[dnautics]

I don't think there was ever a 'solid attempt' in Japanese to do a strictly phonetic system. The language has such a high degree of homophony that assigning chinese characters in the written system does allow some level of useful disambiguation.

It gets really complicated with japanese - there's a many-to-many-to-many <symbolic>-<phonetic>-<semantic> relationship... One character can have many different readings and due to the homophony, any given reading can have divergent meanings. For example - HASHI can mean bridge, "side of something", or chopsticks - and the character for "bridge" can also be read "kyo" depending on the context.

I imagine chinese is much easier for a japanese native speaker to learn than vice versa for those reasons (since often some of the phonetic forms "on-yomi" of the characters are directly borrowed - with some inflective changes).