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by minmax2020
788 days ago
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I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?) I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing. As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance. |
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It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces.
>For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車)
1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese).
2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-)
As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English.