Welcome to the Cellar, sordid. :D
So those oriental characters are sounds or syllables?
Yeah Bruce, always waiting for fresh meat, aren't you? :eek:
Well, Hiragana and Katakana are syllables. There's the exception of the "n" which is a single consonant, but usually you'll either have a single vocal or exactly one consonant followed by a vocal. That's why oral Japanese is so extremely easy to understand for computers. Consonant, vocal, consonant, vocal - so much easier for tincans than my mothertongue German.
Hiragana and Katakana are even easy to learn - unluckily nobody uses them in Japan except to mark endings of words written in Kanji. And Kanji is a pain in the ass, since it's derived from Chinese.
In Korean you'll find two writings as well. The older one, Wenyan, is also derived from Chinese and works the same, yet the other one, Hangeul, is pretty similar to our system.
Thai on the other hand is completely like our system - except for the fact that these wavy letters they use are supposed to be pronounced completely different depending on how they're written.
That means that a vowel like "ma" could be pronounced in like five different ways, depending on how you'd rape the vocal. :D
Sorry I have such a hard time explaining it, that's actually since English is not my native language.
Khmer, the language spoken in Cambodia, is the complete opposite, although Cambodia is so heavily influenced culturally by Thailand.
Khmer consists of syllables and most words are hardly longer than two syllables.
