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    <title>The Writing System 1</title>

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        <div class="chapter_number">Chapter 2</div>
        <div class="chapter_name">The Writing System</div>
        <div class="blurb">The Japanese writing system is surely the largest stumbling
        block for students thinking about tackling the language. After all, languages
        like Spanish or German, with their familiar alphabets, seem much more
        accessible. Maybe you throw in a tilde here or an umlaut there, but all in all,
        it&rsquo;s the alphabet we know and love in English.</div>
        <div><img src="divider@2x.png" class="divider" /></div>

<p class="bodycopy">It&rsquo;s my job to show you that <i>different</i> is not necessarily <i>hard</i>.
        Actually, I believe that the Japanese writing system is in some respects one of
        the best-designed systems in the world. In other respects it is very
        challenging indeed. To understand this paradox, we need to learn a bit of history.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">There was a time in human history when we did not write. So,
        necessarily, some cultures invented writing systems earlier than others. The
        leader in Asia was China.
        With a culture that goes back at least 5000 years, the Chinese began writing
        basic pictograms perhaps 4000 years ago. These pictograms gradually evolved
        into a stylized set of characters that eventually could express any possible
        sentence, which is the basic requirement of a full-fledged writing system.</p>


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<p class="bodycopy">As a brief aside, it&rsquo;s interesting to think about why
        pictograms by themselves cannot form a real writing system. Remember rebuses?
        These picture games use symbols to spell out sentences by using puns and
        word-association. I used to love them as a kid. They work something like this:</p>

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            <div><img id="figures_rebus" src="figures_rebus@2x.png" /></div>
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<p class="bodycopy">The reader, using a bit of imagination, can translate this
        into the sentence, &ldquo;I love you.&rdquo; But this technique has a serious drawback. It
        is hardly fit for representing more complex sentences. How would you write, &ldquo;I
        love it when you do your hair like that&rdquo;? Because there are no clearly defined
        rules about how the pictures go together or work, even if you figured out some
        clever way of representing this sentence, the odds are very small that anyone
        else would be able to decipher what you meant.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">It turns out that to have a useful writing system, you can&rsquo;t
        just draw pictures and hope that the reader can guess your intent. 
        You have to have a unified system with rules that everyone
        agrees on. The Chinese accomplished this by creating characters that were not
        merely pictures of things you can see and touch, but also of abstract concepts, 
        plus the rules for using them all in actual sentences.
        
        By any account, the set is bulky and hard to learn, consisting of tens of
        thousands of characters, but it was successful in that it was a true writing
        system, capable of recording everything from business transactions to love
        songs to official matters.</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">The Chinese brought their characters to Korea, Vietnam,
        and Japan.
        Japan received Chinese characters
        around the year 400 AD, and soon thereafter, officials in Japan began
        writing Japanese using Chinese characters. The Japanese name for these
        characters is <i>kanji</i>. There was just
        one problem. Japanese and Chinese are totally, completely different languages.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">To understand what happened, let&rsquo;s imagine how it might look if, instead of kanji 
        being imported into Japanese, they were imported into English. 
        Transport yourself for a moment, if you will, to a parallel universe, one in which 
        English has no writing system. As we start our tale, we English speakers are living out our lives,
        going about our business, muddling along with no written language. Perhaps we have crude
        calendars and some basic symbols, but certainly no means of writing something
        like a newspaper or grocery list. Now the Chinese show up at our doorstep and
        tell us about their fantastically weird squiggly marks. They tell us that these strange things can record thought! 
        The idea is utterly fascinating. So we decide to see if they might work with our language.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">At first everything seems fairly straightforward. 
        There&rsquo;s a Chinese character for each kind of thing in the world, so to write
        down any sentence, you just find the character for each word and write
        it down in order. So the sentence &ldquo;I like ramen&rdquo; is easy. Just find the
        characters for each word, write them down, and now anyone can read it back <i>in English</i> and get the exact sentence
        you originally meant.</p>

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            <div><img id="figures_kanji_01" src="figures_kanji_01@2x.png" /></div>
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<p class="bodycopy">Make no mistake&mdash;at this point you are not writing Chinese
       &mdash;you are writing down English sentences using Chinese characters. Splendid!</p>

<p class="bodycopy">(Speakers of Chinese will note that I am taking some liberties with these examples. 
Bear with me&mdash;they are for illustrative purposes only.)

