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 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.
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