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Hiragana and katakana are just the very easy parts of written Japanese - it's merely like learning Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Personally I picked up a Hiraga

Hiragana and katakana are just the very easy parts of written Japanese - it's merely like learning Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard. However, unlike western writing systems, there's also a third thing which is not an alphabet: Kanji. And this is a world of troubles, because Kanji is literally FUBAR. So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler.

geraldwhen 3y ago
How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space. I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.
- filmor 3y ago
  From my understanding, there are some words that are usually written in Hiragana anyhow (which always confuses me when that word contains a は). I don't think it would hurt to replace usage of Kanji by introduction of visible word boundaries, where necessary.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  >How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. They could just start using spaces. They use the button anyway to cycle through the different kanji that they've typed out in kana or latin. In latin script text we recognize words as "symbols" of the language. Words might be composed of characters, but you don't read them one character at a time. You see the start, the shape, and the end of word. Based on that you know what word it is and what it means. You can raed scrmabled text withuot isseus. Japanese would gain the same kind of recognition if it were only written in hiragana and katakana. It already has that anyway. You don't scrutinize whether it is the actual correct kanji. If it looks close enough it's good enough. I think a bigger potential problem would be homophones. Japanese words seem to like using the same sounds for a lot of different meanings. (I wonder if that's why their language has so many English loan words.) I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. Having a harder language isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  - tkgally 3y ago
    > I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. I’ve been following public discussions about the Japanese language in Japan for nearly forty years, and I think it’s safe to say that there is currently no significant advocacy for dropping kanji or drastically curtailing their use. Kanji are just too deeply embedded in the culture, economy, and educational system and in people’s linguistic identity. The Japanese Wikipedia has an article about the history of the movement to switch to romaji [1]; the movement had some momentum up until the 1930s but was suppressed by the government during the Second World War. It was taken up again by the postwar Allied occupation [2], but nothing came of it. One of the last Japanese groups still advocating for a switch to romaji dissolved earlier this year after more than a century in existence, as the remaining members were too old to continue [3]. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5%AD%97%E8%AB%96 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Reforms [3] https://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/articles/-/1011059 https://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/articles/-/1011059
    - geraldwhen 3y ago
      I suspect younger people have it easier than ever. Once you get a computer or cell phone, you only need to know how to read kanji and slam that autocomplete button.
      - astrobe_ 3y ago
        AFAIK on electronic devices, they use Hiragana and the autocomplete "translates" in Kanji. People here point out that they cannot drop Kanji because of homophones, so I guess that autocomplete turns really fast into "autocorrupt" if you don't know your Kanji. But I think electronic dictionaries are a great relief.
  - LittleCloud 3y ago
    I'm sure what I'm going to write are not new insights but, to add to your point, generally we expect to consume information much quicker through reading than through hearing. When reading, say English, we don't really sound through each word but recognize the shape as you say. More concretely, it's probably our brains' pattern matching of frequently occurring clusters/patterns of letters: "psy" in "psychology" for example, if you spelt that "phonetically" as "saikolojee" I doubt people would recognize that. I don't know Korean, but I've been told that it has plenty of Chinese loanwords (or Chinese-derived character compound "words") like Japanese, yet because it is less homophonous than Japanese, Korean people nowadays are very able to recognize such words by the shape of them when written in Hangul. As a native Chinese speaker, Cantonese to be precise, my opinion is probably biased but I find Japanese to be so homophonous (for Sino-Japanese words 漢語 but even for native words 和語 to a degree) that even if Japanese adopted a more "efficient" syllabary like Hangul, words would still be difficult to decipher, spaces included. Pitch accent only helps so much (and of course that isn't written down in kana), the typical examples being 紙 ("kamì": paper), 髪 ("kamì": hair) and 神 ("kàmi": god). I'm trying to indicate the pitch accent in an adhoc manner with the accented letters; note that according to my (native) Japanese dictionary, 紙 and 髪 have the same pitch accent. So I think, a more phonetic writing system for Japanese, that remains efficient for reading, would end up annotating words with semantic or etymological hints, like the idiosyncratic spellings of Latin and Greek root words in English. Also, the texts we read are allowed to use more sophisticated words, more literary words, with more complicated sentence structures. So while phonetic spelling ought to work to represent ordinary speech, that's not necessarily the case for general written expression. In practice, I find 漢語 in Japanese speech to be surprisingly difficult to comprehend, in the sense that, words are often too indistinct for me to pick them