for the bored...

there are 3 alphabets in japanese

the 2 minor ones are phonetic, like english, and have 50 characters each.............those 2 are pretty easy for foreigners to learn

the problem is the main alphabet?, kanji

it was lifted straight from the chinese thousands of years ago and before the war had thousands and thousands of characters. but after the war the basic set taught in high school was reduced to just under 2000 characters

still every year seems to see more and more kids struggling to understand what their grandparents write

japanese computer keyboards are basically the same with only a couple more keys to change between alphabets. most japanese just type in an abc version of japanese called romanji but as so many different kanji word/pictures have the same pronunciation, and hence abc spelling, you are forever dancing around the function keys selecting which kanji you really mean

and that's why translation software has such a hard time going from east asian languages to english

"suzuki" the bike, usually ends up being called "sea bream" a fish etc. as each word often changes in context to the words around it

kind of like "chevrolet corvette stingray"
translation software would leave "chevrolet" alone but would probably translate "corvette" into small naval vessel and "stingray" into the fish...

here endeth the lesson

oh, and japanese is traditionally written from top to bottom but now from left to to right is pretty common

but books are often printed "backwards" so you need to turn the pages the other way.....