Japanese at U of T

Japanese has many similarities to languages which belong to the Altaic family such as Turkish, Mongolian and Korean but there is no conclusive evidence relating Japanese to a single family of languages. Although Chinese is often thought to be similar to Japanese because many common characters are used, they are very different in various ways.
Japanese mainly uses three different "character" sets in texts; kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana and katakana. Kanji are more like words which have their own meanings while the kana are more like alphabets, combinations of which can be meaningful units.
Japan is a country where both old and new values are respected. Even if you are interested only in modern Japanese culture, technology and society, you will be amazed to realize that tradition resides in many modern values.
Although English is commonly taught as the first foreign language in Japan, not many Japanese can fluently communicate in English. If you would like to experience real "Japan" and to meet local people, Japanese language skills would be indispensable.

Is Japanese hard to learn?
Someone learning both English and Japanese may say that Japanese pronunciation is much simpler and its grammar is not very complicated. It is often said that casual oral communication in Japanese is relatively easy, however, formal oral communication is rather complicated since an extensive system of politeness and honorific expressions is applied. Another factor which makes learners say Japanese is a challenging language might be its writing system and a long list of kanji you need to memorize.
How many kanji are there? Should I learn all of them?
There are approximately 50,000 kanji listed in the biggest kanji dictionary edited in Japan. However, no ordinary Japanese person would know them all. There are 1,945 kanji identified for daily use by the government. These are learned in primary and secondary school. You might still think 1,945 are too many. Actually, if you learn well a select 200 kanji, you will be able to recognize half of all the kanji used in daily newspapers, and if you learn 500, you will be able to recognize almost 80 per cent of the kanji in newspapers.