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Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかってい

Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana：「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招じる空です。」「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じるからです。 Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさくさくらさくさんさくさんくさくさくらんくらくら？ Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精? In all seriousness, even Koreans still debate whether they should continue to use some Chinese characters, and they do so in poems and literatures. For instance, 악유원 means shit, yet 乐游原 has layers of meanings. Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Unlike Chinese, where individual characters correspond closely to morphemes and carry distinct meanings, Japanese is organized around words as the fundamental linguistic units. Furthermore, because Japanese employs a pitch-accent system rather than the kind of lexical tones found in Chinese, writing some native Japanese words (和語) entirely in kana typically does not create confusion. Also, Japan had at least three major attempts to remove Kanji. First time: The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, was written by a woman entirely in kana, with only a small number of Buddhist terms in kanji—terms which, in theory, could also have been rendered in katakana. This demonstrated that early Japanese could be expressed systematically and fully without using any Chinese characters at all. Nevertheless, the Japanese chose to retain kanji. Second time: During the Meiji Restoration, slogans such as “Abolish kanji, or East Asia will never grow strong” were popular. In the end, Japan found that it could modernize, prosper, and even become one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations while still keeping kanji. The decision was made to continue using them. Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

svara 1y ago
I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.
- timr 1y ago
  It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemming and deriving the meaning of the verb is trivial, because it closely follows from the Kanji (e.g. 見る => 'see', and pretty much every noun or verb involving 見 carries that connotation). Toss in the few particles (を、で、に、へ、が、は), and you've broken a sentence into semantic chunks with very little mental effort -- and along the way, gained much of the meaning at the same time. Doing the equivalent with a stream of nothing but hiragana requires a kind of parsing that is like depth-first prefix search, but with ambiguous matching at each terminal. It's incredibly tedious.
  - svara 1y ago
    I can read Japanese, yes, and obviously also find hiragana-only text hard to parse. I think that would be almost completely solved by using spaces and getting more practice though. I'm much better at reading than speaking/listening, so the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think.
    - timr 1y ago
      > the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think. Not sure what you mean by that. It's almost a daily occurrence that someone tries to explain a word's meaning by drawing invisible kanji on their palms. Someday I'll figure out how to read that.
  - astrobe_ 1y ago
    Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.
astrobe_ 1y ago
You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.
- bobthepanda 1y ago
  Latin script for Vietnamese replaced Chinese-based script under the French colonial government and were helped by the Nguyen Emperors going along with it. (Interestingly this did not take off in neighboring Cambodia or Laos.) Hanja is also mostly gone in Korea, particularly in North Korea. The big thing is that both shifts happened before rapid literacy growth. It's much easier to teach new writing systems when the majority of the population can't write anyways. 95% of Vietnamese could not write in 1945; only 22% of Koreans were literate in that time period. --- One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.
  - hintymad 1y ago
    I've always wondered how some countries manage to drop Chinese characters, while others can’t—or just don’t want to. And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages? From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace. Sure, we don’t need them when we’re speaking, so in theory it seems like we could just get rid of them altogether. But in practice, we still rely on them a lot - especially when we’re trying to understand what a certain pronunciation means. And reading is a whole different story. Recognizing characters is just way faster than sounding out spellings. Maybe one reason is that the basic unit in Chinese is not word but morphemes, which mostly are just single characters. Maybe we could come up with a different writing system, kind of like what Koreans did, instead of sticking with Romanized pinyin.
mastermage 1y ago
I dont know who amongst the Koreans argues for the use of Chinese Characters. The vast majority of Koreans don't know even the small amount of Characters they still use. Even simple ones.
latentsea 1y ago
> Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精? It could be 校内射精.
zahlman 1y ago
That first example is amazing; where does it come from?
- hintymad 1y ago
  There were online discussions on abolishing Kanji in Japanese (漢字廃止論). There were tons of interesting examples, and I took some notes. Unfortunately I don't remember the original sources now.
coffeeling 1y ago
You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad. Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words. It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together. Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy. Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English. Likewise, in my native Finnish: - Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon. - Koko kokkoko? - Koko kokko. ie. - Kokko, assemble the bonfire. - The entire bonfire? - The entire bonfire It's perfectly readable despite the meme value. Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean: kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire kuusi palaa = the spruce returns kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire kuusi palaa = the number six returns kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire kuusi palaa = six (as above) return kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire kuusi palaa = your moon returns kuusi palaa = six pieces Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony? > Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035/bunko17_d0035.html https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035... > Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese. J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