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<p class="bodycopy">But soon challenges appear. Take the sentence, &ldquo;He bought
        the cat.&rdquo; The first and last characters are easy. But what about the word
        &ldquo;the&rdquo;? The Chinese language doesn&rsquo;t have an exact match for this word, so obviously there is no
        character for it. What to do? Someone comes up with the idea of recycling an
        old character that isn&rsquo;t used much in Chinese for the word &ldquo;the&rdquo; in English.</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">So far, so good. But what about the word &ldquo;bought&rdquo;? 
        In English, some words change form to indicate tense. But in Chinese,
        past tense verbs are usually formed by using the present tense verb (&ldquo;buy&rdquo; in this case) plus
        another character which makes it past tense. So now we have to use <i>two</i> 
        Chinese characters to get the <i>one</i> English word &ldquo;bought.&rdquo;</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">As I hope you can see from our little thought experiment, 
        trying to write English using characters
        that were designed for Chinese would soon become fairly complex, above and
        beyond the simple fact that we are required to memorize a large number of
        characters. And that same problem occurred when those early pioneers tried to
        graft Chinese characters onto the very, very different language that is
        Japanese. In fact, in my opinion, it would be much easier to write English using
        Chinese characters than Japanese. (The fictional examples above are a cakewalk
        compared to what ancient Japanese written in pure Chinese characters looks like.)</p>


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<p class="bodycopy">Let&rsquo;s get back to the story. Our early Japanese friends began
        writing their language using Chinese characters. But the Chinese writing system
        was complicated to begin with, and now that we were trying to use it to write
        an altogether different language, it was even worse. So it took a lot of
        training and practice to master the system, which meant that only the rich and
        powerful could afford the time and effort to learn it. Everyone else
        had to spend their days just attending to basic food and shelter needs.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">But here&rsquo;s where it gets interesting. Japanese culture at
        the time believed that women were not capable of learning such a complex
        system, so even the women who happened to be born into wealthy families
        generally were not educated deeply in using Chinese characters. But these women
        wanted to write. So they began to do something quite extraordinary. For each
        syllable they wished to express, they chose a Chinese character that could be
        pronounced that way, and used the character to represent only that <i>sound</i>, 
        discarding the actual <i>meaning</i> of the character.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">For example, the Japanese word for &ldquo;sky&rdquo; is <b><i>sora</i></b>.
        There is a Chinese character that, all by itself, means &ldquo;sky.&rdquo; It is 空. 
        In the old system, a Japanese writer who wanted to represent the word <b><i>sora</i></b> would write this single character.
        But instead of doing that, 
        our heroines using this new system would choose one character that could be pronounced <b><i>so</i></b> and another that 
        could be pronounced <b><i>ra</i></b>. They put them together and said,
        &ldquo;Totally disregard what the characters happen to <i>mean</i> in Chinese. 
        Just <i>pronounce</i> them out loud to make a Japanese word.&rdquo;*</p>

  <p class="bodycopy">
    *Earlier editions of this app suggested that women were the ones to create this system, which is called <em>man&rsquo;yougana</em>.
    Having happened so long ago, it&rsquo;s not totally clear who first came up with the idea.
    It is certain, however, that the women described above were early users and popularizers of it.
  </p>

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<p class="bodycopy">The upper line of the chart shows the old method. One
        character meant &ldquo;sky&rdquo; because the Chinese said so. When a Japanese reader saw
        that character, they would read it <i>sora</i>,
        which is how to say &ldquo;sky&rdquo; in Japanese.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">In the bottom two lines, we see two characters that were
        selected to represent the sounds <i>so</i>
        and <i>ra</i>. The original meanings of &ldquo;once (upon a
        time)&rdquo; and &ldquo;good&rdquo; were completely ignored. Only the <i>sounds</i> were important.
        Putting the two characters together, the reader could pronounce <i>so + ra</i>, to get
        <i>sora</i>.</p>

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            <div><img id="figures_kanji_05" src="figures_kanji_05@2x.png" /></div>
        </div>


<p class="bodycopy">Eventually, one character was chosen to represent each of
        the one-syllable sounds in Japanese. Since Japanese is based on a very small
        number of basic sounds, this meant that it was possible to write Japanese
        phonetically using only a few dozen characters instead of tens of thousands.
        Quite <nobr>an improvement!</nobr></p>

