An even greater reason for the use of kanji is that the Japanese language has an enormous amount of homophones, words that are pronounced in the same way but ha

An even greater reason for the use of kanji is that the Japanese language has an enormous amount of homophones, words that are pronounced in the same way but have completely different meanings. When talking, Japanese speakers can usually tell homophones apart based on the context. In written form, kanji make it much faster to understand what a given word means: for anything more complex than children’s books, it is actually quite hard to understand Japanese text written in a purely phonetic system (kana or latin).