As we all know the biggest downside of using kanji letters is the memorization of all the separate characters, and it can sometimes be hard even for the locals. The average Chinese person knows about 8000 characters while in Japan virtually every adult knows over 2000 characters, and a university educated person knows about 3000, and that’s a big difference. The “table of general standard Chinese characters” consists of 8105 characters, while to the joyo kanji list of Japan consists of 2136 characters, which is already high enough and that’s ridiculous.
Chinese hanzi characters usually have singular readings, while the majority of kanji in Japanese have many different readings, both onyomi and kunyomi readings being very common. I think this is the number one reason why Japan needs much less kanji to use than China, because they make more efficient use of kanji characters by having multiple readings and uses for them. In a way, you’re also learning 8000 things, just condensed into 2000. Therefore you’re ridding the need of having to use more kanji characters, and getting rid of complications. Do you guys think this is the reason?
Japan also makes great support to kanji with the hiragana and katakana alphabets, as they perfectly blend in with each other and all have different, unique purposes. Hiragana especially to my knowledge was invented to get rid of all the unnecessary, complex kanjis used at common words. Regardless of what the initial reason was, it greatly helped as it simplified things and sped things up. The blend of hiragana, katakana and kanji are also visually more appealing to the eyes rather than just kanji in my opinion. Kanji is like cheesecake. Having one is good, but eat to much and you start feeling sick.
Chinese is obviously different than Japanese, but Japanese at once was fully han letters too. And obviously i’m no expert, but i just wanted to share my opinion on it. Does Japan make better use of kanji characters than China does in your opinion?
8 comments
Japan makes good use of hiragana and katakana.
I wouldn’t say one country uses kanji better than the other, as there are benefits to both.
Nope.
How about English? 0 kanji. That’s infinitely better.
Kanji sometimes doesn’t make sense in Japanese. Honestly, whoever created kanji probably barely passed Chinese.
女の人in Chinese is 女人. の is redundant here, and wouldn’t you say you understand the latter?
徹底的な. I would say 的 and な approximates to the same meaning (in Chinese) and if I were to rewrite Japanese I would leave it as 徹底的 or 徹底な.
As we all know the biggest downside of using Latin alphabet letters is the memorization of all the separate words consists of sequence of letters which doesn’t represent the actual pronunciation, and it can sometimes be hard even for the locals. The average American person knows about 20000 words…
Jokes aside, Old Japanese didn’t invent writing system on their own. They imported the old Chinese writing system. But Chinese writing system is not phonogram so it was not really good at expressing old Japanese.
Old Japanese writings are more like translation from old Japanese to old Chinese… badly.
Suppose English doesn’t have a writing system and you imported the Japanese writing system, just like the situation old Japanese had, it’s like this.
You want to write “I play baseball.”, you write “野球 する”, then, you assign English reading to the Japanese words like this:
野球 -> baseball
する -> play
So it can be written but read like “野球(baseball) する(play)”
But due to the difference of grammar between English and Japanese, there are many issues. First, the subject “I” is missing. You have to guess from the context. word order is different(SVO vs SOV) so you have to get used to read it backwards. You invent a special character to indicate such a reading like ㆑(U+3191, notice it’s different from katakana letter レ), “野球 ㆑ する” Whenever you see a pattern of “A ㆑ B”, you read it backward, “B A” instead.
Old Japanese invented so many rules to express old Japanese in Chinese writing system. That’s what you refer to “Japanese at once was fully han letters too”. It’s more like poor man’s translation.
Now for the reason of Japanese kanjis has many readings. There are many onyomis because it capture the pronunciation of the different era of China. There are many kunyomis because a word means multiple meanings in different languages.
In English, “book” means “paper book” as well as “book a hotel”. Remember the invented writing system above. So a word has multiple kunyomis.
As for your question of “better”, I don’t consider either are better or worse.
If you think Kanji “fit” Japanese better than Chinese you probably haven’t spent much time studying both systems. It’s very obvious which language Chinese characters fit better from an ease of learning perspective. The Japanese did a remarkable job of adapting a writing system that was not at all intended for their language.
The Joyo kanji are only ~2200 characters, but they correspond to around 4000 joyo-condoned readings, and quite a lot more additional readings outside the Joyo list, and there are plenty of non-joyo Kanji that are quite common. Not to mention garaigo, ateji, etc.
I think a major reason why the Kanji have been reduced as much as they have is because they’re so arcane to learn even for natives.
Chinese doesn’t use a supplemental phonetic writing system (except in limited cases in Taiwan), and some Chinese people, like Cantonese speakers, actually use a very different system of pronunciation to read the same characters. So the systems serve different use cases in very different languages.
You can make an appeal to aesthetics, but that’s totally subjective.
