[lbotos]

I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese.

I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps:

たまねぎ 玉ねぎ

いつつ 五つ

In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying to convey imo)

[latentsea]

I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean.

I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does.

With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think you know how to read it correctly, can never quite be sure, look it up every time as a consequence and are surprised often enough at the reading that you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.

In contrast I was able to score 50% on the reading section of TOPIK II after only 4 months of study.

So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.

[lbotos]

Thanks for clarifying. I don't disagree that Korean does seem easier, but I still think you are slightly confusing what the GP is trying to say.

I've never seen "仲人" before but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of person.

https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%B2%E4%BA%BA

仲 go-between (which I never saw before but I knew the radicals as "person middle" but didn't know what they were combined, but this one made great logical sense)

人 person

So while I can't "read" it (in Japanese) I can know what it means pretty confidently as kanji very regularly mean the same thing in compound words.

If I saw "なこうど" I'd have no idea because those hiragana don't mean anything to me until I learn the meaning.

Am I making sense? Like the first time I saw 花火 I knew "flower fire" and was able to guess firework.

same with 大人 being adult.

I'm not saying you are wrong that Korean is easier -- I'm saying, learning kanji can make it easier to understand a lot of meaning with never actually being able to "read" the words. and the reading is absolutely hard because of kunyomi and onyomi etc etc.

[latentsea]

Being able to guess the meaning of new words was neat earlier on in the Japanese journey, but in the end the problem of "gah but the how hell do you actually read this?" was a greater detriment than that was a benefit.

In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially what it means, but if not, then I could simply opt to move on having collected an instance of seeing the word. I might then later hear it elsewhere, or perhaps see it again and if I encounter it enough times I can get curious and look it up.

I could do the same thing with Kanji except I'd have to look it up anyway to be confident I was reading it correctly. Else I just don't know what the word is, so its harder to mentally file it anywhere in my brain. I found this lead to a very long-tail of pain when reading Japanese that didn't abate even when I got up to around 17k vocab in Anki after which I just said bugger it.

So, on balance I prefer the set of problems that no Kanji poses over the set of problems that Kanji poses.

[vunderba]

I vastly prefer the ability to potentially infer the rough meaning of an unrecognized word, then the ability to pronounce it.

As an ESL CELTA certified teacher for years, their rubric also seems to back this up in order of relative importance: it's meaning, then form, then finally pronunciation.

[latentsea]

I don't know if a rubric for English is as applicable to Japanese.

You're just trading one set of problems for another. Those aren't even problems English has.

[jack1243star]

> I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean.

Me too! Nice to talk with someone with a similar background :)

> you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.

Native speakers don't magically gain the ability to read correctly every new word. So it is fine to hit the dictionary every now and then!

In the case of 仲人, I can guessimate 仲 (naka) and 人 (hito), but recall that 素人 and 玄人 are pronouced <long vowel>~uto. I would try to pronounce it as nakouto (the correct spelling is nakoudo). So people do gain a heuristic for reading.

Also Kanji provides a mnemonic device after learning the meaning of the word. (One who makes/improves 仲).

>So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.

Yes, unless you're Chinese or Japanese speaker ;)