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.
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