First of all, the vast majority of Japanese kanji are not pictographs, but ideograms. But I wasn't referring to reading that at all -- I was referring to my re

First of all, the vast majority of Japanese kanji are not pictographs, but ideograms. But I wasn't referring to reading that at all -- I was referring to my reading speed in just kana, which is a syllabary. Each symbol represents one syllable (mora), and there are only 48 of them in each of two sets, hiragana and katakana. That would be analogous to the number of characters to learn in two cases of a cyrillic alphabet. As for cognates, well, you'd be surprised how much English is floating around in the Japanese lexicon these days.