The average Chinese person does NOT know 8000 characters. More like 3000-4000. Those general use lists are more for publishers and font makers, not an indication of what the average person knows.
Thanks for the post. This is certainly an intriguing topic. If you examine the languages form the perspective of “simplicity of learning/memorization,” perhaps this is true. As you said, Japanese requires a much smaller amount of kanji to be functional. But by that logic, why use kanji at all? Why not just stick with kana, or better yet, just use romaji? You memorize 26 Latin letters and that’s it, no need for 2000 complicated characters. Evidently, there’s a reason why kanji is still used in Japanese despite legitimate advocation of abandoning it and just going with kana.
Kanji/hanzi is a pictographic system, and it inherently conveys meaning. A person who does not speak English won’t be able to look at an English word and tell you what it means, and the same goes for a Japanese word written in kana, but 水 kind of looks like three flowing streams, 月 kind of looks like a crescent moon, and 一二三, well that’s just too obvious. Moreover, once you learn a few characters, your ability to figure out other characters greatly expand. 小 small on top of 大 big is 尖 sharp/pointy, 日 sun + 月 moon = 明 bright, three 木 woods together make a 森 forest, etc. Knowing more characters allows these fundamental pictographic meanings be understood. Kanji/hanzi has its inherent beauty and use, so “how many of them is required for the language to be functional” is not a good metric to determine how well they are used. Instead, the metric should be “how much is the beauty of the system conveyed.”
By this metric, things start to look different. Japan may have a more “efficient” use of kanji, but how much of it is at the cost of losing the inherent beauty of the system?
Firstly, many hanzi characters are designed to have partial indication of meaning and partial indication of pronunciation, making learning/memorizing its pronunciation much easier. For instance, 樱 is 木 + 婴 where 木 serves to indicate this character has something to do with wood and 婴 serves to indicate that it’s pronounced “ying.” This is evidently lost in Japanese when the pronunciations change, so learning kanji pronunciation becomes pure memorization.
Secondly, Japanese kanji readings range in syllable count but each Chinese hanzi reading is strictly one syllable, meaning hanzi pronunciation is more consistent and usually easier to learn. Even if I don’t know how 籭 is pronounced, I know that it is definitely a one-syllable reading that falls under one of the many (but not too many) possible readings. Even without kana, I can still learn its pronunciation easily by learning that it’s the same as 筛 shai. You mentioned that Japanese more readily gives kanji multiple readings, which helps the efficiency. However, this further sacrifices consistency and focus.
This difference in consistency means that poetry and song lyrics in Japanese, for instance, is much less capable of leaning on kanji-based wordplay/literary devices and primarily tend to use kana-based wordplay/literary devices. For instance, Chinese poetry formats, in limiting the number of hanzi, also limit the number of syllables. So it looks fantastic:
千山鸟飞绝
万径人踪灭
孤舟蓑笠翁
独钓寒江雪
Japanese poems, despite limiting the number of syllables, don’t have this consistent look because kanji might have multiple syllables. That’s only one of many examples of literary devices that can only be done with Chinese hanzi and doesn’t properly translate to Japanese kanji. Of course, there are also literary devices and wordplay that are unique to Japanese, but those are almost exclusively kana-based, not kanji-based.
Lastly, whether or not the three writing systems working together is better than one I find to be subjective. On one hand, they are each more specialized at their purposes. Just looking at a word written in katakana, without even knowing what it means, you can tell it’s a foreign word, which can’t be said when transliterating words into Chinese. However, at the same time, it’s jarring for non-native speakers to constantly shifts between three different writing systems when Chinese is, once again, more consistent.
Oh, also, regarding the transliterating foreign words problem you brought up in the comments, I think it’s safe to say that Japanese is usually better at transliterating proper nouns but not necessarily loan words. Look at ケーキ and you know how it’s pronounced, even in its original language (kind of). But look at 蛋糕 and you know it’s a dessert made from eggs. So each has its own merits. Even with names and proper nouns, Coca Cola is transliterated as 可口可乐 where 可口 means “tasty” and 可乐 means “bringing joy.” and the name Emily can be transliterated into 爱美丽 (“loving beauty”), these are still transliterations that maintain the pronunciation, but they also give the words meaning to make them more easily memorable, something that katakana can’t do.
Congratulations, this is the stupidest question I’ve ever seen.
How is it even possible to answer? These are two separate languages.
Does English make better use of Latin characters than Spanish? Or French? Or Vietnamese? You absolute imbecile.
A little knowledge in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing.
Literally, what is the best possible answer you could get from this inane fucking question? You add nothing to the great human story.
China makes better use.
My take: I prefer Chinese exactly because one character does not have multiple readings. This enables you to read words that you don’t know yet. Example: have is 有you and name is 名ming. If you see 有名 how do you read? Youming. Japanese not having a single reading annoys me. I can’t guess the reading.