Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
They're just called kanji. And I know I'm just a silly gaijin, but I can't for the life of me find the usefulness in them. Each kanji has about three or four different interpretations, as a word, as its Chinese root, as its Japanese root, and as the individual sound it creates when used in a word. And the sound it creates is almost always easier to write in hiragana or katakana. You can use a three-stroke hiragana symbol or use a 15-stroke kanji symbol that can be interpreted the same way. Aaah, it's crazy!

That part of the language is most difficult, but in reality, it's still one of the easiest languages to learn verbally. Mostly because a) the character's names are exactly how they sound, b) you don't have to learn (or unlearn) different pronounciations/readings for letters and words that you normally use (as per European languages), and c) Japanese follows its own grammatical rules more often than it doesn't. Kanji does get complicated (I'm learning some general rules that should help me decipher new kanji), but Kanji aside, it is easy to learn how to read and write it as well. And I say 'easy' in comparison to European languages, etc.

With respect to Kanji, you'd be surprised how much of it you can pick up whilst in the country. I learned heaps of new Kanji just from reading city names on road signs and signs at the train station. Most of the city names are written in Kanji with Romaji underneath it. If I didn't know what a fragment of a city name was, I'd just ask one of my Japanese friends. For instance, I knew that 'ta' or 'da' means 'field'. There was a part of Osaka called 'Umeda', which I figured from the Kanji meant '_______ - field', so I asked a Japanese friend what 'ume' was and they told me it meant 'plum', so I correctly deduced that the town called 'Umeda' literally means 'plum-fields'.