You've gotta love the kanji

When you return to your room at 1 in the night, not so sober and not really in the mood to sleep yet, what do you do? I guess most people would watch tv, play computer/video game, eat something etc. At least your answer probably wouldn't be drinking some nihonshu (sake) and sitting down to practise writing kanji characters for an hour.

Lately I have had a growing fascination for the kanji characters, the more or less complex Chinese characters used in the written Japanese language. Which of course is good since it's the most difficult part of the Japanese language to learn. Indeed it takes alot of time to study the kanji and it's easy to mix them up or forget how to write, even for Japanese people. Many of the other students (the Chinese doesn't have any problem with the kanji though of course) at my school seems to see the kanji as the troublesome, tiring part of the Japanese language and sighs alot about it. However, for me, it tells alot of interesting stories about the culture and how the language is constructed, which is a very good source of inspiration.

When first looking at a kanji I haven't studied before, to borrow a good expression from a friend back home in Sweden, it may seem like a 'brädhög', a pile of planks. And indeed, sometimes I­'ve felt like I'll never be able to remember all these strange characters, they all look alike anyway.
At those times, I've thought of the Chinese people in my class. The Japanese language use the kanji characters combined with more simple characters (hiragana and katakana) to form different words, which makes alot of different combinations possible. Therefore to learn Japanese, around 2000 kanji is enough. The Chinese language uses solely the kanji characters, which means they have to learn ten times as many characters or so.
So if the Chinese people in my class, which (no offense my Chinese fellows) seems like quite ordinary people, have managed to learn tens of thousands of characters, why shouldn't I be able to learn two thousand? It's quite simply alot of practise.

It's a satisfying feeling when you study something you've never tried to learn before and notice that your brain actually after a while decides that 'alright, if this is so damn important, I'll remember it'.
When you break it down and look at the different parts that makes up the kanji and write it a few times, it's ­suddenly not a brädhög anymore, and you can write it without any major problems. It's kind of like when I was a kid and built stuff with lego bricks. A feeling of creativity.

What I also find interesting is how the kanji is made up and how they are combined. My main reason for going to Japan was to learn more about the culture and how Japanese people think, and the kanji is an important part of that.
I'll give you a couple of examples.

If you can't see the Japanese characters correctly, I suggest you install the Japanese character set on your PC or you might have to change the character encoding of your web browser, because I am not going to spend time on posting the Japanese characters as images.

The Japanese word for interesting is 'omoshiroi', which is written like 面白い.
The first part, '面' is pronounced 'omo' and by itself carries the meaning 'face'.
The second part is '白い' is pronounced 'shiroi' and means white.
Thus, probably someone a long time ago thought that a white face is interesting and it came to carry that meaning, I guess.
Believe me, Japanese people in general and Japanese kids in particular still think so..

The kanji for man, '男', pronounced 'otoko', is two other kanji characters that is put together to one.
'田' which means a field, and '力' which means strength.
So, a man is a person who is strong in the field.

The kanji meaning like or love, '好' is also two other kanji characters that's been put together.
'女' which means woman, and '子' which means child.

It might seem a bit old-fashioned that a man is someone who's strong in the field, and to like or love is a woman and a child, but keep in mind that these characters wasn't exactly made yesterday.

One more example which I find a bit amusing.
The word for animal in japanese consists of two kanji characters, '動物' 'doubutsu'. The first kanji '動' (dou) carries the meaning moving, which is also used when writing for example a car, 自動車 (jidousha), which quite exactly means a self-moving vehicle.
Well, let's get back to the animal, 動物 (doubutsu). So the first kanji carries the meaning moving.
The second kanji, 物, means a (living or not living) thing or object. So, an animal is quite simply a moving thing.
Brilliant, isn't it?

For me, these small discoveries gives the written language a depth which the western languages doesn't have at all.
I mean, a word in english or swedish just consists of the letters that forms the pronounciation of a word. You learn that a certain pronounciation carries a certain meaning. The characters themselves however, doesn't carry any meaning at all.
Sure, it's practical, but boooring. Therefore, I can think it's kind of sad with the huge amount of katakana words (words taken from other languages, mostly american-english, which is written with katakana characters) used in the japanese language.
For many of those words there's already japanese words, but it seems to be kind of cool to write the foreign words instead, I don't know. In my opinion, it makes the japanese language lose some of its depth.

This is the good thing about learning a language as an adult, I have the ability to reflect and question why things are in certain ways.
Japanese people I talk to don't really seem to have thought much about how the language is made up, they've just learnt it as a child and accept that things are the way they are.
The bad thing is, if I'd have the mind of a child I wouldn't question anything, I'd just learn it and it would take a lot less time.