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I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are

I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doubt have a certain beauty and their history is interesting, but a system where the meanings and pronunciations have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. Even in a language like English which abuses the Latin alphabet in a notoriously messy manner, the amount of phonetic information that can be gleaned from the written form is fairly high, which gives two paths to the word (via memorized whole-word recognition or incremental sounding-out).

aikinai 1y ago
It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese. They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Is that so? Deducing definition of an unknown kanji word isn't that difficult. I never had issues with "advanced kanji" as far back as I can recall.
  - aikinai 1y ago
    My children are Japanese-English bilingual and can read far more advanced books in English. Initially I took this as an imbalance and suggested they read the same books (or something very close) in Japanese. But their native Japanese language teachers said, no, because of the different learning curves you can't expect them to read the same level of Japanese texts; the equivalently educated/advanced Japanese reader will be behind, at least in the elementary school years. Japanese as a whole are extremely avid readers, so I don't think there's a gap at the top, only the shape of the learning curve.
jansan 1y ago
Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, although the languages are quite different. If the people would have been Greek and could not speak any English, no conversation would have been possible at all. Another thing to mention is the radical system. Many Chinese characters consist of two or more characters, of which one is the "radical". This often helps you understand the broad meaning of the character in case you do not know it. For example, the Japanese character for fish is "魚". If you know that character and see another unknown character that used "fish" as a radical (for example "鮭"), you know that the character probably describes some kind of fish (in this case salmon). So it is not simply a huge list of "syllables".
- gwd 1y ago
  > Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their languages; and then when traveling, people could at a basic level read the signs and menus, and communicate at a basic level by writing, without having to know anything about the language. Would you choose, post-facto, to add Chinese characters to English? For my part, I'd say "no way". English orthography is already hard enough for my son to learn, without having to add characters on top of it. ETA: Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner: It is a 真理 universally 認知ed, that a 単一男 in 所有 of a good 財産 must be in 欲 of a 妻. However 少知n the 感情s or 見解s of such a 男 may be on his 最初入ing a 近所, this 真理 is so 好固定ed in the 心s of the 周囲家族s, that he is 考慮ed as the 正当財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s. "My 親愛 Mr. Bennet," 言ed his 夫人 to him 一日, "have you 聞ed that Netherfield Park is 貸 at 最後?" Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不. "But it is," 戻ed she; "for Mrs. Long has 丁度 been here, and she 告ed me 全 about it." Mr. Bennet 作 no 答. "Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?" 叫ed his 妻, 不耐. "You 欲 to 告 me, and I have no 反対 to 聞ing it."
Barrin92 1y ago
>have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty much everyone can understand the meaning of written Chinese. And so can even Japanese or Korean people. In contrast spoken language tends to change so quickly that phonetic writing systems can rapidly become completely unintelligible. Old English is practically a foreign language. Probably nobody understands that "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum" means "Hey! We the Spear Danes, in years gone by".
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  The problem with these advantages is that most actual uses of words depend on some amount of context, and only a relatively small set of word+context combinations can actually work across languages that way. It is like the equivalent of doing a word-by-word translation. Another way to put it is that this is essentially no longer "writing language", it's some alternate form of meaning representation. Language is not just a sequence of independent words.

aikinai 1y ago

It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese. They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.

numpad0 1y ago
Is that so? Deducing definition of an unknown kanji word isn't that difficult. I never had issues with "advanced kanji" as far back as I can recall.
- aikinai 1y ago
  My children are Japanese-English bilingual and can read far more advanced books in English. Initially I took this as an imbalance and suggested they read the same books (or something very close) in Japanese. But their native Japanese language teachers said, no, because of the different learning curves you can't expect them to read the same level of Japanese texts; the equivalently educated/advanced Japanese reader will be behind, at least in the elementary school years. Japanese as a whole are extremely avid readers, so I don't think there's a gap at the top, only the shape of the learning curve.

jansan 1y ago

Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, although the languages are quite different. If the people would have been Greek and could not speak any English, no conversation would have been possible at all. Another thing to mention is the radical system. Many Chinese characters consist of two or more characters, of which one is the "radical". This often helps you understand the broad meaning of the character in case you do not know it. For example, the Japanese character for fish is "魚". If you know that character and see another unknown character that used "fish" as a radical (for example "鮭"), you know that the character probably describes some kind of fish (in this case salmon). So it is not simply a huge list of "syllables".

gwd 1y ago
> Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their languages; and then when traveling, people could at a basic level read the signs and menus, and communicate at a basic level by writing, without having to know anything about the language. Would you choose, post-facto, to add Chinese characters to English? For my part, I'd say "no way". English orthography is already hard enough for my son to learn, without having to add characters on top of it. ETA: Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner: It is a 真理 universally 認知ed, that a 単一男 in 所有 of a good 財産 must be in 欲 of a 妻. However 少知n the 感情s or 見解s of such a 男 may be on his 最初入ing a 近所, this 真理 is so 好固定ed in the 心s of the 周囲家族s, that he is 考慮ed as the 正当財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s. "My 親愛 Mr. Bennet," 言ed his 夫人 to him 一日, "have you 聞ed that Netherfield Park is 貸 at 最後?" Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不. "But it is," 戻ed she; "for Mrs. Long has 丁度 been here, and she 告ed me 全 about it." Mr. Bennet 作 no 答. "Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?" 叫ed his 妻, 不耐. "You 欲 to 告 me, and I have no 反対 to 聞ing it."

Barrin92 1y ago

>have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty much everyone can understand the meaning of written Chinese. And so can even Japanese or Korean people. In contrast spoken language tends to change so quickly that phonetic writing systems can rapidly become completely unintelligible. Old English is practically a foreign language. Probably nobody understands that "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum" means "Hey! We the Spear Danes, in years gone by".

BrenBarn 1y ago
The problem with these advantages is that most actual uses of words depend on some amount of context, and only a relatively small set of word+context combinations can actually work across languages that way. It is like the equivalent of doing a word-by-word translation. Another way to put it is that this is essentially no longer "writing language", it's some alternate form of meaning representation. Language is not just a sequence of independent words.