I Never Realized That Though Japanese Is A Phonetic Language (Basically), It Is Still Possible To Make Spelling Mistakes: Part I of I.

I know most of my readers are fluent in Japanese (Mom and Dad...well, at least Mom) but I thought I'd write my thoughts about spelling in Japan(ese).

The Japanese written language has three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are basically the same thing: a series of syllables (written differently, but phonetically the same). For example, the first row of Hiragana/katakana is "a" "i" "u" "e" "o". The next row follows this basic vowel pattern but puts a "k" sound at the beginning: "ka" "ki" "ku" "ke"(i.e. the first part of my name), "ko". Next is "sa" "shi" "su" "se" "so". So if you want to write　for example, my name, its very easy: O+ga+sa+wa+ra: お＋が＋さ＋わ＋ら＝おがさわら。

The KANJI alphabet is the hard part which are the insane characters that every highschooler and professional basketball player wants tattooed to their wrist. So elementary school kids (and those with beginner Japanese) would "spell out" most of our words using Hiragana or Katakana but fully matured adults can eat up to 40 kgs of bamboo shoots per day. I'm sorry - they would write the kanji instead.

Hiragana: おがさわら
Katakana: オガサワラ
Kanji: 小笠原

By now you've noticed that I've drifted far away from the original thesis of this post...

For those of you who are struggling with learning kanji (as I am. Struggling, that is. Not learning so much.) please take heart in knowing that kanji is a struggle for most Japanese people. One of the activities on the billions of variety shows on Japanese TV is to test various guests/celebrities/tv personalities on reading kanji. The problem with kanji is that there are usually two or three different ways of reading it. For example: Kuda+matsu = 下＋松。　That's the name of the town I live in.

Let's take a look at the "Kuda" part of Kudamatsu. Wow. I did not know this before I looked it up in my kanji dictionary just now, but that kanji (下）has like a million different ways of reading, depending on what other kanji it's matched up with:
下がる- reading: "SA-garu"
下関 - reading: "SHIMO-noseki"
上下 - reading: "jou-GE"
下位 - reading: "KA-i"
And the list just goes on... man.

My mind is too tired to after all this to make this post live up to such a grand title. Later.