up by ear if I have not heard them in speech before, even if I have seen them in text before and would know the characters already (including their readings 音読み in Japanese). That's different for me as a Cantonese speaker where I can pick up new literary compound words if their constituent characters are ones I know from other words/compounds, even rather infrequent ones. I would say it's because the sound system of Cantonese has 6 tones, mapping nearly one-to-one with the tones + voiced/voiceless distinction from Middle Chinese, which in turn is a much more monosyllabic language where characters have quite distinct sound values compared to any of the modern Chinese languages. Incidentally I have a harder time picking up new terms in Mandarin by ear where many characters that are distinct in Cantonese sound the same; and it's widely agreed that Mandarin Chinese has evolved more disyllabic words to compensate. Again, yes, even when I know the compounds already through writing, learning to pattern-match for them in hearing in real time, has been, unfortunately, for me at least, a different story. (Edit: added below) I believe also that both Chinese and Japanese got more homophonous because they could get away with it (i.e. people got lazy in pronouncing more intricate sounds) when there was 漢字 to distinguish characters/words when needed. So there's certainly a feedback loop in there. If for the 2 to 3 thousand years of history there was no writing in ideographic characters, there would have been evolutionary linguistic pressure against too many homophones in the languages.
- jdshaffer 3y ago
  You have a very good point (so I'm not sure why you were downvoted). I currently read Japanese at an upper-intermediate level. For example, I can read most of Harry Potter in Japanese an only look up a word every page or two. The biggest problem with switching Japanese to "all gana" is the homophones. Many similar words sound the same but have different nuanced meanings such as hear and listen -- 聞く and 聴く -- both pronounced "kiku". This happens so often, that I think dropping kanji would be a disaster. An additional benefit to the kanji is that when you get to know enough of them, you can begin to guess the meaning of new words, similar to learning Latin roots and morphemes like "un-" or "re-".
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    Indeed the homophones are something! I recently came upon 熱い and 暑い in my learning, and that was a trip. (Both pronounced あつい, both mean hot but with different meaning).
  - LittleCloud 3y ago
    Just wanted to add some color here. The various written forms for native words (和語) like 聞く and 聴く aren't really coming from different words, they were most very likely the same word originally. Only that because Japanese adopted Chinese-character writing, it started developing these stylistic distinctions. Native Japanese people writing these words also don't always distinguish them properly, e.g. using 聞く generally even if the more specialized meaning of 聴く would apply. This particular kind of distinction is called 異字同訓 (の漢字の使い分け) in Japanese. I think a better example is 話す versus 離す which I just discovered yesterday also seem to have the same pitch accent!
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Alphabet used to be written without spaces. Speech is also spoken without word delimiters. It’s very easy add spaces to written Japanese.
FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
Dropping kanji will probably make the language even harder, due to the huge amount of homophones. It won’t be impossible because clearly Japanese people can talk with each other despite the homophones (pitch accent might help a bit here, but I doubt it would be easier than just learning kanji.
- samus 3y ago
  In most cultures, spoken language is usually much simpler and down-to-earth than written language. Misunderstandings can be immediately clarified by asking the other person to repeat or rephrase. Complex structures in spoken language is usually reserved for formal speeches or presentations. It is not surprising that people easily tire listening to those. In case of Japanese, the pitch accent is not recorded in writing, but in spoken language it is probably very helpful to recognize word structure and boundaries.
Aerroon 3y ago
>Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler. Another example: Vietnamese swapped from using a modified Chinese script to a (modified?) Latin script.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  And on the other end of Asia, Turkey changed from Arabic script to a version of Latin in the 1920s, one of Ataturk's big reforms.
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    The phonetics of Turkic languages are pretty close to Latin languages, though.
kalleboo 3y ago
> Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard The first time I visited Japan I set my phone wallpaper to a Katakana chart image and whenever I was waiting around (riding a train/subway, etc) I'd sit and read words on advertising. By the end of the week I no longer needed the chart. This was back when data was extremely expensive and pocket wifis weren't a thing yet so there were far fewer distractions, I guess that helped...
alexlur 3y ago
> So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. They did consider it in the 20th century when Japan was modernizing and catching up with the Western world. Nowadays nobody takes you seriously if you propose abolishing it. The debate was settled in 1962-1966 [1] when the government officially gave up any attempt to remove kanji from the Japanese writing system. It’s a very much a fringe idea now. [1]: See 国語国字問題 on Japanese Wikipedia. The full quote is 漢字仮名交じり文が審議の前提。漢字全廃は考えられない。

geraldwhen 3y ago

How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. Japanese words are lengthy compared to English as well. Kanji packs more content into less space. I agree that the existence of “rare kanji” is a bit strange, but 8,000 or so characters seems reasonable, especially with so many compound kanji.

