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One of the greatest difficulties in Japanese derives from the fact that it developed as a purely spoken language until about the 5th century A.D., when imperial officials decided to adopt Chinese characters (kanji) as their form of writing. Not only was this system extremely difficult in itself, but the two languages were completely different.
Partly because the Chinese kanji did not fit Japanese, partly because they were so hard to learn, the Japanese began in the 9th century to develop a supplementary set of phonetic symbols known as hiragana. At the same time, because priests had trouble transcribing kanji, they invented another set of phonetic symbols all their own (katakana). To this day, Japanese is written in kanji, which number almost 50,000 (though high school students have been required since 1946 to learn only a basic 2,000) plus the two phonetic sets of 48 characters each. There are also two different systems for translating all these sounds into the Latin alphabet (or romaji). Finally, and most formidable of all for a foreigner to interpret, there is a quasilanguage known as haragei, roughly translatable as "belly talk," in which the Japanese communicate without using any words at all—only with techniques like the artful silence.