Actually this is just incorrect. Spoken Japanese is much more ambiguous. There's a reason subtitles are ubiquitous here. Americans who didn't understand the la

Actually this is just incorrect. Spoken Japanese is much more ambiguous. There's a reason subtitles are ubiquitous here. Americans who didn't understand the language tried and failed to get rid of kanji after world war 2. The langauge just does not work without them. Additionally spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones such as 雨 and 飴. Long strings of kana are difficult to read period. Native Japanese people struggle and can easily be confused by them in my experience. Korean isn't comparable because it's phonetically much more diverse and uses spaces. Kanji / hanzi work just fine for over a billion people. They make skim reading easier and add a lot of character and depth to the language. Westerners have a perception that kanji are hard to learn, and perhaps they're a bit harder than an alphabet, but in the age of computers, it really is a non-issue to learn and use them.