kanji to kanji to kanji mo kanji

I`ve been here half a month. I miss all of you, and eating nachoes, but I`m liking life in Japan. Granted, I would like it, will like it much more once I have command of the language. I speak English and French pretty much fluently, and in both I have an extensive vocabulary, which I rely on heavily to express myself ( as this sentence shows). Now, in English, this is a matter of firguring out all the latin and greek fixes and a few anglo-saxon words, and while that is quite a challenge, nihongo (Japanese) has a bigger challenge. It`s name is kanji.

Now, all japanese words can be written out in kana (hiragana and katakana), but there are so many homophones that it would be difficult, it not impossible to completely understand the message, especially since the japanese don`t have words per-say, they have phrases (eg. konnichiwa is actually kon=now, nichi=day, wa=topic particle). So, in order to figure out which word you mean, you use kanji. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, each kanji can be from one to, the highest I`ve seen is twenty-four lines (at which point it becomes more of a blob on a page), tt usually takes two kanji and one hiragana to make a word, and every kanji has at least two ways of being pronouced.

So, you can understand my greif when looking at a page of text and about 40-60% is kanji. Well, it`s not just my greif. Every Japanese person must learn these (they`re taught 1058 in elementary school), and there are over ten-thousand. It`s a system so cumbersome that every gameshow I`ve seen in Japan has a major part of the show that basically "pronounce this word!"

But my book on the subject is very good. I also have a Japanese-English dictionary, all I need now is the Japanese version of Beshrelle.

As for school, I don`t like the uniform, the pants are okay, the solid leather shoes I wear to school are uncomfortable (but inside school I wear sneakers), the shirt isn`t bad, but tying at tie takes ten minutes every morning. The girls are nice, the best English speaker in my class is the class clown (they all try their English around me, and I try to speak Japanese back), and the math class is doing distance now, but I spotted some calculus in the back of the book.