[jerf]

People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji.

It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.

And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.

I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.

[James_K]

You'd be surprised how much staying power these things have. The nation and its language are two concepts inherently intertwined. Take the case of Welsh in Wales. It was an almost dead language that no one spoke, but as soon as the Welsh got the ability to self-govern, they enacted laws to mandate all documents and road signs were available in Welsh, required it to be taught in schools, etc. It's very difficult to kill a language in a democratic state because it's a very bad look to oppose laws that "protect the nation's culture". The people who want these things are endlessly pandered to as a result.

[jcranmer]

Welsh is generally highlighted as the example of a successful language revitalism movement, but it's also one of the rare examples of such movements succeeding. By contrast, you can look at Irish--where the need for the language that wasn't English was seen as absolutely essential as part of the (successful) revolution and independence movement--and see that the language revitalism there is more or less a failure. A century after independence, the number of L1 speakers of Irish has gone down, and I believe the Irish government still conducts most of its business using English (despite English officially being the lesser of the official languages) since so few members of government are sufficiently proficient in Irish.

[amrocha]

Kanji is never going away. I struggle to believe anyone who fully mastered kanji would say something like this.

Kanji is not just “harder”. It’s better.

[jerf]

I've studied kanji to some degree. I'm not a "master", but I am aware of the way it resolves a lot of ambiguities in Japanese.

But that does not on its own mean that Japanese couldn't evolve out of Kanji. It is not the case that if Kanji goes away, the entire rest of the language MUST stay static. It in fact would not. It would begin a multi-decade process of adjustment to the new issues.

It has happened before in other contexts, and it will happen again. There's a lot of signs that Chinese is on the verge of such a change (on a decadal time scale), which carries somewhat different baggage, but roughly the same amount of it.

What really throws the wrench into the whole thing is computers, and I don't just mean that it will simply speed up or slow down such a change, but that it could send all of this flying out in an entirely new direction. If we're all wearing augmented reality goggles full time in 20 years, what will happen to ideograms if every ideogram you see comes with floating pronunciation guides, and your googles can also translate phonetic spellings transparently in real time back into kanji/ideograms? Could languages like English start growing something like ideograms, presumably descended from modern-day emoji, if computers erase the disadvantages of emoji that cause languages to largely go alphabetic thousands of years ago?

What I absolutely do know is this: In 50 years, no language will be the same as it is today. Guessing what the changes will be, especially in a rapidly evolving novel landscape, is really hard. I don't think kanji/ideograms being seriously diminished is off the table.

[James_K]

Why is this if you don't mind me asking? I thought that hiragana could already write all the words. What makes kanji so much better than that?

[Tor3]

In addition to the phoneme problem, it's about readability. Yes, really. The first time I saw わたし written as 私 I just about instantly remembered the latter (it is, after all, used constantly in writing). That kanji is much easier and faster to read than the corresponding hiragana, and it was like that from way back when I had just started learning Japanese. I still have a way to go.. learning a language at my age turns out to be quite slower than when I was younger.. but everything is just easier to read, as soon as one's able to read something in kanji instead of hiragana. The latter is hard and slow to read, even though it's such a simple character system to learn.

[fennecbutt]

Nah as someone that learnt it for 3 years, did a 6 month exchange and then stopped after that I totally disagree.

Not only are kanji needlessly complex because of history, there's also extra work like stroke order (another needlessly "important" thing).

Hira/kata is so much easier, but I ended up giving up the language after I both realised that I wouldn't live there and that they're just romanising so much anyways.

[amrocha]

This is equivalent of saying you studied engineering for 6 months and turns out arches are useless, you can just get rid of arches in all bridges and nothing bad will happen.

[Analemma_]

Japanese is very syllable-poor and so there are a colossal number of homonyms and homophones. In speech a lot of these are distinguished by tone and pronunciation, but in writing kanji is the only way to tell them apart. Reading kana-only Japanese is not impossible, but it's a fast path to a headache and leads to huge numbers of ambiguities even in the best case.

[int_19h]

This just indicates that kana orthography is not phonemic enough; but there's no reason why it couldn't be improved to cover tones etc.

[amrocha]

The issue is not the writing system. Japanese phonetics are extremely simple. There’s nothing you can do about that.

[Tor3]

Japanese doesn't have tones, it has pitch accent, and pitch accent applies to words, not phonemes. You would have to invent a system where pitch accent could be indicated for each word. The difference between 橋 (bridge) and 箸 (chopsticks).. the pitch accent is slightly different. But written the same in Hiragana: はし So there would have to be something (wavy line above the text?) to indicate pitch accent. Not sure how that should be done. And then there are the words with little or no pitch accent difference, only context.. in kanji they're different, would be the same in hiragana, so how do you encode that.. compromises would have to be made. I'm sure people have tried to come up with something, somewhere. Maybe.

But then again.. it's that other problem: Reading when there's kanji is much faster. Even for beginners. If you don't understand a word in kanji then it doesn't work, but as soon as you understand it it's way easier and faster to read.

