Kanji

I never realized the real benefit of kanji until I got here. Sure they look cool and you can make really gorgeous calligraphy, but really there is a practical purpose for each character. Lol this may seem like a really dumbed down statement, but I really hardly believed it until now. Prior to Japan, I could not get past the inconvenience factor. Doesn't it mean the same thing if I write it in hiragana?! Lol too many things to learn and not enough brain capacity to get all of the Japanese grammar, writing, comprehension, plain/polite distinctions, conjugating verbs, etc. in! I probably hate it because I am so bad at remembering/reading/writing them!

I'm embarassed to say that I am now in a Japanese class were the profs write nearly everything in hiragana, because no one has learned much kanji. It is rather ridiculous. Lol even with the limited number I can recognize or at least remember learning, very very few are ever written. *sigh* My class is a little bit too easy to say the least.

We had an assignment last week where we were given random verbs and had to conjugate them. Put what class they are in (1,2,3), change them to polite, and then to past form. it wouldn't have been that hard, but all of them were written entirely in hiragana. If you have taken Japanese, you know how much easier it is to read/understand it if it is in kanji.

Being the person that I am, when I get loads of homework, I always do it as fast as I can. Get it over with. It is definitely not a good way to study, especially for Japanese. That is probably the reason a lot of this stuff doesn't stick. Oh well. Anyway, I did the sheet fast and ended up getting a ton of red marks all over it when I got it back. So hard to read things written totally in hiragana. Who would have thought?!