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> Aren't the squarish Kanji characters related to Chinese text? Hiragana are the smooth rounded alphabet characters in Japanese. I always considered the Japanese to be lucky in that respect with their language.

The Japanese Kanji are pretty much directly transcribed from Chinese characters. Granted, they're not exactly the same any more (and the meanings/usage are quite different) but the Kanji do come from the written Chinese language.

Now, Japanese also has two phonetic alphabets (the Kanji, much like Chinese characters, are typically whole words or ideas): Hiragana and Katakana. Both of these have their roots in Kanji, but the characters used in the two alphabets look very different. Hiragana are very rounded, where as Katakana are very straight and sharp. Each alphabet has the same number of characters (well, Katakana has a few irregularly used extras) and both represent the same sounds. In Japanese consonants do not appear by themselves (the exception is the "n" sound and two consonants can repeat, i.e. "nippon" to give the consonant a harder sound) so basically the Hiragana and Katakana are pronounced as either a vowel alone ("a", "i", etc) or a consonant and vowel pair ("ba", "bi", etc). The one exception is "n" which appears by itself OR in a pair.

For anyone who's still reading this, the Kana both evolved more or less as short hand writing systems (and both are much easier to learn/write than Kanji). Today Katakana is primarily used to spell out foriegn words (for instance, computer becomes "kompuutaa" in Katakana). Hiragana is used by children (and often times small hiragana, called "furigana", is written over Kanji so that it's more accessible -- note that much of high school is spent studying Kanji). Kanji is basically annoying to foriegners trying to learn the language (this is and has been my biggest stumbling block in my studies) as there are 1,945 "standard" Kanji with the average educated adult knowing 3,000+. That's a lot to memorize...

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> > Ste "Boku wa gaijin desu yo!" phen
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> Okay, so don't keep us in suspense, man. Out with it!

Not that interesting: "I am a foriegner, you know." Except "foriegner" is the dictionary definition, "gaijin" is much ruder a name than foriegner, and really is almost a racial slur...

Stephen