If you replace kanji with katakana and keep hiragana for particles and conjugation, you can call it a day.
Easy to learn, no more trying to guess if it's on/kunyomi, immune to mispronunciation from using a foreign alphabet, the list goes on.
Easy to learn, no more trying to guess if it's on/kunyomi, immune to mispronunciation from using a foreign alphabet, the list goes on.
Or rather, the 2-3 months would be ten times easier and everything after would be ten times harder.
What is the advantage of using a different symbol for each word, that offsets the huge disadvantages of having to learn and remember a different symbol for each word?
Especially considering that the spoken language already distinguishes between all possible words through pronunciation (and context in the case of homophones.)
So, obviously learning 1000 kanji isn't easy. But doing that is what makes it possible to learn 100,000+ words whose pronunciations and meanings would be otherwise largely unrelated.
It's quite similar to the role that Latin/Greek roots play in English. When you see a word that includes "-graph-" you know it probably involves writing, and similarly when a student of Japanese sees a word with "間 (kan)" they know it involves an interval or space. Throw away the kanji, and your student now just sees "kan" - which means the word will probably involve an interval -- or a barrier, or emotion, or appearance, or a tube, or a building, a warship, a crown, an ending, China, a publication, a government ministry, or.. you get the idea.
Spoken language is quite limited compared to written Japanese.
Assuming yes, do their users have significant problems understanding the written text when pronounced in an audiobook? Are there well-known conventions or shortcuts or explanations that audiobook readers insert into their speech to signal the correct meaning of the word?
Do Japanese audiobooks provide evidence for or against the idea that doing away with kanji in writing would not harm understanding significantly?