[petodo]

> Having a working knowledge of German, Italian, French, English was fun, valuable, and normal especially when doing business in diverse countries and with diverse peoples.

That's nice with all these very similar languages using latin alphabet and now try it with Chinese characters and tones in China or at least kanji/hiragana without tones in Japan. Characters are huge barrier when learning the language, because you don't see words to memorize everywhere you look, you see just bunch of strokes. I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin as Vietnamese did (and Chinese intended, but didn't finish), it would remove huge barrier in communication (and also tehcnologically wise, after all most of the Chinese already write pinyin anyway on smartphones/computers, which just transcribe their pinyin back to characters) and people would realize Chinese is actually very simple language, where you don't have tenses, plural, etc.

As someone speaking English/German and my other two mother languages I can still understand some Italian, French or Dutch (which is basically English mixed with German by drunk sailor), because of how similar these languages are, so picking up some of them would be very easy compared to Chinese/Japanese (well at least Japanese has much more loaned words from English than Chinese).

[amrocha]

Do you actually speak Chinese or Japanese? Because either of those languages with phonetic characters would be a nightmare imo.

The characters actually make it easier to learn the language imo, and anyone who claims otherwise hasn't actually tried to learn seriously

[skhr0680]

Vietnam and Korea have mostly dispensed with Chinese characters and are doing fine

[tsukikage]

Strangely enough, the official languages there are Vietnamese and Korean respectively, not Chinese or Japanese.

[eloisant]

I don't know about Vietnamese but you can really make a parallel between Korean and Japanese.

Korean was using kanji the same way Japanese are using them now, and Japan could totally switch to hiragana only like Korea went for hangul. I've had some Japanese friends who were advocated for hiragana only, and were writing (on Twitter or blog posts) in hiragana only.

Yes, once you know kanji it's easier to read that full hiragana, but there is a point to be made about how learning kanji is difficult. Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

[soraminazuki]

Retro Japanese games displayed text in all katakana because of technical limitations. But it didn't stick, for good reasons. It's incredibly hard to read. Like, imagine reading an ASCII text in hexadecimal representation. That's how it feels when reading a sufficiently long text in all hiragana or katakana.

Abolishing kanjis might've worked for the Korean language, but Korean isn't Japanese. They're entirely different languages. Funnily though, that's something that the Unicode Consortium also needs a reminder on [1].

> Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

This is an exaggeration. Native Japanese speakers in middle school would have no problem reading common kanjis in real life. A high schooler would be able to read as well as a grownup.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

[Tainnor]

It would work fine. Japanese people can read Kana-only text - foreigners often can't because they aren't as used to it, but Japanese children read books mostly in Hiragana and they know what things sound like because they speak the language long before they know how to read it.

[thablackbull]

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

Perhaps Americans would take the first step and switch from imperial to metric, then we can discuss and tell everyone what to do.

[petodo]

Yes, they should, but not sure how is it relevant to what I WISHED for, I didn't tell anyone what to do and I'm clearly not an American.

[HKH2]

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

That's like wishing English would switch to IPA because English spelling is wildly inconsistent - which English would you choose? People who speak different dialects can still understand each other using written Chinese, whereas Pinyin is for Mandarin only.

[petodo]

almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters, it's just redundant at this point, part of tradition without practical meaning

[HKH2]

> almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters

Cantonese speakers don't use Pinyin.