[jack1243star]

> One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?

Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it.

> Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read.

It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often.

> Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.

I'd agree that manga use of furigana helps (perhaps school-aged readers) reading, but furigana in novels are standard tools in the language that authors can use to achieve some effects that is hard to describe to non-speakers.

[latentsea]

Sometimes furigana can be used artistically,sure, but that's the exception to the rule and it's by and large a reading aide in the vast majority of cases, and the inclusion of it in novels aimed at adults indicates that without it the author expects a certain percentage of readers may struggle with how to read the Kanji otherwise.

Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji you at times otherwise wouldn't be able to.

If you come across a word you don't know as either a native speaker of English or Korean, you can at least sound it out, which ups the probability you can connect it with a word you've heard before, otherwise since you know how to type it out it's trivial to look it up in a dictionary. If you come across a word you don't know in Japanese as a native speaker and there's no furigana it's a guessing game. The meaning is slightly more obvious to you, so you might be able to guess, but if you can't guess and you care to know and the word is in print then looking it up becomes a bit more of a pain.

Korean didn't completely lose the mutual intelligibility aspect entirely since the underlying pronunciation of the words still remains and can be used to correctly guess the word in a lot of cases. Like 시간 and 時間 as an example, but there's many, many words I've been able to guess in Korean based off knowing Japanese. I was able to score 50% on TOPIK II reading exam after only having studied Korean for 4 months in large part because of this.

[fenomas]

> Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji

This just isn't true. Even most native JP speakers agree that kanji are oppressively hard to learn and remember, so if it were feasible to get by with kana alone, then at least some native speakers would do it in some contexts. But outside of language learning it's virtually never done, and there's a reason for that.

Also, I think you're overlooking that Chinese and Korean have a lot more vowels/tones to work with than Japanese. There are a lot of Chinese-derived compound words that are homophones in Japanese but not elsewhere.

[latentsea]

So how are homophones in Japanese understood when expressed verbally?

How much trouble do you actually have with them?

[numpad0]

"Science" and "chemistry" are homophones in Japanese: We have special disambiguation reading for "chemistry", bake gaku, used only when misunderstanding is suspected.

There are numerous other examples. Those are all unnatural sounding, mostly industry/field specific, and not replacing the main homophone readings.

1: https://dailyportalz.jp/application/files/thumbnails/width64...