@cmw A friend who learned Japanese said that the spoken word was easy; the calligraphy is the nightmare. Is that your experience?

@tony Somewhat. Japanese is very different from IE or even Semitic languages, and so particle and counter usages are not intuitive to me. I think it's easy to learn phrases, harder to express complex syntax, and yes, "cursive" kanji is impossible.

Handwriting in general can look very different from its print form, and with so many characters (96 unique characters in the syllabary, not including diacritics or kanji, the latter of which number in the 3000s for normal use), the complexities quickly add up.

@cmw To be fair, the variants of a single letter of the Latin alphabet can look wildly different.

In fact, a colleague recently shared with me his observation that Japanese mathematicians have a much keener eye for telling the difference between typefaces. It sometimes happens in notation that the same letter in different styles (upright, italic, bold, fraktur, calligraphic...) means different things in math, and that confuses different people to varying extents.

@JoonasIlmavirta Sure, but Japanese has all that for 96 characters, whereas the Latin alphabet has only 26.

@JoonasIlmavirta I think the two are related! Also, can you give an example of where typeface changes a notation's meaning? That's pretty wild to me.

@cmw Yes, speaking phrases & asking questions is one thing; when they reply, that's something else! The acid test: can you read a Japanese newspaper?

@JoonasIlmavirta Latin handwriting (cursive script) is hard work. The stonecuttings are more palatable.

@tony Papyri look like chicken scratch most of the time.

@tony Not even a little bit. I'm not proficient at all in Japanese. It's only a recent thing, and I dedicate less time to it than I should. I'll let you know how the Japan trip goes, though.

@cmw Here's a quick sample.

Those are normal daily notations to me.

@cmw Oh, absolutely, the size of the alphabet (or similar) certainly contributes to the size of the issue. I was just saying that the concept itself shouldn't be too alien to us.

It's not like R and r look exactly alike...

@tony I find myself thinking that reading it would be less hard work if more hard work had gone into writing it, but I know that's unfair to the poor scribe.

@JoonasIlmavirta Glad I didn't go the math route! Stats was enough for me.

@JoonasIlmavirta Fair! I wasn't saying it was different, just bigger than what we're used to.

@cmw The most painful part of that is new students learning that one should make a distinction in their handwriting.