Thread:Demotivator/@comment-26484417-20171025101948/@comment-26484417-20171108000548

In philosophy, vast majority of martial arts are uniquely reactive, but this is not because of the particularities of the martial arts in question, but because they commonly teach one to avoid fight if possible--and definitely not to start one.

In technique, however, Aikido is one of the few that are mainly reactive. Most martial arts are fairly proactive; be it a grappling martial art like Judo, or a striking martial art like Karate, they can directly go to a target and strike or throw them. Aikido is slightly more restricted in this regard, because while there are strikes, they are mostly meant to provoke a (defensive) reaction from the target which is then used against them... that said, if there is no or utterly inadequate reaction, the strike alone might be enough.

As a matter of fact, while I have on and off dabbled in martial arts all my life, Aikido is actually a relatively recently discovered passion. Beside this, I suppose the two most noteworthy items on my list are Karate (my first martial art) and Kendo (the martial art I'd been practicing until I had to stop due to an injury--which ultimately lead me to Aikido). Have you ever tried practicing any of these?

It's actually not as bad as you might think; you only need to learn the principle and a couple of rules behind the composition of characters (e.g., left to right, top to bottom, etc.) the rest is simply an application thereof. The issue shortly becomes that of vocabulary and grammar rather than the Hangeul. This makes it rather different from both Japanese and Chinese; I suppose this is good news for potential students of the language. =)