People find value in the tradition of writing. If Japanese were to ditch kanji as Korea did, I think there would be some complaints.
It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.
And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.
I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.
Kanji is not just “harder”. It’s better.
But then again.. it's that other problem: Reading when there's kanji is much faster. Even for beginners. If you don't understand a word in kanji then it doesn't work, but as soon as you understand it it's way easier and faster to read.
Really not hard to do. A symbol on the syllable bearing the pitch accent would solve the issue
> And then there are the words with little or no pitch accent difference, only context
What's happened is that effectively a written "shorthand" has emerged that has evolved somewhat separately from how people speak. Losing kanji would mean losing this shorthand, in favor of writing more closely akin to the way people actually speak, but this is how the vast majority of written languages work. Preserving this shorthand seems like thin gruel to justify the complexity of kanji.
I wouldn't compare kanji to shorthand. Shorthand is typically not easy to read, normal writing is easier. Reading written, fully-spelled English is fast. Reading hiragana is slow (and I've been reading hiragana for a long time)- it's slow, and mentally much harder than reading with kanji. The only issue (and that is of course an issue, but tiny compared to Chinese) is that there's a lot to learn before everything can be read fluently. But reading only hiragana is just.. too hard, for any serious amount of text. It's not hiragana per se, it's the language itself with its limited set of phonemes which contributes to the difficulty.
> Reading hiragana is slow (and I've been reading hiragana for a long time)- it's slow, and mentally much harder than reading with kanji.
What's the ratio of hiragana-only text that you read compared to Kanji? And does the hiragana text uses spaces between words? My strong suspicion is "low" and "no", respectively. Familiarity breeds comfort with any writing system, and word breaks are a fabulous ergonomic tool for easing reading.
Could part of that be due to the fact that your vocabulary was also increasing at that time?
Perhaps related is the abjad used in Arabic and Farsi. Vowels are written with diacritics above or below the main part of the character, which represents a consonant. However, in modern Arabic, the vowels are rarely written and are inferred from context.
The bigger problem for Japanese is the absence of spacing between words. Even if you write everything in hiragana with spacing, it's significantly slower to read than when kanji is present without spacing. The mixing of kana and kanji usually provides a hint as to where word boundaries are, because there are few cases where kana is followed by kanji in the same word (eg お and ご), and kana which follows the kanji are most often a continuation of the word (okurigana) or a particle. Some words are usually written in kana despite having kanji available, and their presence can sometimes make it more difficult to read because they might look ambiguous with a particle or okurigana, and you have to figure out from context what was intended, which slows down reading slightly.
As for "translate in real time", that won't happen because from Japanese to English it would mean to translate before the sentence is done, knowing the intention of the speaker before the speaker says anything. For the simple reason that in Japanese the verb comes at the end while in languages like English it's typically the second word. Using an AI wouldn't be any better than when I used to translate for my wife and the other way around. It works but is hardly satisfactory for anything more than occasionally (speak, wait to hear the translation, speak back, ditto).
A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.
As for dyslexia.. I don't see the connection. Dyslexia is a problem of reading and writing, and it exists independent of the language, and also the writing system (it has been sometimes claimed that Japanese children are less affected by dyslexia than people learning Latin-based languages, and I for some time kind of thought so too.. but I have since seen multiple cases of dyslexia related to Japanese as well, it's the exact same problem)
Rates of dyslexia are much higher in countries with less phonetic spelling systems. The general conclusion from this is that, while dyslexia may exist at equal rates in countries with phonetic spelling, its effects are diminished to the point where many individuals with it can read unimpaird.
> A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.
I never claimed it would. A delay of a few seconds between speech and translation is acceptable, much the same way actual translators do it.
As an individual I only have anecdotal "evidence", but for what it's worth - I already mentioned that I've seen dyslexia in Japanese children, but not only that - I've also seen that dyslectic bi-lingual children have dyslexia both in Japanese and in their European language.
Unless I see real evidence I'll continue to assume that dyslexia is simply under-reported in e.g. Japan. As has been the case for so many other things - nobody speaks of lactose intolerance in Japan, though it obviously exists.
Not only are kanji needlessly complex because of history, there's also extra work like stroke order (another needlessly "important" thing).
Hira/kata is so much easier, but I ended up giving up the language after I both realised that I wouldn't live there and that they're just romanising so much anyways.
