#Do you speak Japanese?#
Some people say that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world.
In Japan, almost all people speak Japanese. Japanese grammar is often said to be similar to Turkish.
Japanese has three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, kanji. Kanji(Chinese characters) comes from China in 5th century. Kanji has changed to Hiragana in the 8th century (The Heian period). Kanji is very different from Katakana and Hiragana. Kanji is an ideograph where as Hiragana and Katakana have phonetic alphabets.
Kanji is also practiced as an art form called Shuji. It is uses an ink brush and paper or board. It is known as Japanese calligraphy. The two words used to describe this art are little confusing – shodo (書道) and shuji (習字). The meanings are very interesting.
The kanji 道 (dou) means ‘way’ and is used in 書道 (shodo – Japanese calligraphy or ‘the way of penmanship’), 華道 (kado – Japanese flower arranging or ‘the way of flowers’), 剣道 (kendo – a Japanese martial art or ‘the way of the sword’), 茶道 (sado – Japanese tea ceremony or ‘the way of tea’) and in many other traditional Japanese arts. However, these arts have a different name for when we talk about practicing them in our daily lives perhaps with the exception of ‘kendo’.
書道 (shodo) = 習字 (shuji)
華道 (kado) = 生花 (ikebana) or お花 (ohana)
茶道 (sado) = お茶 (ocha)
I have include a short video of Shuji some get a better understanding.
This is our first post so we will keep it short. We are looking forward to introducing aspects of Japanese culture to you. We will leave you with a short video of Kendo-Japanese sword fighting, which we talk about in our next post.