Slightly off-topic, but I've been learning a bit of Japanese in preparation for a trip to Tokyo, and I'm seeing the differences in how they treat written langua

Slightly off-topic, but I've been learning a bit of Japanese in preparation for a trip to Tokyo, and I'm seeing the differences in how they treat written language vs. English speakers. Japanese has three alphabets: Hiragana ("regular" Japanese), Katakana (generalized phonetics for foreign words) and Kanji (Chinese-origin characters). Kanji can be thought of as a precursor to Emoji, and the name similarity is no coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji. Kanji's purpose is instead of conveying phonetic syllables (similar to what English and other European languages do), Kanji characters convey meaning, which greatly increases information density with the tradeoff that you already have to know what it means instead of being able to just sound it out. I've noticed that frequently they will interweave Kanji characters in mostly-Hiragana words. This works because Japanese speakers have already learned these characters and are comfortable doing so. While Emoji isn't exactly like Kanji, learning about this has given me a much better appreciation for why Emoji has found so much use, and I expect that future generations will be able to include it in their language as a first-class citizen, essentially adopting the Japanese attitude towards written language.