[akavi]

> You would have to invent a system where pitch accent could be indicated for each word

Really not hard to do. A symbol on the syllable bearing the pitch accent would solve the issue

> And then there are the words with little or no pitch accent difference, only context

What's happened is that effectively a written "shorthand" has emerged that has evolved somewhat separately from how people speak. Losing kanji would mean losing this shorthand, in favor of writing more closely akin to the way people actually speak, but this is how the vast majority of written languages work. Preserving this shorthand seems like thin gruel to justify the complexity of kanji.

[sparkie]

> I'm sure people have tried to come up with something, somewhere.

Perhaps related is the abjad used in Arabic and Farsi. Vowels are written with diacritics above or below the main part of the character, which represents a consonant. However, in modern Arabic, the vowels are rarely written and are inferred from context.

The bigger problem for Japanese is the absence of spacing between words. Even if you write everything in hiragana with spacing, it's significantly slower to read than when kanji is present without spacing. The mixing of kana and kanji usually provides a hint as to where word boundaries are, because there are few cases where kana is followed by kanji in the same word (eg お and ご), and kana which follows the kanji are most often a continuation of the word (okurigana) or a particle. Some words are usually written in kana despite having kanji available, and their presence can sometimes make it more difficult to read because they might look ambiguous with a particle or okurigana, and you have to figure out from context what was intended, which slows down reading slightly.

[James_K]

I can't help but feel these languages are just silly, or at least very badly designed. Maybe in the future, when AI is good enough to translate everything in real time, we will just find a language that is best and teach children that instead. It would save a lot of headaches, and probably also cure dyslexia.

[Tor3]

To call a language silly is.. silly. I don't know Chinese. But for a person like me, Japanese is incredible. It's so extremely logical. Exceptions are almost non-existing. Sentences are modular. Etc. I love it, as a person with a programmer's mind. It has very few phonemes and that's one reason it's hard to "fix" the writing system, but that's also one of its good points, for someone learning the language.

As for "translate in real time", that won't happen because from Japanese to English it would mean to translate before the sentence is done, knowing the intention of the speaker before the speaker says anything. For the simple reason that in Japanese the verb comes at the end while in languages like English it's typically the second word. Using an AI wouldn't be any better than when I used to translate for my wife and the other way around. It works but is hardly satisfactory for anything more than occasionally (speak, wait to hear the translation, speak back, ditto).

A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.

As for dyslexia.. I don't see the connection. Dyslexia is a problem of reading and writing, and it exists independent of the language, and also the writing system (it has been sometimes claimed that Japanese children are less affected by dyslexia than people learning Latin-based languages, and I for some time kind of thought so too.. but I have since seen multiple cases of dyslexia related to Japanese as well, it's the exact same problem)

[James_K]

> it exists independent of the language

Rates of dyslexia are much higher in countries with less phonetic spelling systems. The general conclusion from this is that, while dyslexia may exist at equal rates in countries with phonetic spelling, its effects are diminished to the point where many individuals with it can read unimpaird.

> A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.

I never claimed it would. A delay of a few seconds between speech and translation is acceptable, much the same way actual translators do it.

[smallnamespace]

This is not a reason for Japanese people to keep Kanji, but Chinese tourists can read Japanese at about 50% comprehension level just due to Kanji without knowing at all how the words are pronounced in Japanese.

[amrocha]

Another commenter pointed out the ambiguity in Japanese phonetics which is very true.

Imo, the biggest efficiency gain from kanji comes from reading. Meaning is grasped instantly because you don’t need to worry about phonetics. Pronunciation follows a general set of rules, such that even when encountering new words you can guess at how they’re pronounced, while grasping meaning at a glance.

To compare it to latin languages, the difference is like going from reading everything out loud to reading silently.

[fennecbutt]

How does pronunciation follow any rules? There are none that I know of where a given kanji can have several meanings completely independent of one another, there is no structure there.

I'd agree with you if you'd said Korean, where the makeup of the character has direct rules for pronouncing it, if you learn the simple rules then you can read any Korean character - this is the middle ground they should drop kanji for, imo

[amrocha]

The main radical in a character usually dictates how it’s read. General language familiarity tells you which of the readings to use. That’s accurate most of the time, and when it isn’t there’s furigana on the word.

For example, 青 is read as “sei”, and characters that use it as a radical are either read as “sei” or “jou”, such as in 情熱(jounetsu) or 清潔(seiketsu). So when you run into a rare character in a word that uses this same radical, you can assume that it uses a standard reading. For example, the word for fairy, 精霊, isn’t one you run into very often, but when you do you can assume that it’s read as “seirei” based on the radicals, and you’d be correct.

I’m explaining this in length here but with native level proficiency this process happens instantly, as you’re reading.

Japanese should not drop kanji. The only people that think that are foreigners that failed at learning the language. This is not a shared sentiment among japanese speakers.