The kana syllabaries are definitely easier to start with. Hiragana is the curly-looking set that usually fills out the grammar around the ideographic (kanji) verb-stems and nouns; katakana is the spiky-looking set that's used approximately the same way italics are in English, to indicate foreign words and special emphasis.
I'm resigned to the concept of ideographs, which actually aren't so bad once you start to recognize the constituent radicals, but I am driven completely batshit (the technical term, I believe) by the multiple pronunciations for every kanji character, though it would probably help if I could grok the rules of lenition. Even when you recognize the kanji for "god/spirit" and know how to write it with the proper stroke order and everything, you have no guarantee of knowing whether it's supposed to be pronunced kami, gami, shin, or jin, especially if it's incorporated into someone's name.
(Akira, as in Kurosawa's personal name, is the same character as the first half of Meiji, as in the 19th-century imperial reign. How do you cope with a language like that??? In Mandarin, that character ("bright, shining") would be some tonal value of ming and *stay* that way, dammit! Well, maybe unless you switched to a different dialect of Chinese, but even then, the pronunciation would remain consistent within that dialect....)
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2006-03-15 11:25 am (UTC)I'm resigned to the concept of ideographs, which actually aren't so bad once you start to recognize the constituent radicals, but I am driven completely batshit (the technical term, I believe) by the multiple pronunciations for every kanji character, though it would probably help if I could grok the rules of lenition. Even when you recognize the kanji for "god/spirit" and know how to write it with the proper stroke order and everything, you have no guarantee of knowing whether it's supposed to be pronunced kami, gami, shin, or jin, especially if it's incorporated into someone's name.
(Akira, as in Kurosawa's personal name, is the same character as the first half of Meiji, as in the 19th-century imperial reign. How do you cope with a language like that??? In Mandarin, that character ("bright, shining") would be some tonal value of ming and *stay* that way, dammit! Well, maybe unless you switched to a different dialect of Chinese, but even then, the pronunciation would remain consistent within that dialect....)