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You know, I started by loving kanjis too. I like the way they combine, the stories they tell. And I can imagine that when becoming proficient with them, they fo

by Iv 8y ago

You know, I started by loving kanjis too. I like the way they combine, the stories they tell. And I can imagine that when becoming proficient with them, they form a nice cozy system. But face it: you say I have years to learn them. I could learn 3 languages with the effort wasted to learn kanjis (which are half a language because then you also need to learn the pronunciation of words). No, I'll perfect my English instead and learn spoken Japanese, as it is almost a separate language. In terms of communication, evolution, ease to learn and use, kanjis are an inferior system. It took me a long time to accept saying that, because I am of course biased as a lazy gaijin, but really, seeing how easy Korean feels compared to Japanese was the nail that convinced me that there is a fundamental truth in that. Interestingly, hangul (the Korean alphabet) was adopted to replace chinese characters and was opposed on the ground that it made the written language to easy to learn. Hah.

fenomas 8y ago
I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. You either pick them up without intending to (enough to read anyway, if not write), or you don't get proficient. The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge variety of words whose readings are all permutations of a handful of syllables - words like koutai, koutei, taikou, teikou, keitai, koukei, taitei, etc, etc.. And it's not just a matter of keeping them all separate - a proficient speaker might know two or three unrelated meanings for any given reading. Kanji are what makes that possible. I mean, it's challenging to learn even 10 kanji, but once you do it's far easier to learn 100 or 1000 compounds made out of them. So if you want to say kanji are annoying or not worth your time, that's obviously fair enough - but they're not useless and they're not just there to obfuscate things.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  > I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn? (Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)
  - danans 8y ago
    > Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks. Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    > Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down. It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)
- Iv 8y ago
  A typical 12 year old Japanese kid will be fluent in spoken Japanese and pretty bad at kanjis.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    Standard school curriculum for a 12 year old covers 1000-1400 kanji, and I said "proficiently", not "fluently".

by Iv 8y ago

fenomas 8y ago

I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. You either pick them up without intending to (enough to read anyway, if not write), or you don't get proficient. The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge variety of words whose readings are all permutations of a handful of syllables - words like koutai, koutei, taikou, teikou, keitai, koukei, taitei, etc, etc.. And it's not just a matter of keeping them all separate - a proficient speaker might know two or three unrelated meanings for any given reading. Kanji are what makes that possible. I mean, it's challenging to learn even 10 kanji, but once you do it's far easier to learn 100 or 1000 compounds made out of them. So if you want to say kanji are annoying or not worth your time, that's obviously fair enough - but they're not useless and they're not just there to obfuscate things.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn? (Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)
- danans 8y ago
  > Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks. Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.
- fenomas 8y ago
  > Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down. It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)
Iv 8y ago
A typical 12 year old Japanese kid will be fluent in spoken Japanese and pretty bad at kanjis.
- fenomas 8y ago
  Standard school curriculum for a 12 year old covers 1000-1400 kanji, and I said "proficiently", not "fluently".