That’s kind of the point. There are a lot of homonyms in Japanese, but when speaking, the meaning is understood from the context. People understand when you are using one particular word in a conversation, so why why is reading considered different? And homonyms exist in all languages, a like ‘bow’ in English being a great example.
I’ve had this kind of conversation many times with Japanese, and we just have to agree to disagree. What does get me is the claim that kanji is logical and intuitive. It ain’t. And no Japanese will admit that if there is a kanji that they don’t know (usually a specialist one) they have to stop reading. Sometimes they will have no idea about how to say it, so if it’s not in a dictionary, they can’t even ask for help. I have seen this happen.
First, conversation is contextually rich compared to written language. People can point, the object of conversation can be right there, etc. I’m not saying it’s impossible to understand kana-only text (I think some books are written in this fashion?), but it’s not ideal.
I’ll also insert the personal opinion that kanji are a) relatively easy to learn (the million and one readings perhaps being an annoying exception to this) and b) easier/faster to read than non-logographic languages (this one may be a fact, but I’m not doing a lit review tonight). I know from my experience reading Japanese that it’s relatively easy to scan a page and get most of the meaning whereas pages of kana are the stuff of my nightmares.
Don’t overlook that written language is in general very different from spoken language. You can often see words in text that you would never hear in any conversation. That’s a quirk of literature in basically every language. In Japanese in particular, in spoken language a lot of words are of Japanese origin, which are far easier to understand without worrying about kanji. I’m not saying jukugo is not used in spoken language, but there are a lot that are basically only ever seen written out.
Unless you don’t mind having every book use the same pool of words as in spoken language, and few jukugo. That’s basically throwing a great chunk of the language right out the window.
Edit: I just found this article for whoever thinks it’s interesting.
I personally don’t buy any of the arguments that Japanese couldn’t be written legibly with just a syllabary or alphabet. The Tale of Genji was written entirely in hiragana. Many older games written only in kana are perfectly readable with the addition of spacing and punctuation. Japanese are able to communicate verbally just fine without kanji, so it’s not as if the absence of kanji robs the sounds of their meaning.
Anyway, there’s a difference between possibility and preferability. I’m convinced of the possibility of writing Japanese only using an alphabet or syllabary, but not that it would be preferable. Most Japanese are convinced that kanji is simply faster to read. That’s my experience as well, but clearly acclimation is a large part of that. I think some serious research should be done on this topic if it hasn’t already.
I stopped paying attention to the radicals and mnemonics at around level 10.
You don’t need them to read, and the aid they provide is only temporary anyway— once you’ve truly learned the kanji you’re reading there’s no reason to know arbitrary names for all the parts, or how to make a story out of them.
There were already several attempts for romanization in the Meiji period and after WW2, but “it failed to catch on” as Wikipedia puts it
Even if a new writing system were vastly better there are still conservative forces, inertia, cultural heritage, and no particular interest to redo every school book and official publication ever.
Even if a new writing system were vastly better there are still conservative forces, inertia, cultural heritage, and no particular interest to redo every school book and official publication ever.
Of course, I doubt the Japanese would ever change their writing system substantially in the foreseeable future considering how large the corpus is and how dedicated they are to their traditional culture. Even if it were definitively proven that kanji were inferior to an alphabet I think they’d just accept it and move on. I was speaking from pure curiosity; if someone were to design the most efficient writing system I wonder what it would look like? My suspicion is that while alphabets are much easier to learn, I think having a large character set is more efficient when it comes to reading. This makes sense if you approach writing as an information encoding/decoding problem. But even if that’s the case, considering the trade-off between training time and reading efficiency how many characters should a writing system have for optimal reading speed?
You can actually observe that people that read using a alphabetic system subconsciously create a much larger set of symbols they recognize than the actual alphabet allows. I think it’s common knowledge now that fluent English readers recognize words mostly from their length and overall shape and not by the individual characters, except in situations where the word is rare or unfamiliar. In that case maybe an alphabet IS strictly better since it’s more intuitive and natural to learn but still ends up being just as efficient to read with enough practice.
EDIT: I forgot that I wanted to mention the fact that a lot of the Japanese people I’ve spoken to about this are convinced that Korean Hangul is an enormous handicap for Korean academia, and that Japanese academic research would be hamstrung if a switch to a Hangul-esque system ever took place. Is this true? I doubt it but that’s the kind of mindset Japanese seem to have towards kanji and its effectiveness.
I was thinking about that, could you just read with noting exactly all the names of the cast, have detailed knowledge of the speech patterns of the time, the context, etc. Just because someone was able to decipher it again doesn’t mean that kana are a great choice for your next novel
Concerning the effectiveness, I just read somewhere that Asian students are handicapped because they have to wait several years to access higher level texts that are more accessible in alphabet. Not sure if western children actually read those higher level texts
Basically this is a topic of someone from another culture declares what is better for the people from a certain culture, because of course this person knows way better than the people who actually born, grew up, and live in that culture.
If you already lack the motivation to continue from day one I’m not sure how your language journey is going to fare. The written language is my favorite part of Japanese. Just like I love written Chinese over spoken Mandarin, but I guess we all have differing opinions. Good luck with your studies
When it’s a specialist term in a specific context. My wife was studying a health related course, and would come across terms that weren’t listed in the general dictionary. She had no real clue as to their meaning or their reading. She would have to pretty much stop studying until she could go in to ask the teacher what the word was.
Well, that’s true. I really don’t like Japanese much. I have enough to survive, but I feel I really should be able to read more, hence trying to study here.
What do you get from just coming on here to complain, you think they’re going to just reform the whole language because this one guy SystemD can’t wrap his head around it? Come on dude, learn it or don’t learn Japanese
Maybe if instead of rejecting and loathing the system, and changed your perspective to thinking it as fun, it wouldn’t be such a drag, might even be easier! There’s lots of merits to kanji although of course it has a time constraint as a learner, but every language has it’s difficult parts
