'A lot of squinting and counting.' That is how Dries Durnez, a Belgian graduate student at Doshisha University in Kyoto remembers how he used to look up kanji, those intricate Chinese-based characters that make up a sizable chunk of the Japanese syllabary.
"I'd count 12, 13, 14 strokes. That would already narrow it down. But at times I still couldn't find the kanji. OK, time to count again," says Durnez, 25.
Few languages have a writing system as complex as kanji, 1,945 of which are designated for daily use by the education ministry.
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