japanese blog#3 yep, my head is a mess

I know, it's the third post in a month. I'm addicted to telling my experience here. Anyway, I think I'm making a big fuss out of nothing, but I'm now confused with the whole "learning kanji" approach that I decided to undertake just a few weeks ago. I've been reading some websites on the internet , looking for methods to learn kanji in an effective way and recently I just discovered those little things called "radicals", which to my understanding, are like the building blocks of kanji. To some people, whom this discovery happened until much later down the row, I may seem like a lucky guy, and maybe I am, but now I'm so confused with the whole concept. 

Let me explain: first of all, I am confused with the whole Kanji thing, I mean, do they represent entire words or just syllables? When I google this, all the websites that I've visited tell me that they can be both. However,  I thought, very naively I must say, that if they represented syllables then one kanji had to correspond to one and only one syllable. But yesterday I learnt that this is not the case. There's a lot of homophones as far as Kanji are concerned so the entire "one kanji at a time" approach doesn't make much sense now. 

Recently I came to the realization that the Japanese government releases a list of 2230 kanji (or that was the latest update) which are to be taught to the Japanese children during their school years and these kanji happen to match the most common kanji used in the media and the newspapers. So, to become functionally literate in Japanese (oh, big words over here) you have to learn these 2230 Kanji or so. Furthermore, I also discovered that they are taught in a sequential way from the simplest kanji (as far as stroke number is concerned) to the most difficult ones which may have 21 strokes or more. So here's when it gets tricky: the most difficult ones are the ones that represent easy concepts such as 紫 purple 猿 monkey and 顔 face.

It's all explained wonderfully in this website called kanjidamage.com So, now I'm tempted to learn the 200 radicals first before even trying to memorize word by word by word. Well, enough of whinnying, I should share the good news with you guys: I read a word in hiraga. It's a big deal form me because that means that I'm actually learning. I decided to take the "the one word at time" approach, no learning of hiragana or katagana separately and It's paying off people. It was the word ろおまじ which is like the transcription of the Japanese language using the Latin alphabet. Yes, I totally do my homework when it comes to languages.

I also should say that the one word I would use to describe the language learning process is UNCONFORTABLE. I mean, seriously: it's unconfortable at the beginning when you understand nearly nothing, it's unconfortable in the middle stages of proficiency, when you understand but not that much. And it's uncofortable when you start hearing the grammar constrains and they sound weird to you as well as the new phonemes of the language (if you're lucky enough) BUT I do have to say that I know for a fact that this is only temporary If I'm consistent enough. Gosh, when did I become so whinny? ありがとう.