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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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.
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