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Have you ever actually studied a language involving "pictograms" or are you just making assumptions? I didn't take Chinese long enough to get a feel for it one
by Larrikin 11y ago
Have you ever actually studied a language involving "pictograms" or are you just making assumptions? I didn't take Chinese long enough to get a feel for it one way or the other but in Japanese kanji will remain in the language from here until the end of the Japanese language. Japanese has a limited set of sounds and Japanese written completely phonetically is not only extremely long, but once you learn the kanji it becomes much more difficult to read and make sense of a sentence without the kanji.
- samastur 11y agoI actually have studied Japanese for a while and have no clue what you are describing as extremely long. In hiragana you have 48 letters for sounds which in most cases are a consonant + vowel. Hence Japanese written in Hiragana or Katakana is shorter than it would be if it was written with a western alphabet. Japanese is probably not the language with shortest words, but neither are they exceptionally long.
- Larrikin 11y agoRomaji is not in use for the most part in Japanese. Romaji would of course be much longer but I was talking about a sentence written out in only kana vs a sentence written out normally with a mixture of kanji and kana.
- kragen 11y agoUsually the difference is about 30% by character count, but you can write the kana smaller before the text is too small to read.