Imo, the biggest efficiency gain from kanji comes from reading. Meaning is grasped instantly because you don’t need to worry about phonetics. Pronunciation follows a general set of rules, such that even when encountering new words you can guess at how they’re pronounced, while grasping meaning at a glance.
To compare it to latin languages, the difference is like going from reading everything out loud to reading silently.
I'd agree with you if you'd said Korean, where the makeup of the character has direct rules for pronouncing it, if you learn the simple rules then you can read any Korean character - this is the middle ground they should drop kanji for, imo
For example, 青 is read as “sei”, and characters that use it as a radical are either read as “sei” or “jou”, such as in 情熱(jounetsu) or 清潔(seiketsu). So when you run into a rare character in a word that uses this same radical, you can assume that it uses a standard reading. For example, the word for fairy, 精霊, isn’t one you run into very often, but when you do you can assume that it’s read as “seirei” based on the radicals, and you’d be correct.
I’m explaining this in length here but with native level proficiency this process happens instantly, as you’re reading.
Japanese should not drop kanji. The only people that think that are foreigners that failed at learning the language. This is not a shared sentiment among japanese speakers.
But that does not on its own mean that Japanese couldn't evolve out of Kanji. It is not the case that if Kanji goes away, the entire rest of the language MUST stay static. It in fact would not. It would begin a multi-decade process of adjustment to the new issues.
It has happened before in other contexts, and it will happen again. There's a lot of signs that Chinese is on the verge of such a change (on a decadal time scale), which carries somewhat different baggage, but roughly the same amount of it.
What really throws the wrench into the whole thing is computers, and I don't just mean that it will simply speed up or slow down such a change, but that it could send all of this flying out in an entirely new direction. If we're all wearing augmented reality goggles full time in 20 years, what will happen to ideograms if every ideogram you see comes with floating pronunciation guides, and your googles can also translate phonetic spellings transparently in real time back into kanji/ideograms? Could languages like English start growing something like ideograms, presumably descended from modern-day emoji, if computers erase the disadvantages of emoji that cause languages to largely go alphabetic thousands of years ago?
What I absolutely do know is this: In 50 years, no language will be the same as it is today. Guessing what the changes will be, especially in a rapidly evolving novel landscape, is really hard. I don't think kanji/ideograms being seriously diminished is off the table.
I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.
It's necessary to use Hanja today in educated contexts because Hangul has too many homophones, and most educated (technical, literary, scientific) vocabulary has a Sinitic origin and therefore are more homophonic than typical Korean words.
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
Innovation would be to just put in the verbiage, precisely define terms, fuck tradition.
Frankly, the whole language seems like such a mess that maybe they should?
Easy to understand for a fluent speaker, but a learner might struggle.
We saw back when we had keypad phones, the youth would write "txt" speak because it was faster to type with 10 digits. I'm pretty sure there was a decline in literacy rate around this time, the youth struggled with spelling because they wrote rarely, but texted frequently. Smartphones fixed that problem, because they provide the full keyboard and auto-correct.
My guess is, if you took the tones out of pinyin, then a generation or two later there would be less literacy. Children would struggle to add the tones even though they know how to speak the word. Writing already contains far less information than speech. Over several more generations, the speech could even change because the written word has lost the tonal information. Compared to the past, we read far more, speak less, and write even less, and most writing has been replaced by typing.
> mchncl lmt xsts t th wdth f sngl xhst prt, t bt 62% f th br dmtr fr rsnbl pstn rng lf.
> Th rd vlv s smpl bt ffctv frm f chck vlv
That's just from a Wikipedia page I have open from earlier. Already quite a bit harder to decipher.
I wonder if there is any evidence of that other than boomers complaining about it.
>Over several more generations, the speech could even change because the written word has lost the tonal information.
That happens automatically with every language already. It's not like a race to the bottom where suddenly no one knows how to communicate though.
>Compared to the past, we read far more, speak less, and write even less, and most writing has been replaced by typing.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
> If this [writing tones] was so easy, pinyin (a standardized writing) would have replaced characters decades ago!
Which is saying that the reason Pinyin has not replaced traditional characters because it cannot accurately transcribe Chinese speech.
I don't have a dog in this fight one way or the other, but it really is surprising that all these pro-kanji comments seem to ignore the concept of context altogether. It's very circular reasoning being used to try and explain why kanji are necessary.