So anyone learning Japanese or Chinese knows the dreads of kanji lessons. Even natives of the language have to go through classes throughout their childhood to keep learning more and more difficult kanji.
Living in Japan for a while, books and newspapers had to deal with the more undereducated population by writing in brackets the hiragana next to the kanji, where half of the article would end up just being in brackets anyway.
Seeing as they have a fully functioning (two even) phonetic alphabet, why go through the difficulty of keeping kanji? Is it just intrinsically cultural, or is there a linguistic aspect or something else?
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>Even natives of the language have to go through classes throughout their childhood to keep learning more and more difficult kanji.
As a native Chinese speaker we don’t. There is such a thing as dictionaries. You learn how to use it and come back as needed (That kind of tells you how the characters are organized so if you have to keep learning Chinese characters separately you may be learning it wrong).
For Japanese it is a completely different story. Japanese characters somewhat forks from Chinese so ancient Japanese texts like Man’yōshū are all Kanji.
The Japanese pronunciations are listed on the side of the Kanji because the same phrase in Kanji can be read in different ways (They may mean different things when pronounced differently; I don’t know enough Japanese to tell you which is the case) and for some publications it is there for only the first instance like abbreviations in English.
Japanese in particular has [very very few](https://www.eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml) phonemes, which are sounds that are put together to make words. For this reason, they end up having many words that sound the same but have different meanings, and single words out of context could be mistaken relatively easily for one another. Kanji can help in these cases.
They are also a very stubborn culture. They were virtually closed to the rest of the world and mostly free from it’s influence for hundreds of years, so they are culturally very set in their ways.
Kanji flatly make it much, much easier to figure out the meaning of words. If a word is written in hiragana, you have no idea what it means outside of context. With kanji, it’s possible to get a rough idea of what the word means just by looking at it.
Kanji make it easier to understand the layout of the sentence just by looking at it, especially as Japanese spacing is not the same thing as English spacing. Anyone who is beyond the most basic Japanese can tell you that a sentence written in hiragana is hard to read, andistheequivalentofwritingenglishlikethis.
Because reading only hiragana is hard, try to read this
もうそうがねぼうそうする
ちょうとっきゅうにとびのって
いまあいにいきたいの
いいわけとかりゆうだとか
めんどくさいな
うんめいだからしかたがないよね
かなわなければ
このこいは
えいえんにさめることもないの
なにもしらない
めをとじて
かわいいままでほしにねがった
おもいどおりにならない
せかいならもういらない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
おもいどおりにならない
せかいとかありえない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
このきもちはこのきもちにしか
わかんないのに
みんなかってにきめつけすぎだし
しらないのにしったふりで
そんなかんたんにあきらめちゃうの
もったいないよね
かなわなければ
このゆめは
えいえんにさめることもないの
なにもしらない
めをとじて
かわいいままでほしにねがった
おもいどおりにならない
せかいならもういらない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
おもいどおりにならない
せかいとかありえない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
かなわなければ
このこいは
えいえんにさめることもないの
なにもしらない
めをとじて
かわいいままでほしにねがった
おもいどおりにならない
せかいならもういらない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
おもいどおりにならない
せかいとかありえない
ほしいのはひとつだけ
ぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶぜんぶ
Kanji was first and is pretty useful since there are a lot of words that are spelled the same way in hiragana, but have different meanings and different kanji spelling. But changing your language is hard for any nation and Japanese are very proud and stubborn to begin with.
I wonder if this will change soon though. Seeing that the younger generations are much more open to Western ideas and how painful it is to use Kanji while writing online.
There are too many homophones to not have kanji. Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Due to the nature of hiragana/katakana syllabaries, the spelling cannot be different either. For example the word atsui can mean hot, but it can also mean thick. Sure in most cases you can understand which one is being used due to context, but when reading it helps a lot that they use two completely different kanji, so you immediately understand which one is being used in the text.
Getting rid of Kanji would require a huge reform of the language and a new alphabet would have to be made. A lot of countries have done that. Vietnam and Turkey both abandoned their original scripts at some point to use a reworked alphabet based on the latin one. But in Japan there isn’t any demand or willingness to change anything. Their last major reform in the early 20th century was very controversial, so it’s not easy to get the people to agree on the matter as some see change as corrupting their culture while others feel it is necessary.
Ultimately it’s not impossible to learn kanji, and while not knowing a kanji can stop you dead in your tracks when reading a text, knowing kanji makes reading much faster
Japanese has a **lot** of homophones. Take a simple Hiragana like きどう (kidō), the same reading is used in words such as 起動 (start), 軌道 (orbit), 機動 (motorised), and many others.
Without Kanji, it would be extremely difficult to impossible to properly read any piece of text. In addition, native speakers identify what word it is much as you would identify a logo or icon, which means it’s not that difficult to decipher.
You probably also noticed that Kanji are extremely compact, allowing you to cram a hell lot more information into a single character than you could with Hiragana.
Japanese could get away with moving away from kanji if they really wanted to. Korean has a lot of similarities and they do just fine with hangul. I think fundamentally the Japanese just like kanji. Using kanji connects the language to the past.
believe it or not, in the end kanji makes japanese much easier to read. there are countless homophones in japanese – if kanji didn’t make the distinction between them, you’d be lost most of the time. while it’s difficult to learn initially, it becomes so useful you’d never want to read japanese any other way.
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