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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m

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> The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later

The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.

It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace.

I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.

Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem).

If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text.

Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).

Generally writing systems with higher workloads to read/write lead to less native literacy rates due to people with learning disabilities not being able to get over the hump, not to mention less foreigners learning the language due to the higher barrier of entry.

Is there research supporting that (specifically in reference to native literacy rates)? Would be curious to see it.

I remember reading it in something semi academic many, many years ago, so you'll have to google it.

I think it was linked to dyslexia and languages with spelling and maybe japanese, and how china simplified it's characters led to higher literacy, although that might have a few confounding variables.

Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...

> There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script

No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed.

Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.

Ridiculous comment. The Japanese writing system as a lot of issues, but visual elegance is not one of them. On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences and give limited information about word origins. It also provides endless possibilities of word plays.

> On the contrary the mix of different kind of characters is really convenient to easily parse sentences

There is also an advantage that most foreigners do not realise. The mix of Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana create natural delimiters in the sentence and make spacing useless.

Reading Japanese fully written in Hiragana is currently much harder due to the lack of delimiters between words. The mix of hiragana, katakana and Kanji allow a very high density per character.

Indeed, mixing different shapes as letters makes reading text much easier. Blackletter, on the other hand, while beautiful in its uniformity, is notoriously hard on the eyes.

It wasn’t such a bad fit for Vietnamese, whose syllabic structure is basically the same as Chinese languages. Actually Han and Chu Nom were used for a way longer time than Quoc Ngu is. And the change to a latin based alphabet is more due to colonization than anything. For Korean you right though.

The absurd number of diacritics one must append to Latin letters in order to use that alphabet for Vietnamese is the best evidence that Vietnam should have had its own rationally constructed system like Korea.

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