[yomly]

>Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn.

Yes and no. Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing Roman letters/an alphabet to the point where there isn't a great deal of transferability between Western and East-Asian languages.

But people think in composites just as you said - people prompt each other with "anshin no an" or hand drawings. This isn't too different to thinking of spelling in composite blocks of syllables.

Characters are to syllables what strokes are to letters. And people can describe characters in their composite strokes just as a syllable is a composite of letters. The difference is that the association is mechanical/visual, rather than aural.

People making errors by using the wrong "an" or the wrong radical happens just like people getting the order of "i" and "e" mixed up in English... Or German, for that matter.

I'd probably agree that there is a steeper learning curve with character based languages. Possibly even more so with Japanese - Chinese people don't really get the option of kana so are forced to master kanji/hanzi from a younger age through exposure if nothing else. That said, after a certain point, it does genuinely suddenly click. I used to snort in disbelief when my Japanese friend claimed he could memorize 100 kanji in 10 minutes (he was a bit of a machine to be fair) but after my first thousand I was able to memorise entirely new characters after barely a glimpse.

Alas, you can forget them as quickly as you learned them!

[wodenokoto]

> Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing ...

arguably Japanese is not a Chinese character based language, but a Chinese character adopted language. Looking at Mandarin it kinda makes sense why a character based written language sprung up. Looking at Japanese and Korean, it boggles the mind why only the Koreans moved away from Chinese characters.

Except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English.

[yomly]

You're right in that linguistically its roots did not come from Chinese, but I don't agree with > except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English.

That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are plenty of features in Japanese that make learning Chinese (or vice versa) easier than Mandarin/English. Assuming by "borrowed words" you're referring to onyomi (which is a huge deal in learning languages) there's still the fact that in both Japanese and Chinese (off the top of my head) there is:

- no verbal conjugation

- no genders for nouns

- monosyllabic sounds

- gender ambiguity in pronouns

- no definite article

I'd also argue the concept of tenses is more similar between Japanese and Chinese than Chinese and English.

If you start factoring in things like onyomi, it's a whole different ball-game, and anecdotally I and other people familiar with South-East Chinese dialects (e.g. fujianhua/chaozhouhua) have noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Japanese and Chinese - which makes learning new vocabulary way easier see [0].

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-Chinese-dialect-is-the-most-simil...

[wodenokoto]

> no verbal conjugation

I don't know how you define conjugations, but I consider 食べた a conjugation of 食べる. I know some tokenization systems will split the former into 2 tokens and keep the latter as a single.

The other points in your list I agree with, but I am sure we can find just as many dissimilarities between Japanese and Chinese, although I concede that I was exaggerating with my comment about English.

My point is that the way Chinese is shaped, the character system is befitting. The way Japanese is shaped, it is not, but effort has been made to put them there anyway, which has lead to (at least a written language) far more complicated than necessary.

A friend of mine once described Korean as "Chinese words with Japanese grammar" and the Koreans transitioned away from Chinese characters with great success (and I dare say they are better off having done so) and retain plenty of words that more than resembles their Japanese and Chinese counter parts. I'm assuming you wouldn't argue that Korean is a "Chinese character based language"

[dibujante]

Japanese is very phoneme-poor. If they switched entirely to hiragana there would be too many indistinguishable homophones. Korean has more phonemes and escapes this somewhat.

Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.

[yomly]

During the cultural revolution, the complete romanization of Chinese was explored. The idea was ultimately abandoned much for a similar reason Japanese will probably struggle to go character-free: there would be too much ambiguity in the written language.

This poem was the go to for people against romanization[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...