[felipeerias]

Japanese has fewer sounds and a lot more homophones than English, so purely phonetic writing becomes a lot more ambiguous. Children grow out of it at an early age.

Furthermore, kanji often allows the reader to skip phonetics altogether, because the symbol itself carries the meaning. It’s a bit like how people understand emojis without having to make a sound for them in their heads.

As a result, the Japanese are able to read very fast in their native language, so switching to a different system would carry significant drawbacks.