As my drunken pedo comrade once said during one of his few sober moments (yes, that was pretty long ago), you can't learn a country's language without learning its history. So here's a bit of a BBC history lesson for you all, via Anime Online.

As a respectable anime / manga fan, you surely know that the Japanese writing borrows quite a few... thousands of cryptic ideographs (a.k.a. kanji) from the Chinese language, most of which are "pretty old" to say the least. Contrary to popular belief, however, the kanji writing may be even older than 4,500 years, as was previously estimated by highly esteemed academic dudes. That belief has recently been shattered to oblivion by a bunch of Chinese archaeologists, who discovered pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years (that's nearly over nine tousand!!), on cliff faces in the north-west of the country.

One of the "cliff carving experts" (sounds like a fun job) said that they found "some symbols shaped like both pictures and characters", failing to mention what kind of kinky pictures they actually represented. Humankind's oldest profession does come to mind, though... And I'm not talking about cosplaying.

Now, if only these damn kanji were 14 years old, learning them would be so much more enjoyable!