Just because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated.
It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"
It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese
It's telling that there is what's effectively a reading test for Japanese people, where it requires 12 years of schooling to take a stab at Level 2 (covering only the "daily use" kanji!), and Level 1 requires years of additional study on top of that:
If you take a language like English, it's still arguable that you'd need 12 years worth of schooling to do an advanced test.
Kanji Kentei seems to ask esoteric things at level 2. So it's a test of fluency of not only the Kanji but the language.
How would an English learner fare with Shakespeare or reading a book like Finnegans Wake?
I don't know if there's any data about this. But I think what would be a good study is the level of native proficiency in languages around the world.
Does languages considered simpler result in a greater mastery by the general population?
For example, "La negra" would mean "the sword", and "duelos y quebrantos" wouldn't mean "mournings and breakdowns", but some kind of dish made by mixing scrambled eggs, chorizo and bacon.
Kanken levels beyond 2 are a different matter; they cover words that aren't in common use, and are more akin to learning trivia for the sake of learning trivia.
I would guess they're talking about kanji though, which really isn't very complex. It's moreso just annoying to have glyphs that you can't pronounce if you don't already know an onyomi/kunyomi reading...
Take hiragana for instance, it consists of 46 characters (versus 26 for the latin alphabet). The latin alphabet is way more efficient than hiragana because we compose sounds instead of syllables: ta is t+a, whereas in hiragana あ doesn't appear in た. Then you add katakana and kanji, and it just becomes impossible to think of Japanese writing as not complicated.
Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange.
It most likely helped the leaders there to stay in control. Without native Japanese translators foreigners are unable to get very far.
A good example of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing"
The language is structured around those two syllable letters.
Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.
I've done language conversation exchanges with Japanese English learners and the characters really are completely different to someone learning them for the first time.
Ahem. Not even syllabes.
Also, Gothic letters are just a representation, such as cursive, which in the end are the same letter.
You have the Sans/Serif versions of the CJK characters, too.