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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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.
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