Japanese Students/Fluents, Give me Your Advice!

I never learned much Japanese, but I've always had a knack for languages and I can't really figure out what everyone's hang up is about kanji. I mean, sure it's a picture when you're used to letters, but when you think about it, you don't read letters, you read words. And how are words any less complicated than kanji? Just think of kanji as words that are smushed together into one character.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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Yea, and see, there are THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of kanji. Or pictures. Whereas all words are made up of the same symbols.

But you don't read the symbols, you read the entire word at once as if it were one long streched out character. That's why you can rearrange the letters of words and still read them.

Actually, continuing with my analogy, kanji are actually made up of "radicals" which are sort of like characters and they appear in many different kanji and have their own separate meaning.

How ya doing, buddy?

I don't think you guys are getting what I'm saying.

Look, if any retarded Japanese boy can learn kanji, so can you. It's just a question of getting over that mental block of dealing with a languge that is completely unlike the one you're used to. I took to it pretty quickly, even though I didn't learn many. Probably because I didn't convince myself that it was hard.

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I wish I had, honestly. My college totally screwed me by not offering any language courses at all. Ever.

But did you read what I said about radicals? Kanji are made up of a smaller number of characters (sort of) that are repeated. So what's the difference?

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The same is true for words, though. There are words that look the same and have different meaning, there is context to be considered in English, and I can say for certain that there are way more exceptions to the "rules" of English than there are to the rules of Japanese.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I guess the thing that bugs me is that people go into languages like Japanese with a defeatist attitude. Anyone can learn it, really. Anyone can learn any language. The only thing you need to know is that you have to use it or you lose it.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

True, but on the other hand, the look of English words doesn't suggest anything about their meaning, whereas the way a Kanji looks might give a clue as to what it means.

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I guess I'm just more of a visual learner. I couldn't tell you how that kanji looks like a fish, but I can tell you that I'll never forget it now. I can't write all the kanji I've learned, but I've never forgotten any.

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given that you don't like to let an argument drop, you might want to give learning them a try, even if your incentive is to prove everyone else wrong.

You give me far too much credit, Squirrel. I'm way too lazy to accomplish that.

But yeah, I guess I should drop it. I don't really have anything more to say anyway.

Jam it back in, in the dark.