Oh man, sometimes I just have to say:
Fuck you Japanese...
If anyone wants an idea of what I'm talking about who doesn't already, here's a
Wikipedia article on kanji for you. Or if you just want a taste:
In a number of cases, multiple kanji were assigned to cover a single Japanese word. Typically when this occurs, the different kanji refer to specific shades of meaning. For instance, the word なおす, naosu, when written 治す, means "to heal an illness or sickness". When written 直す it means "to fix or correct something" (e.g. a bicycle or a poorly written Wikipedia article). Sometimes the differences are very clear; other times they are quite subtle. Sometimes there are differences of opinion among reference works -- one dictionary may say the kanji are equivalent, while another dictionary may draw distinctions of use. Because of this confusion, Japanese people may have trouble knowing which kanji to use. One workaround is simply to write the word in hiragana, a method frequently employed with more complex cases such as もと moto, which has at least five different kanji, 元, 基, 本, 下, 素, three of which have only very subtle differences.Why did my language passion have to be
this language?
