No, the tricky part of Japanese isn't speaking it...it's reading and writing it. Derived from Chinese characters, there are at least 50,000 characters (some estimate closer to 80,000)...thankfully “only” about two thousand are required for something akin to fluency. But all the characters have different readings and meanings depending on what word they're in, and they're not very easy to draw, either...you're also expected to get the order of stroke right. Is it any wonder my kanji skills are pathetic even after three years in a classroom?
But...no one will argue that the characters aren't beautiful. There's a reason all those hipsters get those Chinese/Japanese character tattoos. And some people get really into kanji. Really, really into kanji.
One of those people is Eve Kushner, author of Crazy fror Kanji: A Student's Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters. The book, published by Stone Bridge Press (who provided a lot of the original information in our database), was released this month, and Kushner held an awesome-sounding “Kanji Festival” at the Kasuga Restaurant in Albany, CA (near Oakland). Wish I could have gone...
Anyway, it looks like a cool book as well as a cool event, and my favorite part is this quote:
"I should note that kanji can also bring one close to insanity.”
True enough!
My protip, just learn vocabulary first in hiragana and then move on to learning kanji. It makes learning Kanji a lot easier when you have the context.