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An even greater reason for the use of kanji is that the Japanese language has an enormous amount of homophones, words that are pronounced in the same way but have completely different meanings.

When talking, Japanese speakers can usually tell homophones apart based on the context. In written form, kanji make it much faster to understand what a given word means: for anything more complex than children’s books, it is actually quite hard to understand Japanese text written in a purely phonetic system (kana or latin).

> canyoureadthiseasily?ididn'tthinksoeither.nobodywriteslikethisinenglish

This is very legible for a native english speaker

It’s legible, but it takes a bit of active effort which makes it tiring to read more than a few sentences in a single sitting.

Spaces weren't always used. If you look at old greek/roman engravings everything is jammed together without spaces. I think you could eventually become quite good at reading spaceless text, even though spaces definitely aid in comprehension.

There are still several languages that don't use spaces. Like Thai and Cambodian. Both of these languages are very analytic - they use short words, which makes it easier.

The actual problem without using spaces is not that humans can't read it, it's that computers can't read it (without at least complete dictionary and maybe some AI help). GNU aspell for instance does not support languages that don't use spaces.

[1] http://aspell.net/0.61/man-html/Unsupported.html

Yeah, context is essential. We've seen plenty of examples of website names where the spaces being squashed out gives alternative meanings. Two come to mind where the last word was "exchange" and it followed a plural. No simple-minded spel chequer is going to be able to figure that out.

An example of text segmentation library for Japanese:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeCab

Like you said, it does come with a dictionary to work properly.

It's legible (ish) due to the limited ways that English characters can group up - e.g. there's only one valid way to split up "writeslikethis". In JP many common words are only 1-2 characters long, so in general even a very short string of kana can be split up multiple valid ways.

Yeah, no problem here. I've been learning japanese for a while and have encountered the phenomenon though. Still if you look at e.g. the front page of JP wikipedia: https://ja.wikipedia.org/ there's plenty of kana there, be it words that are habitually written entirely in katakana or hiragana, or even kanji words that still have some attached kana to disambiguate readings.

After more practice I've found myself starting to pick up on common dividers, like particles, verb endings, adjective endings, etc. I assume native speakers do this instinctually, much like native English readers aren't really reading letter by letter (wichh is why txet lkie tihs is rbleadae at ntiave seepd for most)

Although you can write hiragana-only with spaces between the words - children's books are written like this. But I still find it way harder to read my kids hiragana-only books than text using kanji, for whatever reason (familiarity I guess)

I also find hiragana-with-spaces hard to read, even as a gaijin. So I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that Japanese and Chinese are harder to read because they don't use spaces. No offense to some people here, but I think it would be better to avoid coming at this from a position of "what is the secret that makes western culture so much better?"

After a quick search, there is at least some research out there that suggests that Chinese readers are able to read faster than English readers, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1938807990955829.... This comes at a cost though, and that is the time spent learning how to write, but maybe technology like word processors will reduce that cost while retaining the benefits.

>"what is the secret that makes western culture so much better?"

I wrote that example as an attempt to frame how Japanese scripts are written compared to English. If you thought it had anything to do with superiority and inferiority, you read between the lines too much.

Spaces can be used, especially in modern times and are sometimes used for even better readability, but generally and historically Japanese script is one connected string of characters with no breaks except for the occasional punctuation and line breaks.

A connected string of nothing but hiragana and katakana is very infuriating to read, with or without spaces, and as a practical concern the issue manifests quite frequently in any piece of longer-form writing that contains lots of foreign words (because foreign words are all written in katakana).

I'm not aware of such research but it doesn't surprise me at all. Chinese and Japanese have more bits per symbol and thus if symbols can be decoded in a similar timeframe they should read faster.

I think

c a n y o u r e a d t h i s e a s i l y i d i d n t t h i n k s o e i t h e r n o b o d y w r i t e s l i k e t h i s i n e n g l i s h

might get the feeling across a bit better?