Won't Miss #452 - not being fully literate

OK, I'm pretty sure I can read these boxes. 

Some people are going to react with incredulity that I spent such a long time in Japan and never became fully literate. Well, judge away, my friends, if that is what you need to do to elevate your estimation of yourself above your estimation of someone who writes a little blog on the internet. Before you bang your little gavel and pronounce me a lazy dumb ass (I won't argue with you if you do), keep in mind that I've had conversations with a great many Japanese people who have also told me they can't understand every character when they read a newspaper. They just guess based on context or just skip it, though few people even read newspapers anymore, especially among the younger set. With over 10,000 kanji on top of the phonetic alphabets of hiragana and katakana (both of which I know fully), does it surprise anyone that many natives can't read every character?

The truth is that the very fact that there are so many characters made me pretty much give up on ever becoming fully literate in Japan and I won't miss the fact that there was always going to be something that I couldn't read.

Won't Miss #358 - handwritten Japanese

Mostly, it's the stuff on the left near the bottom that trips me up.

When I teach, I use a white board to write notes or words for students and I always print. I have quite good handwriting, but if some letters are not nearly perfectly formed (especially "r", which without a prominent hook will be seen as an oddly squashed "v" for some reason), my students frown and look confused at what has been written. For Japanese folks, handwritten English, despite being a fairly simple set of 26 letters with relatively few complex shapes, can be very hard to read. And, let's not even go there when it comes to cursive, which many people cannot read at all. I know how they feel. I can read Japanese which has been produced by a machine, but hand-written Japanese can sometimes be nearly impossible to decipher with all of the personalized spacing, loops and styles.

I won't miss trying to decipher handwritten Japanese.