REALITY of Living in Japan as a Foreigner: Pt 2

"I know hiragana and katakana, but not kanji." - BIG FRICKIN DEAL!

Knowing hiragana and katakana alone is a good start. But it's no achievement to feel proud of or to brag about. Learn 5 characters a day (15 mins a day) and you'll learn them all in about 1-2 months. You'll be able to read about 5-15% of everything you see. How much of it will you understand? About 5-10% at best, depending on how much Japanese you know. How much does that help? Not a whole lot.

EVERYTHING is in Japanese in Japan. EVERYTHING! Just to make sure I get my point across, let me say it again - EVERYTHING! That means KANJI! Any word that can be expressed in kanji WILL be so!

Just going to the supermarket to buy your usual groceries and maybe some personal care products will have you doing guess-work. You know all those highly technical English words that you'd think there is no Japanese translation for? Surprise surprise!

Pick up a cosmetic product and see if you can even figure out which part of it has the list of ingredients and chemicals. Pick up any packed food product and see if you can figure out what's in it or even what flavour it is. Go to a restaurant with no pictures in the menu and you're in trouble. Even navigating through a shop and figuring out which aisle to find things is all guess-work.

So what's my point? LEARN KANJI!!! In fact, just learning to recognise kanji and know the English meaning of the characters will be FAR MORE useful than just hiragana and katakana.