collect lots of stamps

The English alphabet has 26 characters. Learning those is tough for little kids – remember how you used to make the letter “s” backwards all the time, or how you had trouble with “b” and “d”?

Actually, there are 52 characters, because we have both capital letters (upper case) and lower case letters. Note: right now I am only talking about writing the letters in English, not spelling the words.

Learning to write characters in Japanese is about double that, because there are two sets of phonetic characters which represent sounds, hiragana and katakana, with 56 (?) characters each.

Oh, yeah, then there are the kanji characters which represent words or ideas. There are a few more of those, maybe 20,000 or so – though most people use only about 2000 kanji in everyday life.

Learning so many characters requires a lot of time and practice. So, from the first year of elementary school, Japanese children practice writing kanji every day in class and at home. And it is not enough just to write the characters – they must be written correctly, with each stroke made in a particular order and direction. All of that means lots of writing practice.

Here is a page from one of my daughter’s notebooks (she is in second grade, by the way). The character is 切, which can be read in two different ways (oh, yes, most kanji have multiple readings and meanings, complicating the situation even further, but that is a different topic).

One of them is “setsu” as in “shinsetsu” 親切, being nice to someone. Or, from her notebook, “Be nice to elderly people”. By the way, next week we have a national holiday for 敬老の日: Be nice to elderly people day.

Another reading is “ki” as in “kitte” 切手, or postage stamp. Or, as in her example, “Collect lots of stamps”.

日本語 hints:
-- characters = 文字
-- backward character =鏡文字
-- capital letters = 大文字 = upper case letters
-- lower case letters = 小文字
-- phonetic characters = 音声文字 (?)
-- kanji = Japanese characters (for English users). Chinese characters are hanzi, 汉字 and these are usually different from the kanji characters used in Japan.