Japanese children remember the characters?
Meets Anne rogaleva, General Director of the Moscow center for foreign languages and culture “Business Eurasia”.
Many foreigners consider to be one of the most difficult languages Russian, so as to understand the cases, the conjugations and why some things are “put” and others should “believe” — not an easy task. But learning Japanese is not easier.
The Chinese characters used in Japan, appeared 3,000 years ago. The first inscriptions extant, carved on tortoise shells and animal bones. They have been used for divination. The Japanese became acquainted with Chinese writing system about 1500 years ago.
Now they used a mixed writing system that consists of the characters “kanji” and two syllabic alphabets: hiragana and katakana. Each alphabet of 46 characters. And characters there are from 60 000 to 80 000. However, knowing everything is not required. The Japanese themselves are guided by two lists of characters.
First — Joya necessary for everyday use and consists of 2136 characters. So many characters know graduating high school and University students. The same minimum needed for foreigners learning Japanese. This is enough to read Newspapers, magazines, documents, mass media texts.
The list is intended for exam Nihon kanji proficiency Kenta to determine the level of characters, contains about 6000 characters. So you need to know to read the original works of classical literature and historical texts.