Asian Characters

Language barriers do exist for travelers, unless you're blessed with a knack for picking up new languages. The Asian characters are especially hard to fathom for Western natives. Most of those languages merely have an alphabet and then just rearrange their order to form words, sentences and so on. It's the words that have meaning, rather than the characters themselves.

Chinese definitely works differently, in that characters themselves have meaning. The sequence of characters describes context, meaning and intent. If you're a native speaker/reader, you have gained years of experience understanding that background. If you're a Westerner, you don't have that experience, so you wonder what the heck the characters for person, competition and wind are supposed to say.

Korean and Japanese are supposed to be a little less difficult to pick up. Korean actually consists of an alphabet, but then composes single characters from the individual alphabet components. Those single characters form sounds, which in sequence form words. Japanese doesn't form characters from alphabet components, but it does have two different alphabet systems, which it uses interchangeably. Also Japanese doesn't get away with completely losing Chinese characters, so a Westerner will very often see characters not covered in the alphabet.

Asian character systems are very efficient with regards to footprint. You can imply a lot using only a few characters. It also seems like some people have to say huge amounts of text, but don't write it down. It pays to have the common history, so that you know why people say so much with so little text.

All this makes it unrealistic to just head off to Tokyo, Beijing, Taiwan or Seoul without any language training, and just expect to do well with a small English-to-something else dictionary. You need to learn some simple gestures and the basics, otherwise you're going to remain lost in translation.

Or you could, you know, just go to Belgium instead.