Interesting Tidbits: この言語は無理

I'm trying to teach myself to read Japanese. It's a long grueling process. I've been told that, in order to be able to read the newspaper here, I'd need to know approximately 2000 characters.
 But it's not even that simple. Setting aside the actual spoken language, the process of learning in reading and writing Japanese is similar to that of venturing into a never ending labyrinth, where knives lurk around every corner. It's just...tricky.
You see, there are 3 "alphabets" in Japanese. Technically, you could establish a (barely) similar comparison with roman letters; where we have 2 alphabets: 'UPPER CAPS' and 'lower caps.' Though there are 26 letters, there are actually 52 symbols to memorize. Upper caps and lower caps serve a different function, though these functions are quite simple to remember. The three Japanese alphabets are the following:


1: Hiragana - ひらがな - 48 symbols.
 Hiragana is the basic written Japanese. The baby shit, if you will. Each of the 48 symbols is a sound, such as ka, ki, ku, ke and ko. You can technically write everything in hiragana, but it'd just make shit confusing as hell, since a lot of Japanese words are homo-phonic and would be written in the exact same way. But this is the first form of writing you learn at school.

2: Katakana - カタカナ - 48 symbols.
 Same as hiragana, katakana is also associated with sounds. The same sounds, even. However, people use katakana to write words that aren't Japanese in origin, such as foreign names, or brands, or words that don't have a Japanese origin, such as "hamburger," the Japanese word for which is "hanba-ga."


3: Kanji - 漢字 - over 50,000 symbols.
 That's right. 50,000 motherfucking symbols; but to be fair, only 2000 to 3000 are in common use. Each symbol is a word, or a part of a word. See, this shit is confusing. Depending on how you combine these symbols together, they have entirely different and unrelated meanings to other combinations of the same god damn symbols. For example, 日本 reads "Ni/hon". It means "Japan."　本日 reads "Hon/jitsu." It means "This Day." You see what happened there?  Though 本 stayed the same in terms of its reading (Hon), 日appeared in both those words, but was read completely differently in each occasion, going from "Ni" to "Jitsu." That's because one symbol often has multiple readings. Often two, sometimes three. Or four. Or five. There's no quick way to learn this. You just have to drill them into your head. By the way, some of them have like, 20 strokes. They suck.


As of now, I know 200 kanji symbols. And I already get 'em mixed up sometimes. Shit.