For this semester I am taking Japanese language and I was actually daydreaming of becoming a manga translator. Turns out the average characters on manga consists of katakana, hiragana and the unfamiliar "kanji", which are chinese characters imported into Japanese. Persistent on finding out more about kanji (since at this point the prospect of translating manga is getting heavier than actually passing my language subject), I discovered that the standard kanji for the average Japanese school consists of more than 2000 characters!
I was astounded. How can someone live with more than 2000 characters inside his head? I have a background of learning romanized Bahasa Melayu and the Arabic writing Jawi so that is 26 and 28 characters, total of 54 characters. The Japanese, Chinese and Koreans are required to learn at least 2000-3000 characters just to read the papers. Because of this alone, I will smack anyone who complains about learning English or any other romanized language.
This really shows the potential of the human brain. More specifically, our capacity for learning. Just imagine, the entire basis of a language and culture, based on characters so abundant, so rich. Just boggles the mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment