Alphabetical language is like a puzzle for me.
When I saw this broken station name plate I was stunned. (or someone made it on purpose?)
It supposed to be "Wedding" which is located in north-western part of Berlin.
I loved it and I took this picture with a smile.
This is exactly how we amuse ourself with the alphabets!
I'm only able to speak Japanese, English and little German right now.
English has 26 alphabets and German has 30 alphabets.
My mother tongue, Japanese has 3 kinds of alphabet (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji) and they are 50＋50＋3000(more or less) so it means we have much more letters all together.
Chinese seems to have about 4000 letters as well.
I'm not saying Japanese and Chinese are rich language, it's just the way they are.
Personally I admire Arabic alphabets because they look so beautiful.
Arabic has 28 alphabets.
Another interesting language Hebrew has only 22 alphabets but they look complicated enough to put me in chaos...
After all I prefer Japanese even if we need to continue studying Kanji our whole life!
I'm often told I must know about 3000 Kanjis as an ordinary Japanese.
To be honest I wasn't sure about that.
However I had studied "Kanji kentei" which is called "Japanese Kanji aptitude test" and its level pre-1 before so perhaps it's not completely unreliable fact I guess.
After few years of English studying I figured out alphabetical languages are quite mathematical.
However it's my opinion and some might differ with me.
After all I'm Japanese and it's just a little different from what I'm familiar with.
I have a few friends who studies linguistic and learning Japanese particularly.
And each of them have pretty different view of Japanese.
Some says it's simple language and some says it's way too complex.
I have few things I like about Japanese but I'll tell you one of that today.
As I wrote before, we have 3 types of letters in Japanese and it's certainly splendid thing.
Well, it's difficult to explain how we feel when we see a same word but written differently in Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana.
Let's say if we have a word "Tamago" which means "Egg" in Japanese.
We can write it as たまご(Hiragana), タマゴ(Katakana) and 卵 (Kanji) these 3 ways in Japanese.
Native Japanese speakers must get different impression by each of them.
I'll try to explain how I found the difference.
(But please don't forget these are just my opinion!)
たまご gives me transparent and chubby image for the egg and I even feels the warms from just looking at the word.
タマゴ seems a bit awkward but at the same time it stimulates my curiosity.
卵 is more just an organism or a life form to me.
This might be uncomprehending for someone who doesn't know much about Japanese.
But I can assure you, it won't be so surprising if we trace back on the its origin in Hiragana and Katakana.
They are both derived from Kanji and their shape are designed in each ways.
In case you took an interest in this topic, you may want to see these page,
Anyway leaning other language could be pretty fun.
Needless to say it takes time so we need to be patient a little.
Though I'm sure we can enjoy it time to time.
We also can learn a lot about our own language, culture and so on.
Each language has its own background and history.
It's beyond the culture and country.
Once I met a German guy who likes traveling.
And he said can't afford the time to travel any more so he decided to travel among people.
That's how he learned Spanish and Japanese.
I believe this isn't only about the language.
We don't need to board a ship or an airplane.
Just one step further we go, we may reach something new.
Do you remember when you were a kid you made new color using different colors?
That's it, that's what we adults need.
I don't particular have a favorite color now but someday I might find one... who knows!
picture:Wedding S-bahn station in Berlin
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