Reading

Japan is a country of readers. In the trains, you will find people reading novels, comic books (manga), newspapers, kindles, etc. There are new and used bookstores all over the place and people take good care of their books.

Japanese writing and reading is not easy to learn due to having not one, but two different syllabaries called hiragana and katakana that have 46 symbols each for a total of 92, and then add in the 3000-5000 Chinese characters called kanji that are necessary for everyday life, and you can see it becomes rapidly difficult. Moreover, each of the kanji can have more than one way of being pronounced, so it becomes a nightmare very fast lol. For example, the character for water can be read as sui or mizu. Both mean water, but the pronunciation changes depending on what other characters are with it. In a normal sentence, you can find all three of these writing systems intermixed together!

Despite being such a difficult language to learn, Japan has a 99% literacy rate, so basically, everyone you meet can read and write! To be honest, the people in Japan that make up the 1% illiteracy rate are probably the foreigners living here lol! Although I can speak Japanese quite well, it has taken me many years to gather enough Japanese to read menus and elementary school level novels. Thankfully, my cellphone makes it easier to write in Japanese as I can enter my writing using the fourth (yes, 4th!!) method of writing Japanese called romaji. This uses the Roman alphabet to approximate the sounds of Japanese. Strangely enough, many Japanese people are confused with the romaji and cannot read it well, while the people who grew up using the alphabet find it so much easier :)