> 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. Ah, see I only know around 30 readings for Chine

> 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. Ah, see I only know around 30 readings for Chinese characters (since I don't trust any Japanese onyomi at all.) Those are indeed some common ones to have two. But let me show you how horrifying Japanese can be: 生 can be read as セイ, ショウ, い.きる, い.かす, い.ける, う.まれる, う.まれ, うまれ, う.む, お.う, は.える, は.やす, き, なま, なま-, な.る, な.す, む.す, -う, いき, いく, いけ, うぶ, うまい, え, おい, ぎゅう, くるみ, ごせ, さ, じょう, すぎ, そ, そう, ちる, なば, にう, にゅう, ふ, み, もう, よい, りゅう -- and there's more, if you count nanori. 生糸 is kii-to (silk thread), 生絹 is su(tsu)-shi -> suzushi (silk product), 生理 is sei-ri (physiology), 生温い is nama-nuru-i (lukewarm), 生き方 is i-ki-kata (way of life), 生得 is shou-toku (inherit), on and on. So now try and guess how to read 芝生 (lawn) ... give up? shiba-fu, of course. > How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them I definitely get what you're saying here. I'm not defending hanzi/kanji, but I think it helps a lot that speech is usually in person. And in modern times. On a Game Boy game, it's on a 160x144 screen with four colors, and the king is asking you to "Go find <XYZ>", where XYZ can mean 20 different things, and could be any of those in this fantasy world. If your boss at work asked you to find XYZ, you could immediately rule out the fishing net, the broadsword, and the carburetor as being unlikely items your boss would ask you for. It's probably either the pen or the sign. Worst case if you can't guess, you can ask him which one he means, "the writing XYZ (pen) or the shop XYZ (sign)?" I definitely enjoy when the kanji in written form rules out synonyms for me, even if I can't see kanji in speech. The usual pro-kanji argument, which I do believe holds up a bit, is that it makes reading a lot faster, and allows you to condense a lot more text into the same visual area. Great for old video games and comics, at least. The downside to me as a learner is that I find myself saying the kanji in their English meaning because I don't remember the proper pronunciation, but know what that kanji by itself means. But yeah, it would certainly be a lot more approachable to have the languages written in pinyin or hiragana+katakana, so long as they used spaces between words (and sadly, written Japanese without kanji do not.) And technically, with digital works, you can certainly transform text like that. There are some nice Firefox plugins where you can hover over Chinese characters to see their readings. > That poem was written specifically for a political battle Oh, that's unfortunate. I thought they were just being silly, like English alliterations where every first letter in a sentence starts with 'A' or whatever.