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It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of picto

• chousuke 14y ago
  Learning kanji isn't quite so hard as people often make it out to be... It's not trivial, of course, but you're off by an order of magnitude. :P A native Japanese person once told more she sees kanji as images, so it probably is different, though.
• hkmurakami 14y ago
  I'm bilingual in English and Japanese (When I am in Japan, people can't tell I'm not from Japan until I tell them). I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page). I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.
• lars512 14y ago
  Kanji contain repeated elements ("radicals"), which form something of a graphical alphabet. Learning a new character's form is not too difficult then, you can identify that it's radicals A, B and C, in this kind of arrangement. Basically, it's neatly pre-chunked for memorisation. The pronunciation of kanji is more difficult than their visual layout, and arguably where most of the burden is in Japanese. A single kanji can have pronunciations it's picked up from several periods in history. In practice, it just means that it might have a handful of different pronunciations in different contexts. Learning all these contexts takes time.