I remember the first kanji I ever wrote. In fact, I still have them — a Chinese aphorism roughly equivalent to "seeing is believing." In 1964, I awkwardly copied them out of a book on linguistics from my high school library in North Carolina. I was about to turn 17 and could not possibly have imagined that within 12 months I would be living in Okinawa.

While recently rummaging through a box left in storage several decades ago, I found myself peering into an old notebook, and there were the kanji — 百聞不如一見 — I had transcribed 40 years earlier. The Chinese saying is familiar to virtually all Japanese as 「百聞は一見に如かず」　("Hyakubun wa ikken ni shikazu") — literally, "One hundred hearings are not equal to seeing once."

In the long process of acquiring spoken and written Japanese, you can expect to encounter dozens, perhaps hundreds, of kotowaza (ことわざ, aphorisms), seigo (成語, set phrases), koji (故事, fables), meigen (名言, famous quotations) and kanyo-ku (慣用句, idioms), which pop up regularly in news articles, books and everyday conversation.