How Do You Say "Hell" in Japanese?

You don't need to. It is understood from context: everything is hell in Japanese. Let me illustrate how to look up new words, for instance:

The scene: Me at my desk with a 430-page coursepack, which I have to review in its entirety before moving on to the actual work I have to do for class. "Review" is a misnomer, as I have never laid eyes on this coursepack before. This is what I get for convincing a teacher to teach me a class for which I never took the prerequisite.

Some background for those mercifully unfamiliar with Japanese: This fine language has two different alphabets (hey, why not? the more the better) and thousands of Chinese characters ("kanji"). In any given sentence, all these elements may be thrown together in an orgy of linguistic confusion. Kanji do not seem to follow any pronunciation rules whatsoever; the exact same character may have three or four completely different pronunciations. Not satisfied with this level of complexity, well-meaning western teachers have also transliterated written Japanese into "romaji" (the Roman alphabet). Unfortunately they disagree on how to transliterate it, so, for example, in different romaji dictionaries, "zyaa" and "ja" might actually be the same word. Perhaps the romaji dictionaries are just trying to prepare you mentally for the sheer frustration of Japanese itself.

The issue: This coursepack is full of kanji I have never seen before (the teacher's explanation: "we get so many Chinese and other Asian students studying Japanese, and since they already know kanji, we start out at a high level.") In other words, those of us who don't already read another Asian language just have to figure this out for ourselves. The kanji are printed in text 1/8th of an inch tall; many of them look like nothing so much as tiny centipedes crushed flat on the page. There is a conspicuous absence of handy-dandy furigana (phonetic characters), so I have no idea how the kanji are pronounced, so I can't even try to look them up in the only dictionary I have, which is in romaji (though it has Japanese writing next to every word). So in addition to not knowing how they're pronounced, I don't know what they mean.

The solution: Complicated. Breaking the process down, it goes like so: (1) attempt to count how many strokes were used to write the teeny-tiny, crushed-centipede kanji. If there's another kanji next to it that might happen to be considered part of the same kanji, count those teeny-tiny strokes, too. The usual result is that it might be, say, 13 strokes, although it could also be 12 or 14. (2) Look in the small kanji-pronunciation dictionary in the back of my textbook, under 13-stroke kanji. When I don't find it, look under 12 and 14 strokes too. In the unlikely event that I find it, move to step 3; otherwise skip to step 5. (3) Read the hiragana (phonetic Japanese) next to the kanji in the back of said textbook; then (4), having transliterated the hiragana into the Roman alphabet, look the word up in my romaji dictionary. Or (5) if I don't find the exact kanji I'm looking up, but I find the first big chunk of it contained within other kanji, notice the multitude of ways in which that chunk can be pronounced; say, for example, it could be pronounced shin or ka or ga. Then (6) start looking in the romaji dictionary: read every word that starts with shin, then every word that starts with ka, then ga... and hope I find it.

The result: This method ain't pretty, but it more or less works. On the other hand, spending an evening this way is roughly as much fun as spending it getting into a bar fight and being rushed to the hospital minus your handbag and two pints of blood. I think I am beginning to understand the high suicide rate in Japan--is that what they mean when they say learning a foreign language teaches you about the culture, too?