Jon Farber wrote:

    In the anime "Faster, Kasumi, Kill, Kill", Ranma tries to write a
kanji to contain the demon, but misses a stroke.  The spell is
ineffective.  Says something about his kanje, doesn't it? ^_^

Forgive me for my impudence, but I fail to see how that has any bearing at
all on whether or not he knows his kanji.  There are probably over five
hundred thousand different kanji, with only a fraction of them used
regularly.  Spirit wards would probably be a very specific kanji that few
outside of clergy would know.  You can't hold that against Ranma.  (I ask
you to recite the prayer for exocising a demon.  You can't, without
researching.)  That he was able to only miss one stroke, I feel, is a
testament to how intelligent Ranma is.

Okay.  A few points here.

1)  The character they are writing is not an esoteric spirit ward.  It
is the extremely common character for _mame_, "bean."  This is because
beans are traditionally used as a means of getting spirits out of the
house.  So there's no need to cut anybody any slack for the obscurity of
the character.  

2)  Not to start an anime-versus-manga debate, but in the manga the
priest is the one to write the incorrect character, and Ranma is equally
as fast as Akane at picking up that the character is wrong.  Your choice
of source material is, of course, your own, but I lean towards the manga
myself.

3)  Despite occasional bad penmanship (which varies throughout the
series -- some of his writing has been quite good) and lack of attention
given to schoolwork, I at least have seen no evidence that Ranma is not
up to par in his use of the written language.  He even occasionally
deciphers scrolls in "classical" Japanese.

4) And just for the record, Japanese does not use anywhere *near*
500,000 kanji.  There are 2,000 that are considered the essential kanji;
the number swells to 4 or 5,000 including archaic forms and characters
which only remain in names, not in linguistic use.  Chinese is, of
course, another story.

mata ne,
bengman 


As to the question of Ranma's intelligence -- that, I think, is up to
the author.  

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