Kanji. Have I mentioned Kanji here? I'm sure I must have at some point.
In case you don't know, Japan uses lots of Kanji. Kanji is defined as, and I'm quoting here, "A Japanese system of writing based on borrowed or modified Chinese characters." Ok, that's simple enough. But what it doesn't tell you is how complex the system gets. And I am only scratching the surface here because that's all I can do at this point in my education of the stuff.
I was studying a bit of Kanji yesterday when I came across the symbol for "mountain" (I'd write it here but I have no idea how to and your computers might seize up anyway). I know this symbol well due to my prefecture. I live in Yamanashi, a word that when written in Kanji consists of two symbols. The yama part means "mountain" and the nashi part means "pear" or at least this is what I've read. Quite often, though, you'll see Yamanashi written with three symbols and I assume the third symbol means "prefecture," but I am not really sure of that. And, just for some extra info that you can take to the office to share, Kofu, the city I live in, is also made of two Kanji symbols; ko(u) meaning "armor" and fu meaning "government center" or "office";　thus Kofu is an "armor coated government center." Yamashita-sensei explained to me that it is the mountains surrounding the city which represent the armor. So there you are. It all makes sense up to this point.
But back to my story.
Yesterday I was looking at my Kanji book and came across the symbol for yama, aka. "mountain". So I was looking at it when I noticed that they used it in two examples. The first was in "volcano". This word is made of two Kanji symbols, the first being the symbol for "fire" and the second for "mountain". "Well, that makes perfect sense," I thought to myself. But then I noticed that you pronounce the word for "volcano" as kazan. "Kazan?!" I said in my head, "Where the hell is the yama part?" So I did a little more looking over the explanation of the symbol and noticed that it can also be pronounced as san (or zan). Turns out that Kanji symbols have two readings; one is called the on reading, the other the kun reading. Apparently the on reading is based on the old Chinese way of pronunciation and the kun reading is based on the newer Japanese way of pronunciation. But also apparently, both are still used, though to what degree I am really not sure.
So the word for "mountain" is yama and the word for "fire" is hi (hee) yet the word for "fire mountain" or "volcano" is not hiyama as you might expect it is kazan which combines the on readings of ka for "fire" and san for "mountain". You with me?
Now, I am sure that those of you who can speak and read Japanese are laughing at me, but that's ok. I take no offense to such things.
To continue....the other example using mountain was the two symbols that make up "mountain" and "water". You know the two readings for mountain now and the symbol for "water" can be pronounced as either sui or mizu. When in a restaurant and you want a glass of water, mizu is what you ask for. Anyway, you can put these two symbols together to mean two things (by my book's explanation) and you put them in the same order; first the symbol for "mountain" and then the symbol for "water". One is pronounced yamamizu which means "mountain water" (hey, that's easy), the other is said sansui, which according to the book means "mountains and water, landscape." So I guess that depending on the context in which they are used you can either have nice mountain water or a nice landscape. I don't know.
So have I thoroughly confused you? If so, don't feel bad cause I too am lost over here. Seems to me that this system wouldn't really be too efficient, but since it's worked for so long I don't feel I can make that claim. And please don't forget that hiragana and katakana are also in use over here. And all three are used at the same time. As another book pointed out to me, the simple sentence "I am an American" uses hiragana, katakana and kanji to get its point across in Japanese writing.
So if I come back to America in two or three years unable to read this language, you now know why. I ain't giving up just yet, but I think that climbing Fuji next summer will be much easier on the body than learning Japanese will be on the brain.