Kanji nightmare
So I've never studied Japanese. I've only picked up a few study at home books and at one point familiarized myself with hiragana, which I've actually now forgotten because I stopped practicing. But I was on the Shinshokan website looking for anything I could find on Empire of Midnight by Hakase Mizuki. I basically navigate my way through a Japanese website by remembering how particular kanji look (like Hakase Mizuki's name, or the comic title Mayonaka no Teikoku). I come across some issues of Wings where she has other stories printed. So I'm trying to translate what these story titles are. I take my handy dandy Berlitz Japanese Dictionary and actually try to look up the kanji. At the beginning of the dictionary there is a list of 1,945 common kanji (called Joyo Kanji). It is organized by how many strokes it takes to write the kanji, so it goes from 1 to 23 strokes. So I look at a kanji in the story title, try and estimate how many strokes it took to write it, and begin browsing through the dictionary, looking for a symbol that matches what I'm looking up. Tedious! I'm decoding some secret language to me, when there are actually millions of people out there who can do it relatively easily. haha, its like a big joke. But I suppose its how I occupy my time. It's sort of fun.