Quote:
Originally Posted by bermuDa
I'm told that modern written Korean is much easier to learn than written Japanese, because it consists of only one alphabet (hangul), whereas Japanese has 3 separate sets, including two moraic writing systems representing the sounds of the language (hiragana and katakana), and a set of about 2,000 chinese characters (kanji).
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There are a lot more than 2,000 kanji, and they are not all Chinese characters anymore. While it is true that the Japanese writing system was derived from Chinese a couple thousand years ago, there isn't a lot of overlap anymore. There are about 50,000 kanji characters in modern Japanese, and while it's true that you can understand about 60% of the language with only the first 1,500 or so, it's an incredibly expansive and descriptive language.