JapanForum.com - Japanese According to Foreigners

Having been born and lived an entire life in a culture which bases its written language solely in the Roman alphabet, we, as natives from the western world, have come to find the oriental languages, specifically their writing systems, to be nothing short of an art form.

In particular, the Japanese writing system seems to be the one that captivates the most attention amongst westerners. It seems as though the main reason for this stems from the overall, written look of said language. We’ve become so used to our 26 letters of the alphabet that whenever something that completely derails from what we're used to seeing shows itself up, we can't help but stare in ecstasy and admire the beauty. Furthermore, the Japanese writing system is not based on 26 easy-to-draw letters but rather an entire and almost innumerable number of pictures, so to speak.

You’ll nowadays find several teenagers in the western world that are pursuing the learning of Japanese only due to the reason that they found the hiragana and katakana systems to be very visually appealing. Furthermore, whenever the task of having learned said systems comes to pass, they’ll extensively brag about it and show it off in any way they can, like writing their Japanese names everywhere legal.

I myself took an interest in learning Japanese for this very reason; I wanted to know what it felt like to be able to communicate in a way that my brain hadn’t already been pre-programmed to do. I am able to speak all three English, German and Spanish very fluently and this task proved to be not as hard as it should’ve been due the fact that all of these three languages practically use the same alphabet. When it came to Japanese, however, I found myself falling amidst an abyss of confusion. It’s slowly getting clearer, whatsoever.

The Japanese language is a beauty. It is true every good thing they say about it. Japanese calligraphy is indeed what it states it is, and Japanese culture does bring a lot of peace and positive spiritual energy to my mind. To me, communicating in Japanese is almost like drawing what’s in your mind.