Originally posted by KiT@June 27 2002, 5:12 pm
Kanji is the name of the japanese ideographic alphabet, consisting of about 10,000 (is this correct?) ideograms borrowed from the chinese alphabet.
Funny, I had thought they were stolen (i.e.,
pirated) from the Chinese written language
.
AFAIK, the literal meaning for kanji (
"hanzi" in Chinese), as shown from the kanjis below, is Chinese character. The first character "han" (
traditional form BTW) is used to mean Chinese as the majority of Chinese people are of Han origin and speak the Han language know as "hanyu" (
i.e., Mandarin, national spoken language, the common speech).
Originally posted by KiT@June 27 2002, 5:12 pm
Identifying and remembering kanjis is in fact the biggest obstacle for a western native speaker when learning japanese.
That's right. Learning kanji is pure memorization. This reminds me of the very last episode of Star Trek Voyager where Captain Janeway of the future has a tiny chip implanted somewhere in her brain which enables her to know how to perform many different skills (such as piloting a ship) and also expands her memory capacity(?).