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Comment by othello | Hacker News Reader

the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system

This is a common misconception (which I shared until I studied Japanese).

Writing a sentence may be more of a hassle than with an alphabet based system - and even that would remain to be seen - but reading it is much more efficient due to the more condensed form factor: a page of kanji would take much more space written in romaji.

The fact that Japan and China stuck to an ideogram-based writing system did not stem from a lack of alternative. Japanese actually has had not only one but two syllabic alphabets for more than a millenia (1). Yet kanji were kept, notably because of the numerous homophones in the Japanese language.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#History

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I don't think it's a misconception at all. I used to enjoy learning kanji but objectively speaking it's a much worse system than alphabets. The merits -- I can think of shorter text and quicker reading -- hardly outweigh the defects: the sheer number of characters, all the years it takes for native speakers to memorize them, the mess that are loan words and neologisms (unless you use kana), etc.

Now it's too late to change but Japan could have done it, just as Korea did. About homophones:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1198145

Well, Japan does have katakana, which has moved a bit towards being more alphabet-like via 'little characters'. For example, there's no 'fo' sound in Japanese (as in 'fork'), so you can't represent it using either kanji or one of the two syllabaries (hiragana or katakana).

The closest you can come is 'フオク', which would be pronounced 'fuoku'.

But, you can modify the vowel in katakana with a 'little letter', giving you the common way to say 'fork': フォーク, which sounds very similar to the English pronunciation.

It's not a true alphabet, because you still can't whip together unpronounceable crap like we can do in English, but it's better than having no way to represent out-of-language sounds.

Yet kanji were kept, notably because of the numerous homophones in the Japanese language.

But the reason for this was that a lot of Japanese vocabulary originates from Chinese, which is tonal, whereas Japanese is not. Kanji are used because they are necessary for Sino-Japanese vocabulary. Native Japanese vocabulary has no need for them.

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