I remember I watched once a video made in a Japanese apartment and there was a poster (presumably for children) where it was described using Latin letters how to pronounce your Japanese letters. Won’t switching to latin simply make it easier for children to learn to read and write? What are the advantages of your current writing system over Latin?
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That probably wasn’t a chart showing them how to pronounce kana, it was was to teach them how to pronounce the alphabet.
Like, really sit there and think for a second. Japanese kids, in Japan, who’s native language is Japanese are going to learn their own writing system and they’ll learn it by matching the sounds and words they already know to the kana. They don’t need to first learn the alphabet in order to learn kana.
And Japanese has an advantage of being able to convey more information in less characters because of kanji.
Purple – 紫
Caution – 注意
It’s also incredibly easy to speed read Japanese because important words, like your nouns, adjectives, verbs, tend to be written in kanji, so you can understand a lot of a sentence at a glance.
Japanese also has a fuck ton of homonyms and kanji also does a good job at keeping any confusion that could happen because of thatw
To be frank: this exact question is asked over and over and over.
And the answer is always: because it works fine as is.
Your post is very Eurocentric. What about the Latin alphabet would make it suitable for Japanese?
Some reasons why it wouldn’t work:
– Japanese has the syllable structure CV, which kana maps very nicely too. Japanese is not a phoneme-rich language.
– Japanese also has a large number of homophones, more so than Chinese due to the lack of tones. Kanji are essential to disambiguate words.
– Japan has historically been in the Sinosphere. Only recently has it oriented itself towards western European culture, starting in the late 19th century with the Meiji era. Kanji is literally a part of their culture. They would lose a large chunk of their history by switching writing systems.
In addition to what everyone else said, consider that among all these words there’s only three pronunciations (ignoring accent), one per paragraph:
交床 交渉 交睫 交鈔 公傷 公娼 公相 公称 公証 厚相 厚賞 口承 口誦 咬傷 哄笑 好尚 工匠 工商 工廠 巧匠 巧笑 後章 後証 校章 洪鐘 甲匠 紅晶 綱掌 翺翔 考証 行省 行粧 行賞 行障 講誦 講頌 鉱床 降将 高唱 高商 高声 高姓 高尚 高承 高蹤 黄鐘
公正 厚生 向性 坑井 好晴 孔聖 後世 後生 恒性 恒星 控制 攻勢 曠世 更正 更生 校正 構成 甦生 硬性 興盛 苟生 荒政 薨逝 行星 較正 高声 鴻声
世家 制可 勢家 声価 成果 斉家 正価 正課 正貨 清夏 清歌 生家 生花 盛夏 盛花 砌下 精華 聖化 聖歌 聖火 製菓 製靴 西夏 請暇 青果 青華
“Latin” isn’t a writing system, but I get your question.
It’s easiest to answer by means of an inversion: Why doesn’t English iron out its hundreds (thousands?) of weird spelling quirks?
My answer is cynical: English’s spelling serves to separate prestige writing from non-prestige writing. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the Roman alphabet can make a comprehensible stab at spelling ‘rhinoceros,’ but to spell it (and other, similarly rare words) correctly requires, or once required, a fairly comprehensive education.
Kanji serves a similar function in Japanese writing, though I’m sure it serves others, too. *The Tale of Genji* was written mostly, if not entirely, in kana, and no one complained about the homophones. What people did complain about is a national literary treasure’s being written in non-prestige, feminine orthography.
Olsou Ai gade æsk yuu e kwestshen bæk, wai iz Inglish speling sou komplikeited? Wai doun’t wii jʌst edopt e mor ækyuret orthogrefi thæt reprezents hau werds ar æksheli prenaunsd?. Wudn’t thæt meik it iizier for tshildren te lern tuu riid ænd rait? Wʌt ar thi edvæntejiz ov yuur curent speling sistem ouver e mor iizili lernabl wan?
To lose all connections to the past is too much. If all Japanese stop reading and writing in kana and kanji, all documents written in them would be highly unintelligible to newer generations. At this point, contemporary Japanese can not read the original 10th C scrolls handwritten with brush, but still can appreciate the texts. Probably 20th C manga books will become paper garbage.
Practically speaking switching over to alphabet-base writing would be cultural suicide in this sense. Japan will lose a huge part of its historical accessibility and intellectual continuity.
1) Japanese has a lot of homophones. Writing in Roman letters would make it hard to understand
2) Reading Kanji, once you know them, is incredibly fast. You can even glance at a paragraph and get the gist of what it says, just from looking at the characters. Even though it takes longer to learn, once you have it’s a pretty good system. Plus you can have different types of wordplay, for example using the characters for one word but pronouncing it like another one. Dual meaning in the characters in a way that’s unique.