I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: my introduction to Japanese came from a desire to learn a language comprised of symbols. Nothing more, nothing less. Before stumbling across Japanese, having always been the avid student of romance languages, I had thought that alphabets were ace and symbols were stupid. How could a modern, forward-thinking society get about life drawing pictures all the time? ‘Throw down your easel and pick up your Biro!’ I cried. ‘Join us, in our Western crusade to destroy your doodles.’ How very wrong I was..

And that was only the start of it. You see, once I got into it, the desire to unlock the secrets of the symbols began to run away with me, and was so far in the distance even by the starting block of my Japanese education, that I had already given up and keeled over. Enthusiasm can sometimes be stifling, you know. There was nothing left to do but turn around and take up that cross-stitch class like I’d intended. Of course that didn’t happen, and here I am, my cross-stitch worse off, no doubt.

Being ever the over-zealous type, with kanji I tried to jump before I could even get out of my crib, meaning I was looking them up and trying to decipher them long before my teacher introduced them at our classes. I’d be receiving handouts daubed to the eyeballs in hiragana and would take them home, trying to work out which kanji were being missed out. This frenetic activity however, did not stop the incessant worrying I had about never being able to understand kanji properly. I thought my beautiful new refill pad would always be confined to the cursive permutations of hiragana, that alas, kanji would never adorn those 90mg pages. Couple this with what you know about my long-withstanding katakana experiences (Why kata-can’t I?) and that was it, finished. However, in my ardent manner, I had totally overlooked something that caused me far more problems than understanding: how the hell was I supposed to write them?

And that really is the crux of this post. Understanding is one of those things, right? You wake up one day longing to uncover all the secrets of a world unknown, and, with a huge dollop of research, a medium chunk of common sense and a sprinkling of human nature, voila, you begin to understand. Writing, or more specifically, handwriting, at least for me though, has never followed that pattern.

I love writing. I love it. In case of any doubt, let me say that again: I. LOVE. WRITING. It is something deep within my bones, something that has attached itself to my psyche like chewing gum to the bottom of your shoe, and let me tell you, it’s going to take one hell of a power hose to get rid. I love typography too. Showing off the true geek within, I love new fonts, typefaces, serifs, kerning etc. Finding new window dressing for my writing is important, and a passion. The unfortunate thing is, of course, that my handwriting sucks. It always has, and it always will. And it would appear, that this had transferred to kanji, also.

Being symbols, I thought my curse would not affect my kanji, that my scrawl would take on artistic qualities and provide me with perfectly formed kanji every time, that Picasso would rise from his grave and herald me as the new prodigy, that Monet would take cover under the shadow of my massive ability. As if.

And it’s not like I hadn’t been trying, God loving. I would wake up on a Sunday with no recollection of Saturday, the only evidence of it not having been cut out of the week by some Power From Above being 25 refill pads strewn across my living room floor, each and every page filled to the brim with kanji. I remember the first ever kanji I tried to write, 強, for some reason, as I’d fill pages and pages with it. None of it helped though. I tried with ornamentations, without, fast writing, slow, large, small: nothing. It just all seemed like a jumbled mess, like some ants had got creative in the night, swarmed my front room, and left me with an incomprehensible muddle, fit for nothing.

And the rules. The thing I love about rules, regulations, commands, orders, laws or directives is that for every one of them decreed, there is always an exception. And kanji, for want of a better word, is no exception. Take for instance the rule about starting each kanji at the top left corner and working your way to finish in the bottom right. With a kanji like 強 that’s perfectly understandable, but what about 週 which starts centre top and finishes bottom right? Or the rule that kanji with a centre stroke should start in the centre, then work left to right? For 小, perfect, but what about 火? Oh yea, and a horizontal stroke always precedes an intersecting vertical stroke: again, for 土 great, but not so with 田. A minefield indeed, and with no logical way out.

Hark, though, as now that time has intervened and put itself firmly between those early days and myself, like a sandwich of experience, half mouldy, half good, it would appear that things are on the up. I think I must have woken one day and realised that no matter how hilarious my handwriting had become, it was time to sort it out. Now, I love writing kanji. They’re exciting little things, when you think about it. Sitting there, all in a perfect imaginary grid, each one after the next, more proud and appealing than the last. And they retain so much. Unlike words comprised of letters of an alphabet, they pack in 100% wholegrain meaning. And really, when you think about it, the rules are not really rules at all, just a prompt to get you started in the right direction. Once you know, once you understand, it’s almost like second nature when faced with a new kanji, to know exactly how to get it on paper. Moreover, not only am I able to get them onto the paper, they actually look half decent once there. Well, at least I think so anyway.

So you see, fellow writers of Japanese, break those rules: jump before you can walk, sing before you can speak and write kanji before you can understand them. The order is not as important as they would have you believe..

* For the record, I am not and have never been a cross-stitch fan.