This topic came to mind after watching many documentaries on NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. Seeing dozens of Japanese craftspeople, workers, everyday people gave me the idea that a native language, such as Japanese or Chinese, might have a large influence on a person’s life. Stay with on this, it might be interesting.
For starters, I’ll never be able to learn hardly any of the 2,000 commonly used characters in kanji, out of 50,000 total. It’s the same in the Chinese language since both Japanese and Chinese use many of the same characters. What struck me about all of this is a comment I read when I considered learning a bit of kanji. That comment went something like ‘it’s just as hard for Japanese kids as it is for everyone else’. Maybe we think it’s easier for young students in Japan and China to learn their own language but I don’t think it is. The characters don’t have any relation, at least none that I can see, to the words they represent.
I’ll take a break here to say that there is an exception to the last sentence. The character read as ‘ame’ is kanji for rain. To me, it’s a thing of beauty because the character actually looks like rain on a window, making it very easy to remember. By the way, it’s the same character for rain in the Chinese language.
Back to the topic. English has an 26 letter alphabet and while none of those letters can stand on their own, they can be rearranged into millions of words. Also, as everyone who has tried to learn English, those words may have different sounds when compared to similar words of almost the same letters. Think of rough and tough then think of though and through. That’s three different sounds from four letters arranged identically in order.
While each of the 26 letters is a different shape, there are only 26 of them, not 2000. Yes, there is an advantage to Japanese characters that represent a complete word but you’ll have to admit that the ‘radicals’ as they are sometimes termed don’t give even a hint at their meaning.
I don’t have an answer to my question about how those two languages affect lives and I realize that Japanese culture is very different from that of Westerners but the process of writing and memorizing at least 2,000 characters has to affect something. I have to admit that I haven’t studied other languages as deeply as Japanese and Chinese so maybe it’s the same for Arabic or other writing systems that have hundreds or thousands of characters. Is the link between the eye and the brain different? How is memory affected? With only 26 letters, can English speakers learn them very early in life then move onto other things? Is there a freedom of thought that comes from that? Is there an inherent lack of discipline with only 26 to learn as opposed to 2,000? I think there must be.
Finally, this whole thing makes me think of the intricacy of Japanese art, specifically samurai armour. Yes, that armour is art and you’ll know that if you’ve ever looked at any of it. The leather work, knots, decorations of all kinds are pure art. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other functional art but maybe it exists elsewhere. Does language affect a nation’s art? We’ll see in a future post, this one is long enough.
I’ll leave you with the kanji radical for rain. Cheers!
Brian Mahone
December 12, 2024.
