Fire bucket, Kyoto

Kyoto fights fire with water buckets outside many residences.  The middle symbol means fire--see the two flames?

Writing Japanese

Japanese children spend years learning what I can practice with small effect.

This effort at writing Japanese carries red corrections by the professor who teaches cadets from other countries at the Defense Academy.

I thought when I learned the syllabalary -- corresponding to a phonetic alphabet-- I would be able to read.  But all the interesting words --and word parts--are written in Chinese characters.  These pictograms are  called Kanji (CHinese letters, literally).

Tokyo-Osaka hiking trail

Walking around my new neighborhood in Kyoto, I asked a passerby to pronounce this sign. I could enter phonetic into a word processor and match the six kanji and search on the web. It is long hiking trail between Tokyo and Osaka, a few hundred miles. An access point is 20 minutes by foot from my front door in the northern suburbs of Kyoto.

Tokai shizen hodou=long distance nature trail

Writing Japanese lesson