Before I even started trying to learn Japanese this Autumn, I knew that tackling the wide ranging sets of characters was going to be the initial challenge and probably one of the the biggest hurdles in understanding the language.

This foresight came from when I first learned ancient Greek: I found the language itself very easy to learn, but it was the alphabet that occasionally threw me, even at an advanced level.

I have found it harder to overcome this in Japanese, but I now believe that I have done it. The key thing I found useful to understand was that it is essential to forget your very western desire to break up phonetic sounds into vowels and consonants and to approach the character sets like you have never seen one before.

Japanese characters and phonetics feel far more natural than that of western languages and it is easier to create words with the building blocks the language provides. I also find that words are more digestible, simply because most are a maximum of a few characters’ length.

If you are thinking about learning the language, I recommend starting with a few basic Kanji characters - which are pictoral hieroglyphs to a degree - and then learning Hiragana, finishing with Katakana. I found Hiragana the most challenging character set to learn simply because it is the first time you encounter the building blocks of the language and its emphasis on spoken phonetics. Katakana is a Japanese way of writing western words, so meanings are pretty easy to understand. Kanji are extremely abstract and alien to the way we conduct language in the west, but are probably most rewarding to learn (considering there are over 2000 of them)!

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