Another interesting aspect of Japanese is that there’s not just one writing system, but four — hiragana for fundamental grammar, katakana for expressing foreign loan words and place names, kanji for organizing information into efficient chunks, plus romaji or the Roman alphabet, which is used in various unofficial ways. While the “correct” way to write, say, Russia or Spain or Germany would be to use the katakana syllabery, it wasn’t so long ago that each country had an excruciatingly complex name in kanji, written with characters that phonetically represented that country’s name. Nowadays each of these archaic names still exist but have been reduced to a single character, which has the benefit of being able to express a concept like “three-way talks between the United States, England and Russia” with just five short characters, a common form of abbreviation used in newspaper headlines. Incidentally, we’ve gotten in some cool T-shirts featuring the USA and France written in their kanji names, if you like the way the characters look.
