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 in particular has [very very few](https://www.eupedia.com/linguistics/number_of_phonemes_in_european_languages.shtml) phonemes, which are sounds that are put together to make words. For this reason, they end up having many words that sound the same but have different meanings, and single words out of context could be mistaken relatively easily for one another. Kanji can help in these cases.
They are also a very stubborn culture. They were virtually closed to the rest of the world and mostly free from it’s influence for hundreds of years, so they are culturally very set in their ways.
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