Yeah. My Kanji-learning journey has only just begun. Interpreting them on a computer will be an entirely new challenge.

Since you have put aside the government track, how might you be applying your analytical acumen and dexterous diction at school?

Actually both the Chinese and Japanese names came from transliteration.

The archaic transliteration for “America” in Chinese is 阿美利加 or “a mei li jia”. In Chinese it is common for country names to be shortened to a single character + 国 (country), such as 中国 (China) 韩国 (SKorea) and 法国 (France), so America was similarly shortened into 美国, where 美 happened to also mean beautiful but was chosen mostly for its pronunciation.

In Japanese, katakana is used to transliterate foreign words today, but in the past it was done with kanji similar to Chinese. This is why many European nations that had contact with feudal Japan all possess a kanji character that can be used as their Japanese name in lieu of a katakana transliteration.

The idea is similar to Chinese but took a slightly different path. “American” was transliterated as 米利堅 or “meriken” and subsequently derived into 米国 or “beikoku” using a different phonetic reading of 米. Of course, 米 also happens to mean rice.

More like FAT country.

I enjoy the sound of the Japanese word for “fat.” It evokes fatness.

Danno: Rice Country in Japanese. Heh.

Salutations from the East Coast.