[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.