When you can’t read or write kanji, the idea of being able to recognize hundreds or thousands of the symbols probably seems daunting, but as with most things in life, it’s not as difficult as it first looks. Kanji characters are built quite logically, with different quadrants of many characters organized around the meanings for that character. For example, the kanji for words like to speak, to read and to translate all feature the same left section, a radical which happens to look like a stack of books on a shelf, which is the character for “to say” (iu), indicating that all these characters are related to communication in some way. While Chinese might need around 3500 characters to read and write their language properly, Japanese is a bit more manageable, with 1006 characters taught in Elementary School and another 939 in Junior High, which are collectively known as the joyo kanji or “general use” characters. One of the most interesting thing that happens when you learn a language that’s as different from English as Japanese is the moment you find yourself “reading” normally, without subvocalizing or translating into English — nothing but your eyes, passing over the page and reading in the chunks of kanji, hiragana and katakana directly. The brain is amazing, really — it can do anything.