filmor 3y ago
From my understanding, there are some words that are usually written in Hiragana anyhow (which always confuses me when that word contains a は). I don't think it would hurt to replace usage of Kanji by introduction of visible word boundaries, where necessary.
Aerroon 3y ago
>How would you read Japanese without kanji? The lack of a space character makes all hiragana sentences far less legible than sentences with kanji which act as word boundaries. They could just start using spaces. They use the button anyway to cycle through the different kanji that they've typed out in kana or latin. In latin script text we recognize words as "symbols" of the language. Words might be composed of characters, but you don't read them one character at a time. You see the start, the shape, and the end of word. Based on that you know what word it is and what it means. You can raed scrmabled text withuot isseus. Japanese would gain the same kind of recognition if it were only written in hiragana and katakana. It already has that anyway. You don't scrutinize whether it is the actual correct kanji. If it looks close enough it's good enough. I think a bigger potential problem would be homophones. Japanese words seem to like using the same sounds for a lot of different meanings. (I wonder if that's why their language has so many English loan words.) I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. Having a harder language isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- tkgally 3y ago
  > I think it's definitely possible, but it's up to them. I’ve been following public discussions about the Japanese language in Japan for nearly forty years, and I think it’s safe to say that there is currently no significant advocacy for dropping kanji or drastically curtailing their use. Kanji are just too deeply embedded in the culture, economy, and educational system and in people’s linguistic identity. The Japanese Wikipedia has an article about the history of the movement to switch to romaji [1]; the movement had some momentum up until the 1930s but was suppressed by the government during the Second World War. It was taken up again by the postwar Allied occupation [2], but nothing came of it. One of the last Japanese groups still advocating for a switch to romaji dissolved earlier this year after more than a century in existence, as the remaining members were too old to continue [3]. [1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5%AD%97%E8%AB%96 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Reforms [3] https://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/articles/-/1011059 https://www.kyoto-np.co.jp/articles/-/1011059
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    I suspect younger people have it easier than ever. Once you get a computer or cell phone, you only need to know how to read kanji and slam that autocomplete button.
    - astrobe_ 3y ago
      AFAIK on electronic devices, they use Hiragana and the autocomplete "translates" in Kanji. People here point out that they cannot drop Kanji because of homophones, so I guess that autocomplete turns really fast into "autocorrupt" if you don't know your Kanji. But I think electronic dictionaries are a great relief.
- LittleCloud 3y ago
  I'm sure what I'm going to write are not new insights but, to add to your point, generally we expect to consume information much quicker through reading than through hearing. When reading, say English, we don't really sound through each word but recognize the shape as you say. More concretely, it's probably our brains' pattern matching of frequently occurring clusters/patterns of letters: "psy" in "psychology" for example, if you spelt that "phonetically" as "saikolojee" I doubt people would recognize that. I don't know Korean, but I've been told that it has plenty of Chinese loanwords (or Chinese-derived character compound "words") like Japanese, yet because it is less homophonous than Japanese, Korean people nowadays are very able to recognize such words by the shape of them when written in Hangul. As a native Chinese speaker, Cantonese to be precise, my opinion is probably biased but I find Japanese to be so homophonous (for Sino-Japanese words 漢語 but even for native words 和語 to a degree) that even if Japanese adopted a more "efficient" syllabary like Hangul, words would still be difficult to decipher, spaces included. Pitch accent only helps so much (and of course that isn't written down in kana), the typical examples being 紙 ("kamì": paper), 髪 ("kamì": hair) and 神 ("kàmi": god). I'm trying to indicate the pitch accent in an adhoc manner with the accented letters; note that according to my (native) Japanese dictionary, 紙 and 髪 have the same pitch accent. So I think, a more phonetic writing system for Japanese, that remains efficient for reading, would end up annotating words with semantic or etymological hints, like the idiosyncratic spellings of Latin and Greek root words in English. Also, the texts we read are allowed to use more sophisticated words, more literary words, with more complicated sentence structures. So while phonetic spelling ought to work to represent ordinary speech, that's not necessarily the case for general written expression. In practice, I find 漢語 in Japanese speech to be surprisingly difficult to comprehend, in the sense that, words are often too indistinct for me to pick them up by ear if I have not heard them in speech before, even if I have seen them in text before and would know the characters already (including their readings 音読み in Japanese). That's different for me as a Cantonese speaker where I can pick up new literary compound words if their constituent characters are ones I know from other words/compounds, even rather infrequent ones. I would say it's because the sound system of Cantonese has 6 tones, mapping nearly one-to-one with the tones + voiced/voiceless distinction from Middle Chinese, which in turn is a much more monosyllabic language where characters have quite distinct sound values compared to any of the modern Chinese languages. Incidentally I have a harder time picking up new terms in Mandarin by ear where many characters that are distinct in Cantonese sound the same; and it's widely agreed that Mandarin Chinese has evolved more disyllabic words to compensate. Again, yes, even when I know the compounds already through writing, learning to pattern-match for them in hearing in real time, has been, unfortunately, for me at least, a different story. (Edit: added below) I believe also that both Chinese and Japanese got more homophonous because they could get away with it (i.e. people got lazy in pronouncing more intricate sounds) when there was 漢字 to distinguish characters/words when needed. So there's certainly a feedback loop in there. If for the 2 to 3 thousand years of history there was no writing in ideographic characters, there would have been evolutionary linguistic pressure against too many homophones in the languages.
jdshaffer 3y ago
You have a very good point (so I'm not sure why you were downvoted). I currently read Japanese at an upper-intermediate level. For example, I can read most of Harry Potter in Japanese an only look up a word every page or two. The biggest problem with switching Japanese to "all gana" is the homophones. Many similar words sound the same but have different nuanced meanings such as hear and listen -- 聞く and 聴く -- both pronounced "kiku". This happens so often, that I think dropping kanji would be a disaster. An additional benefit to the kanji is that when you get to know enough of them, you can begin to guess the meaning of new words, similar to learning Latin roots and morphemes like "un-" or "re-".
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Indeed the homophones are something! I recently came upon 熱い and 暑い in my learning, and that was a trip. (Both pronounced あつい, both mean hot but with different meaning).
- LittleCloud 3y ago
  Just wanted to add some color here. The various written forms for native words (和語) like 聞く and 聴く aren't really coming from different words, they were most very likely the same word originally. Only that because Japanese adopted Chinese-character writing, it started developing these stylistic distinctions. Native Japanese people writing these words also don't always distinguish them properly, e.g. using 聞く generally even if the more specialized meaning of 聴く would apply. This particular kind of distinction is called 異字同訓 (の漢字の使い分け) in Japanese. I think a better example is 話す versus 離す which I just discovered yesterday also seem to have the same pitch accent!
wodenokoto 3y ago
Alphabet used to be written without spaces. Speech is also spoken without word delimiters. It’s very easy add spaces to written Japanese.

FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago

Dropping kanji will probably make the language even harder, due to the huge amount of homophones. It won’t be impossible because clearly Japanese people can talk with each other despite the homophones (pitch accent might help a bit here, but I doubt it would be easier than just learning kanji.

samus 3y ago
In most cultures, spoken language is usually much simpler and down-to-earth than written language. Misunderstandings can be immediately clarified by asking the other person to repeat or rephrase. Complex structures in spoken language is usually reserved for formal speeches or presentations. It is not surprising that people easily tire listening to those. In case of Japanese, the pitch accent is not recorded in writing, but in spoken language it is probably very helpful to recognize word structure and boundaries.

Aerroon 3y ago

>Korea used to use Chinese characters too, they eventually (mostly) dropped them in favor of something simpler. Another example: Vietnamese swapped from using a modified Chinese script to a (modified?) Latin script.

walthamstow 3y ago
And on the other end of Asia, Turkey changed from Arabic script to a version of Latin in the 1920s, one of Ataturk's big reforms.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  The phonetics of Turkic languages are pretty close to Latin languages, though.

kalleboo 3y ago

> Personally I picked up a Hiragana/Katakana chart image online and put it as my wallpaper, so I could easily decode a word when given the chance (best with 2 screens). You can learn then over a few months like that without trying hard The first time I visited Japan I set my phone wallpaper to a Katakana chart image and whenever I was waiting around (riding a train/subway, etc) I'd sit and read words on advertising. By the end of the week I no longer needed the chart. This was back when data was extremely expensive and pocket wifis weren't a thing yet so there were far fewer distractions, I guess that helped...

alexlur 3y ago

> So much so that people talk about dropping it every now and then. They did consider it in the 20th century when Japan was modernizing and catching up with the Western world. Nowadays nobody takes you seriously if you propose abolishing it. The debate was settled in 1962-1966 [1] when the government officially gave up any attempt to remove kanji from the Japanese writing system. It’s a very much a fringe idea now. [1]: See 国語国字問題 on Japanese Wikipedia. The full quote is 漢字仮名交じり文が審議の前提。漢字全廃は考えられない。