svara 1y ago

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

timr 1y ago
It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemming and deriving the meaning of the verb is trivial, because it closely follows from the Kanji (e.g. 見る => 'see', and pretty much every noun or verb involving 見 carries that connotation). Toss in the few particles (を、で、に、へ、が、は), and you've broken a sentence into semantic chunks with very little mental effort -- and along the way, gained much of the meaning at the same time. Doing the equivalent with a stream of nothing but hiragana requires a kind of parsing that is like depth-first prefix search, but with ambiguous matching at each terminal. It's incredibly tedious.
- svara 1y ago
  I can read Japanese, yes, and obviously also find hiragana-only text hard to parse. I think that would be almost completely solved by using spaces and getting more practice though. I'm much better at reading than speaking/listening, so the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think.
  - timr 1y ago
    > the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think. Not sure what you mean by that. It's almost a daily occurrence that someone tries to explain a word's meaning by drawing invisible kanji on their palms. Someday I'll figure out how to read that.
- astrobe_ 1y ago
  Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.

astrobe_ 1y ago

You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.

bobthepanda 1y ago
Latin script for Vietnamese replaced Chinese-based script under the French colonial government and were helped by the Nguyen Emperors going along with it. (Interestingly this did not take off in neighboring Cambodia or Laos.) Hanja is also mostly gone in Korea, particularly in North Korea. The big thing is that both shifts happened before rapid literacy growth. It's much easier to teach new writing systems when the majority of the population can't write anyways. 95% of Vietnamese could not write in 1945; only 22% of Koreans were literate in that time period. --- One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.
- hintymad 1y ago
  I've always wondered how some countries manage to drop Chinese characters, while others can’t—or just don’t want to. And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages? From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace. Sure, we don’t need them when we’re speaking, so in theory it seems like we could just get rid of them altogether. But in practice, we still rely on them a lot - especially when we’re trying to understand what a certain pronunciation means. And reading is a whole different story. Recognizing characters is just way faster than sounding out spellings. Maybe one reason is that the basic unit in Chinese is not word but morphemes, which mostly are just single characters. Maybe we could come up with a different writing system, kind of like what Koreans did, instead of sticking with Romanized pinyin.

mastermage 1y ago

I dont know who amongst the Koreans argues for the use of Chinese Characters. The vast majority of Koreans don't know even the small amount of Characters they still use. Even simple ones.

latentsea 1y ago

> Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精? It could be 校内射精.

zahlman 1y ago

That first example is amazing; where does it come from?

hintymad 1y ago
There were online discussions on abolishing Kanji in Japanese (漢字廃止論). There were tons of interesting examples, and I took some notes. Unfortunately I don't remember the original sources now.

coffeeling 1y ago

You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad. Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words. It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together. Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy. Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English. Likewise, in my native Finnish: - Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon. - Koko kokkoko? - Koko kokko. ie. - Kokko, assemble the bonfire. - The entire bonfire? - The entire bonfire It's perfectly readable despite the meme value. Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean: kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire kuusi palaa = the spruce returns kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire kuusi palaa = the number six returns kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire kuusi palaa = six (as above) return kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire kuusi palaa = your moon returns kuusi palaa = six pieces Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony? > Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035/bunko17_d0035.html https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035... > Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese. J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.