I must say that kanji is really cool. We haven't really learned much of anything yet in class wih regards to kanji, but I love the idea of each character being symbolic, and the fact that there is so much detail and precision in the drawing/writing of them. This adds so much art and poetry to the mechanics of a written language, something wholly missing from English.
Inherently, this also means that I will probably always struggle massively to write it, no matter how much time I put in, since my fine motor capabilities are so limited (I can only "swoosh" a pen stroke so far before it becomes a "blot"). Undoubtedly these thoughts float through every Westerner's mind when she or he starts learning any similar language, so I'm sure most of you are saying: "well, duh!" Tough luck! This is my blog so I'll be as obvious as I like!!
You will probably learn how to write my name! Bright Bird! The character for bright is SOOOO logical! What are the two brightest objects in the sky?!?!?! Well the sun and the moon...so you put those two characters together and you get 'Ming' or 'Minh!' aka bright!!
ReplyDeleteAnd what's really neat is my last name, hopefully you get to learn that in kanji! It's the charater of tree (plum tree, to be exact I think). WELL when you put two tree characters side byside what do you get....well a FOREST of course!
Now that I think of it, I think you will really like kanji becuase most of the basic character's are supposed to depict something or be symbolic of something. The Japanese kanji isn't 100% the same as Chinese characters, but there are a lot of similarities.
Ok one last charater. The character for 'peace' is the character for female with some sort of roof over it...that's becasue a man only get's peace when the woman stays at home!!!!!!
See you should have learned Chinese...not Japanese, pish pah! hahah I'm not biased or anything!!
Lol. Ha Ha. I've actually already learned the Japanese characters for sun, moon AND tree, as they're also used for days of the week... though, as you mentioned, I'm not sure if we're talking exactly the same here as you described (and the tree was just a generic tree, not a plum tree...)
ReplyDeleteI don't even get to write my name in Kanji OR Hiragana, because I'm foreign... I have to use the Katakana... how embarassing... no cool sun moon tree cosmic oneness for me!
明 Is that what you learned for Sun and moon?
ReplyDelete李 That is Ly (Li) aka Plum Tree. The character for tree is the top portion.
YAH you know how to spell my name over your own in Kanji...wootwoot!!
How do they pronouce your name in Japanese...Pah-roo...because they can't pronouce 'l' but replace it with 'r?'
Pretty much. It's more "Poe-roo" and you're absolutely right... it's the "L" in my name that causes the most problems so it's being pronounced with that distinctly Japanese "l/r" combo sound!
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