In hiragana, the simplest of the Japanese writing systems, most characters represent a consonant-vowel combination—a syllable. In English, you can smash letters together in unlikely combinations like “strengths” (nine letters, one vowel!) and it’s perfectly legit. In Japanese, however, certain simple sounds are just plain illegal. For example, “wa” is a common syllable in Japanese. “Wu,” however, doesn’t exist. I wonder what people scream at Japanese pep rallies?

Because Japanese is built from these syllables rather than letters, most Japanese words go consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, like when they made you sit girl-boy-girl-boy in elementary school. (Seriously, everything about learning Japanese makes me think about elementary school. When is nap time, again?)

This also explains why there are 46 hiragana characters, even though the range of allowable sounds in Japanese is much more limited than in English. There’s no character for “k”; instead, there are five characters for ka, ki, ku, ke, and ko:

かきくけこ

Learning a character set involves at least three different skills: remembering the sound (and perhaps also the meaning, if the character represents a whole word) that goes with the character; remembering the character that goes with the sound; and producing the character by hand with a pen (or calligraphy brush).

Because I’m over thirty years out from learning the three R’s, however, I’d forgotten than writing involves any skill other than mechanical reproduction. (Hmm, when I put it that way, it sounds like robot sex.) It turns out that, for me at least, learning how to read the character is pretty easy; learning how to write the character is almost as easy; and making my brain cough up the character that goes with a particular sound is stupefyingly hard.

This is what Dan Schmidt was getting at in a comment on my previous post:

One possible issue with Byrne is that from looking at a few sample pages it looks like it is more about recognizing hiragana than being able to write it. But as a tourist that’s probably all you need anyway.

Byrne is the author of the hiragana mnemonics book that helped me quickly learn to read all of the hiragana. Exactly as Dan warned, however, I still struggle to go from sound to character—that is, I can see the character ほ and know immediately that it’s pronounced “ho,” but if I need to write a word with “ho” in it, I often get stuck remembering which character makes that sound.

This is not a big deal for hiragana or katakana, which have a few dozen characters each; sooner or later I’ll remember them all. It’s a serious problem for kanji, the Chinese characters used to write the bulk of all Japanese words. Kanji are more complex than hiragana or katakana, and there are a hell of a lot more of them.

James Heisig, who we will meet again soon, warns about this problem in his book Remembering the Kanji. The very title of the book hints at it: there are over 2,000 kanji to remember. It is one thing to recognize a kanji and know what it means or how to pronounce it. I can recognize about a dozen kanji at this point, the most complicated of which is the character for “eat,” which looks like this:

食

It’s quite another thing to be able to write that character from memory, or even to remember what the character looks like when all you have is the concept “to eat.” It’s like the difference between recognizing that you’re eating lasagna, and making lasagna from scratch without a recipe. Here’s how Heisig puts it:

If you try to shortcut the process by merely learning to recognize the characters for their meaning without worrying about their writing, you will find that you have missed one bird with two stones, when you could have bagged two with one. Let me repeat: study only from key word to kanji; the reverse will take care of itself.

He’s onto me! Oh, well, if I don’t make every single beginner mistake, what will I have to write about?

Next up: The secret connection between katakana and Legos.