Reading the Signs

If it wasn't for the pictures, I'd be lost sometimes. The picture to the left is warning you to not chase the deer around the park or leave trash that they could eat and get sick from. The one on the bottom reminds you to pick up after your dog.

The Japanese alphabet is actually 3 different character sets. The first two character sets , Hiragana and Katakana, consist of about 71 characters, each one corresponding to a different syllable sound. If you can read it, you can sound out a word (which doesn't mean you know what it means, just because you can pronounce it!). I am now fairly able to read and write those two sets, which are sort of like their cursive and print.

The third character set, Kanji, stems from ancient Chinese and consists of about 50,000-80,000 characters! Each one can mean a variety of sounds or can stand for a single word. You need to know about 1,500 of them to read the newspaper, and most Japanese people only end up knowing about 2,000-5,000 or so in their lifetime.

Here is something I wrote my first week here:
"We went to the grocery store to buy food today, and we couldn't figure out if the translucent yellow liquid was oil or salad dressing or vinegar or who knows what. It's funny all you take for granted. Everything is written in a language I can't even begin to comprehend! It's not like we could even sound out the words on the packages to figure it out. And nothing looked familiar. Brands from home like Special K or Twix or Welch's are here but use different packaging...their name is written in tiny print in English on the back. It's a bit of culture shock, trying to figure out if I'm buying sesame oil or olive oil or chicken broth or dish soap, since I can't read the labels, and they're all yellow-ish and come in similar packages! We bought so many things without knowing what they are, figuring we could try new things. We had to buy laundry detergent, and I'm sure we found the right area of the store, but did we buy detergent for colors or did it contain bleach, or was it actually fabric softener? I guess we'll find out."