[Jonnax]

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"

[Clewza313]

Well, you can actually make a pretty good objective case for Japanese writing being the most complicated writing system on the planet, since no other language that I'm aware of regularly mixes 4 scripts, where basically entirety of Chinese forms just one of those scripts. Except that whereas in Chinese it's rare for a character to have more than one or two readings, in Japanese there are characters with over 70：

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei

[fenomas]

You're presenting this very misleadingly. Kanken 2 is basically comparable to something like an SAT; it covers what people are expected to have mastered by the end of high school (reading and writing, incidentally). As such it's odd to say it "requires 12 years of schooling" as if that proved something about the language.

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.

[Clewza313]

Most kids learn to read & write the alphabet in grade 1, although mastering the idiosyncrasies of English spelling takes a bit longer. By comparison, Japanese kids are still grinding their way through the jōyō kanji all the way to grade 12. So, yes, I think this tells you a lot about the complexity of the writing system.

[Morgawr]

Japanese kids learn to write hiragana and katakana at similar age which is comparable to the Latin Alphabet. By comparison, most English speakers still participate in stuff like spelling bees and have to actively learn to spell individual words (remember, English is not a regular phonetic language) well into adulthood.

[fenomas]

Again: kanji tests are vocabulary tests, not just orthography tests, so Kanken is not comparable to first-graders learning the alphabet. If you're familiar with Japanese you must already know this, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.

[Jonnax]

It could be argued that Chinese has a lot more characters to learn if you're including the Nanori (Readings used in Names) for 生.

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?

[Clewza313]

The Kanji Kentei is not a language test, but specifically a test about kanji, and the fact that you need to be familiar with Chinese poetry etc to ace it showcases how complex the writing system is. About the closest English gets is asking obscure loanwords in spelling bees.

[anthk]

So like reading the original unadapted Don Quixote in Spanish. Not bad as Shakespeare, but some words had a different meaning back in the day, with inusual metaphors impossible to know unless you were an expert on Middle Ages.

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.

[earthboundkid]

Japan definitely has one of the most complicated writing systems in the world, but you can get pretty complicated with alphabets if you just go too long without spelling reform. Look at the split between Tibetan as written and Tibetan as pronounced, or basically anything to do with English and our complete lack of spelling integrity.

[andrewzah]

As someone who has studied Korean and some Japanese, Japanese is definitely much more complex. If someone saw English had two syllabaries for the same exact sounds (like katakana and hiragana) they would probably also say it's unnecessarily complex. From a foreign perspective, lowercase and uppercase could be seen as arbitrarily complex.

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...

[thiht]

That's a very simplistic view of the criticism, and I completely disagree with it. Just because I think Japanese is complicated (not "unnecessarily", that of course doesn't make sense when talking about a natural language) doesn't mean I think it should be simplified, nor that I can't back my claims.

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.

[1_player]

That does not mean it's not complicated either.

[WildParser]

When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn.

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.

[earthboundkid]

WE USE THREE SYLLABLE SCRIPTS ALL THE TIME IN ENGLISH. lowercase and uppercase are two divergent evolutions of the roman alphabet that got shoved together for no particular reason. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝕬𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖒𝖔𝖗𝖊.

[anthk]

>SYLLABE

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.

[WildParser]

Are you an Engul user? Syllabic scripts for English are rare. Usually people use letters.

[anthk]

False. Uppercase and lowercase are spelt identically, so do the italics.

[earthboundkid]

LOL. You've been reading Roman letters for so long you've forgotten that A and a don't look even remotely alike.

[tanjtanjtanj]

Uppercase and lowercase are not spelt identically any more than katakana and hiragana are. q-Q, e-E, r-R, a-A, b-B and most of the rest are all completely different characters. Even m and M are not as straightforwardly connected as someone who learned a latin-character based language as their first language would think.

[anthk]

q-Q, e-E, a-A and b-B don't diverge a lot.

Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.

[tanjtanjtanj]

Thinking that e or a look anything like E or A is entirely down to your first language using the Latin alphabet (I'm making an assumption but I can't think of any other way they would look similar).

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.

[earthboundkid]

へ is virtually identical to ヘ visually. Most of the katakana and hiragana pairs derive from the same kanji and share visual similarities, especially if you’re familiar with Chinese calligraphy. So what?

[Jonnax]

What you've said is nonsensical.

A good example of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing"

The language is structured around those two syllable letters.

[WildParser]

Well, I haven't made that up myself - I got the idea from linguistics books - and from people that lived there for a long time. And those linguists were very clear that the language came first and then syllable script was bolted on.