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<p class="bodycopy">To help make clear what happened, think about Egyptian
        hieroglyphics. For years, scholars struggled to figure out how they worked. They
        appeared to be pictograms, but there was something peculiar about the system. There
        were many characters, but a few of them showed up way more often than they
        ought to. Were the Egyptians really writing about birds and snakes <i>that</i> much?</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">The major breakthrough occurred when scholars realized that
        the pictures were really just representations of sounds. A picture of a bird probably
        started out meaning a literal bird, but over time came to represent just a
        particular sound (the &ldquo;b&rdquo; sound, say). The pictograms evolved into symbols for
        pronunciation.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">It was exactly the same thing when the Japanese began using Chinese characters to
        represent sound only. The original meaning of the characters no longer had any bearing on the sentence.
        A Chinese person looking at a stream
        of characters used this way to express Japanese would have been completely
        baffled, just as Egyptologists were when they tried to literally make sense of hieroglyphics.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">Later, these characters were further simplified so that they
        could be written in a few basic strokes. They now had completely lost any remaining
        connection to the original Chinese meaning, and the result was a uniquely
        Japanese set of around 50 or so characters (today it&rsquo;s 46) that we can truly call an alphabet,
        since they represent sounds, not meanings. This was a breakthrough for writing
        in Japan.</p>


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<p class="bodycopy">This revolutionary &ldquo;alphabet&rdquo; is more accurately called a <i>syllabary</i>, because each character
        represents a whole syllable, not just a part of a syllable. (In English, for
        example, most letters, like <i>k</i>, cannot
        be voiced by themselves. They need a vowel to make a complete,
        pronounceable syllable, such as <i>ka</i>.)</p>

<p class="bodycopy">I&rsquo;ve gone into all this detail for two reasons. First, I
        think it&rsquo;s fascinating, and I hope you do too. But secondly, and more
        importantly, it will help you to understand the current state of the Japanese
        writing system.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">The Japanese syllabary I described above is wonderfully
        simple and elegant. Its name is <i>hiragana</i>.
        It is as close to a perfect writing system as I can imagine. We&rsquo;ll be learning hiragana over the next few lessons. By
        the time you&rsquo;ve finished learning it, you will be able to write any Japanese
        word <i>in Japanese!</i></p>


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<p class="bodycopy">Hiragana also has
        a cousin syllabary called <i>katakana</i>. I
        call it a cousin because there is exactly one katakana character for every
        hiragana one, and usually they look similar. It&rsquo;s a bit like the difference
        between block letters and cursive script in English. Cursive letters generally 
        look similar to their block counterparts, but occasionally they take slightly different forms.</p>

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            <div><img id="figures_kanji_08" src="figures_kanji_08@2x.png" /></div>
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<p class="bodycopy">Just as we write foreign words like <i>vis-&#224;-vis</i> in italics, katakana
        is used almost exclusively when representing words that come from foreign languages, like <i>konpyuutaa</i> (for &ldquo;computer&rdquo;), 
        so we&rsquo;ll learn it later on, and at a more relaxed pace.</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">If Japanese used only hiragana and katakana (collectively called <i>kana</i>), it would be one
        of the simplest writing systems in the world. Alas, the picture is a bit more
        complicated than that. See, when hiragana and katakana were
        invented, Chinese characters didn&rsquo;t just roll over and die. Keep in mind
        that kanji were associated with
        wealth, power, and education. So for centuries, most of the people who had
        those things continued to write extensively in kanji.</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">After World War II, laws were passed that limited the kanji that could be used in newspapers
        to a fixed set of about 1850 characters. Everything else was to be represented
        in hiragana and katakana. That set of characters has changed a little over the years and today 
        consists of about 2000 characters called the <i>jouyou kanji</i> (&ldquo;daily use kanji&rdquo;).
        So, although it is much easier to be literate in Japan
        now than in the past, you still do have to know kanji.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">We won&rsquo;t spend a lot of time learning kanji at this early stage, 
        because in order to really make sense of them, it helps to understand the basics of Japanese already. 
        (Keep in mind that Japanese children don&rsquo;t start learning kanji until they already speak Japanese fluently.)
        But we will talk about them from time to time so that you
        understand how they fit into Japanese. Then later, you&rsquo;ll be able to make a
        more detailed study of them if you decide to do so.</p>

<p class="bodycopy">Well! Now that we understand in broad terms how the Japanese
        writing system works, let&rsquo;s have a look at our first set of hiragana characters!</p>

<p class="bodycopy">But first, take a brief pause to quiz yourself and make sure you understand 
what we&rsquo;ve learned so far. By successfully passing this quiz, you&rsquo;ll unlock the next chapter. (Also,
as a reminder, if you prefer, you can unlock all chapters at any time by going to Menu &gt; Preferences
and selecting the &ldquo;Roam freely&rdquo; mode.)</p>

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<p class="bodycopy">Hurry back! Your first steps into reading and writing hiragana are just ahead.</p>
    
          
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