Japanese School

I know that I've explained this in the previous updates, but it was a bit all over the place and I don't think anyone got anything smart out of it. So that's why I decided to write about it more in detail.

When you're 6 years old, you're supposed to go to elementary school. That school is 6 years long, and when you "graduate" from that one, you go to Junior High School. It's a short school, only 3 years long, and you are 12-15 years old by that time. After that, they go to High School. That school isn't something we in Finland "have to go to" because we can choose. High School is like our gymnasie. It's something you choose if you want to attend or not. But most of the kids in Japan go to High School. They graduate when they're 18 years old.

But that wasn't what I was going to talk about. When you attend elementary school, the first things you are supposed to learn is how to write hiragana and katakana. All the kids learn these two ways in grade school, often already in grade 1. After that, they have to learn the 1006 basic kanji characters. When they start attending middle school, everyone knows these. (almost everyone..)
So the basics of kanji is something a 12 year old could learn. Really ;D

As you may know, Kanji has over 50.000 characters. Noone knows them all, I bet, because they are really hard to learn. Most of the people only knows about 2000. You learn those in Junior High School.



Picture - Source