[ehnto]

I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native materials pretty quickly drop furigana.

Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.

[throwaway2037]

About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to (essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to read Hebrew text without the dots.

In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.

[sandbach]

Those vowel diacritics in Semitic languages are called matres lectionis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis

[mcmoor]

I thought he's talking about what in Arabic is called harakat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_diacritics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics

[bertylicious]

They are called diacritics.