Hobbies!

[Copyn]

Hello! I'm especially antsy to cause discussion of a slightly less spamboard nature, so I thought I'd ask about hobbies!

Feel free to use this space to talk about, ask about, learn about, or swerve about various hobbies!

It could be one you're super into, or one you wish you were into, etc.!
You can just gush about what you're into, or ask other people about what they're into, etc. etc. y'all get the idea

To get things rolling I'll ramble for a bit about Japanese! More specifically, Kanji - for those not in the know, kanji is a writing system where each symbol represents an idea or concept; these can be more simple (like 木 - tree) or more abstract (like 気 - spirit).
Usually Kanji is touted as a super giga-hard part of learning Japanese, because there's thousands of Kanji to learn. I won't lie, it can definitely be a doozy, but a lot of people overlook some of the beauty in Kanji!
One of the biggest things about Kanji is that it can make it realistic to find out what a word means without actually looking it up! I mean....this doesn't always work, since sometimes words are just abstract or have weird meanings, but it works enough to be notable!
And even if you can't find it out on the first try, it can make memorizing the word a lot easier!

For an example, let's take two kanji - 文 and 学
文 means "sentence", and 学 means "study"
if you put them together, you get 文学 - Literature
And what's more, each kanji has certain pronunciations, so you can reasonably guess how to pronounce a word just by looking at the kanji!

Of course there's a lot of nuance to it - a lot of Kanji will have many super-different meanings, or a lot of pronunciations, or the pronunciation might change because of something called "Rendaku"
So it definitely can get messy, but it can also help clear up a lot of mess!


Now feel free to talk about whatever you want - it doesn't have to have anything to do with my Japanese ramble it's just about having fun