I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doubt have a certain beauty and their history is interesting, but a system where the meanings and pronunciations have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. Even in a language like English which abuses the Latin alphabet in a notoriously messy manner, the amount of phonetic information that can be gleaned from the written form is fairly high, which gives two paths to the word (via memorized whole-word recognition or incremental sounding-out).
I used to know how to write in Japanese
71–80 of 277 posts
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.
english has spaces to separate words, japanese doesn't. have you tried reading english without spaces?
This is a very silly argument.
If one is seriously proposing abolishing kanji, surely "also let's add spaces where they make sense" is a much easier pill to swallow.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…
Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.
Japanese has fewer sounds and a lot more homophones than English, so purely phonetic writing becomes a lot more ambiguous. Children grow out of it at an early age.
Furthermore, kanji often allows the reader to skip phonetics altogether, because the symbol itself carries the meaning. It’s a bit like how people understand emojis without having to make a sound for them in their heads.
As a result, the Japanese are able to read very fast in their native language, so switching to a different system would carry significant drawbacks.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.
english has spaces to separate words, japanese doesn't. have you tried reading english without spaces?
In a world where hiragana and katakana are adopted to eliminate characters, it's not that hard to imagine also adopting spacing. Hangul for Korean did not originally have spaces in the language.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#75If you're doing an exam in China or Japan, do you write on paper, or use a computer?
Almost always paper. The people who forget are adults who don't write anything by hand anymore except the occasional form or sticky note.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana： 「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招 じる空です。」 「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じる からです。 Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさく…
You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.
I don't think it's that crazy for the language reform to make it through, seeing as the entire political system has been reshaped into a pseudo-American democratic structure for instance. With the emperor going out of fashion and the governance of the country being overthrown, I think it would be the perfect moment for other cultural shifts as well. Had the timing coincided with the introduction of computers (which famously struggled with languages like Chinese and most Japanese) a few decades later, I think the plan would've succeeded.
Most of Europe inherited the Latin script from Christianity, which was spread with less than peaceful means. It took more than a few short years, but it certainly altered culture.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#77If you're doing an exam in China or Japan, do you write on paper, or use a computer?
Not the question you asked; but something that actually surprised me, as someone who has taken multiple language tests in the EU:
The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels.
You don't need to speak a single word, nor write a single character to pass the exam, it's all single-choice answers.
AFAICT, the equivalent exams for Chinese and Koreans do include writing, at least on the higher levels; but still don't have a speaking portion.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#78I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doub…
It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese.
They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#79A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.
How many Americans can write cursive?
I think it's time to abandon the Latin alphabet. It's too inefficient.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#80If you're doing an exam in China or Japan, do you write on paper, or use a computer?
In China, paper