A Revelation!

So I had one of those metaphorical light-bulb moments in class last Thursday, but first some background:

Japanese has essentially two types of alphabets: kana (where each symbol represents a syllable) and kanji (where each symbol represents a word or idea).  When learning Japanese, the process usually starts with romanized versions of Japanese words (e.g. gakusei), moves on to the kana (がくせい), and then finally gets to kanji (学生).

Kanji is generally perceived as the most difficult as there are about 2,000 characters used widely in Japanese (there are over 4,000 in total).  Kana has two syllablaries with a total of around 100 characters, and obviously the romanized versions use 26 letters and are fairly easy to read if you're starting from a language that uses the same alphabet.

On Thursday, we were writing out the sentence "I am a student of Saddleback College", and it looked ridiculously long on the board:

Watashiwa sadorubakkudaigakuno gakusei desu.

I mean, I guess it's not that much longer than the English version of the sentence, but some of those words look scary.  In kana, it's slightly more manageable:

わたしはサドルバックだいがくのがくせいです。

Or on average, has about half as many characters.  It does start to get difficult to quickly tell where one word starts and the other begins.  Also, given that the syllables are already defined by the alphabet being used, there's a lot of very similar sounding words.  However, using kanji (I'm cheating since I'm on the computer, I don't actually know these kanji yet):

私はサドルバック大学の学生です。

It's even shorter, but more importantly, I think, the particles are much more clearly separated from the words in the sentence so it's easy to read.  And so that was my first, "aha" moment when I saw that it really is quicker (once you know the characters) to write in kana or kanji.

The second "aha" moment came while looking at a few vocab words.  I'm going to put spaces in the word where I think the word would be separated into kanji.  I don't know for sure yet, 'cus we haven't got that far:

~jin - a people (like amerika-jin is American)
gak kou - a school
dai gaku - college
gaku sei - student
jin rui gaku - anthropology

I've color coded it to help make it more obvious, but after a while it starts to become clear what the general meaning of each (probably) kanji is, based on where it's used.  Gaku, for example, is something like "learning" or "education".  I haven't looked it up, but I'm inferring that from the fact that it's used in school, college, and student.  I happen to know that "dai" means "big", so "big education" sorta makes sense for a college.

But then since they gave us the definition of "~jin", and I've figured out the definition of "gaku", the word "jin rui gaku" should mean something like "peoples something learning/education".  And anthropology is pretty much just that.

It's starting to look like kanji are about the same as those latin roots/suffixes/prefixes that make up most every English word.  Which means that you can infer the meaning of words the same way, just like if you knew what "superscript" was, and knew what a "position" was, the word "superposition" is easily guessable. Which actually makes me more optimistic about being able to grasp a language that can use over 2,000 characters, seeing that there's probably significantly more than 2,000 latin fragments used in English.