[cubefox]

Oh, I found the apparently quite limited number of Japanese syllables interesting, and indeed:

> The basic units of the Japanese writing system are syllables. Standard Japanese uses 100 distinct syllables. Of these, 5 are single vowels, 62 are consonants combined with a vowel, and 53 are consonants combined with 'y' plus a vowel. [1]

Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.

It's interesting that assigning syllables characters isn't really practical in Germanic/Romance languages, as there are far more than in Japanese. One source cites 15.000 out of 100.000 possible for English [2]. It's actually cool that someone came up with the consonant/vowel distinction, ages ago, which saves tons of characters, and which proved to be a big advantage (mostly over logographic writing) when the printing press took Europe by storm, while it flopped in China and Korea [3].

[1] http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/japan/japanworkbook/language/l...

[2] https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/courses/spsci/iss/week7.php

[3] https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-didnt-china-become-the-w...

[thethirdone]

> Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.

Its somewhat shocking to me that you are not aware of hiragana and katakana or at the very least romanji. They are mentioned in [1] in the writing section.

From [1]:

> Kanji : Thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese writing, each with a different meaning

> Hiragana : 46 "smooth" style phonetic symbols used for inflected endings, grammatical particles and other Japanese words

> Katakana : 46 "block" style phonetic symbols used for writing foreign loan words, foreign names, and for emphasis

[cubefox]

Yeah, but those never replaced kanji apparently. So Japanese people always had to learn ~thousands of characters instead a hundred.

[Larrikin]

It's not either or, they are used together. Once you become even an intermediate learner of the language lack of kanji actually makes it more difficult to read text that is just in kana. Japanese and Chinese can also present the interesting problem for a learner of perfectly understanding what a written sentence means without having the ability to actually say it out loud.

Also excluding names, there are less than two thousand kanji in modern Japanese. Still a lot but not some insurmountable task.

[drtgh]

>Also excluding names, there are less than two thousand kanji in modern Japanese. Still a lot but not some insurmountable task.

The problem with these kanji is that each one has several possible pronunciations/sounds. That, and writing without spaces, increases the difficulty to the maximum. You cannot read a word without previously knowing it, only sightly guess if you have a high level of knowledge and try good luck.

Japanese people can not read old texts in their own language due this.