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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Apart from what the others have said, in terms of literature and poetry, kanji allows you to create a lot more layered and complex meanings and use symbolism that would not be possible with a more simple letter system.
For example, (this is a figurative example, this kanji doesn’t really exist) if you can use the same kanji for Lotus and heaven, it opens up so many possibilities for puns, symbolism and metaphors. A lot of Japanese comedy actually relies on this in fact. Sometimes they use the ‘wrong’ kanji for comedic or poetic effect.
It’s actually one of the things that orginally attracted me towards Japanese. The possibilities are immense and beautiful.
eli5: What are Kanji? Some kind of punctuation?
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