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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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
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