[kyleamazza]

There's one reason (of many) that Japanese still uses kanji: it has a lot of homophones due to the lack of different sounds in the language (relative to Mandarin, which still has a lot of homophones). Even more, it has pitch intonation which differs the meaning of words. The simplicity of the sounds and grammar belies the difficulty of the language. There have been movements to try and romanize the Japanese language, and for the most part, none have caught on.

Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common

(Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)