Always been curious about this and hoping to get answers to this. Korean stopped using hanja just like vietnam stopped using chu-nom, but japanese still retains it.
Just cultural inertia. It’s not easy to force a change to a writing system because of how many people already know the current system and how much material is already there in the current system. It’s why so many inefficient and cumbersome writing systems stick around for as long as they do.
It’s not a coincidence that major reforms of the Japanese writing system were done in the Meiji Restoration and after WW2, that Vietnam gave up their characters after the Communists took power, and that the Chinese characters were simplified in the wake of the Communists taking power. That’s mostly when you see big changes to writing systems, when there’s some major shakeup in the societal order.
Of course kanji can be dispensed with; people speak to each other just fine without kanji, and you can buy audiobooks in Japan. All-kana writing is uncomfortable because people aren’t used to it, but native speakers have no real trouble with it. It’s just that changing the writing system is quite difficult to pull off and there’s no cultural will by Japan to do it.
A combination of several reasons. One being that Hiragana and Katakana were derived from Kanji and so there wasn’t much disharmony when used together. Hangul on the other hand is a relatively new writing system with no direct connection to Hanja and therefore clashed at times (like in poetry for example).
The other thing is Japanese has less vowels and consonants than Korean and there’s no method of expressing tones (like Vietnamese, which also used Chinese characters before abandoning it). This would result in many homonyms and accessory words to distinguish them, resulting in long run on sentences.
Another reason is that people just see it as part of the culture and not interested in getting rid of it. There are lots of people with the same name but with different kanji, it’s an essential part of many wordplay and comedy, and towards the end of the year we wonder what the “Kanji of the Year” will be.
There were some movements to phase out kanji in Japan in the past but they were always a fringe group
Look at it from another angle: every English speaker knows that English spelling makes no sense. Why can’t they fix it?
Japanese without Kanji is a nightmare, and would be very hard to read.
When computer systems were only capable of reliably using romaji, everyone who had thoughts about Kanji got rid of them, as Japanese is nearly illegible without it, because Japanese people do not agree on where words break.
So every time you got an email from a new person, you had to learn how they divided things into words, and store that, so you could read their emails going forward.
There is a reason why fax machines are still in use in Japan, and it comes from the trauma of not being able to use Kanji to write the language.
This is one of the reasons why people who whinge about romaji use in this sub make me twitch. Full Kanji OK, but that’s too hard on many learners, and all kana is as illegible as all romaji. And everyone can read romaji, so romaji it is.
Also, and in general, making all of your historical writing impossible to read is not such a good thing. If Japanese stopped being written in Kanji, most of the historical signage would be impossible for most people to read.
There is media out there that is hiragana only, and let me tell you… it is a NIGHTMARE even when there are spaces.
Kanji makes splitting words, and telling apart homophones an instantaneous process.
It’s also not as hard to learn as it seems.
Japanese exists in such a way where reading it without kanji is exhausting. Hence, those who take the time to learn it won’t ever argue for its abolition.
“Rid” of kanji? It’s a blessing.
I don’t know why.. maybe they just don’t want to?
Reading Japanese texts without Kanji will be a nightmare since we are so used to it now.I have a children’s book that’s 95% kana, and it was so difficult to read.
But thinking about it now – is it possible to get used to a world of Japanese without Kanji if none existed when we had started learning, much in the way Korean is? Of course now we write Japanese without spaces, but it’s not inconceivable to introduce spacing with the adoption of Kana-only writing.
Don’t get me wrong – despite struggling so much with Kanji, I love it very much now and am learning calligraphy. But just thinking if it would have been possible to do without it.
I started learning Korean on my own, and despite my initial misgivings, it does get quite easy to read and to decipher word meanings once I’m used to it.One key difference between Hangul and Kana is that even though they are both phonetic representation of a word, a block of Hangul can represent ‘an idea’ whereas it’s not the case in Kana, and somehow, for me at least, this makes it easier to read. For example, the word 食堂 is しょくどう in Kana, vs 식당 in Hangul.
I only hate the kanji that I don’t know. But I love every single kanji that I know, since they make it so much easier to read and to figure out the meaning of new words. I also have a hard time to learn words that have no kanji. So even if kanji is a pain in the butt sometimes (quite often…) I would probably quit learning Japanese if they were removed. Can’t imagine ever having a chance of success of learning the language without it.
Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet.
生 せい 생
性 せい 성
製 せい 제
精 せい 정
勢 せい 세
Korean was always in a much better position to be able to remove hanja because there is so much more variety in how they are read that there are far fewer words that sound the same. That is in addition to the reasons others have given, the biggest of which in my view is that there is simply no reason to do so. Japan has a 99% literacy rate. The real question is, why would they?
Getting rid of hanja has been going on for long, long centuries. As for VN they too used to toy with their own kanji (which they used alongside the purely Chinese ones) but then decided to altogether get rid of them about a century ago and it worked. As for Japan kanji-banare (漢字離れ) in more casual Japanese (even written) is a de facto reality, despite being a slow process. Also, notice the prevalence of furigana.
12 comments
Just cultural inertia. It’s not easy to force a change to a writing system because of how many people already know the current system and how much material is already there in the current system. It’s why so many inefficient and cumbersome writing systems stick around for as long as they do.
It’s not a coincidence that major reforms of the Japanese writing system were done in the Meiji Restoration and after WW2, that Vietnam gave up their characters after the Communists took power, and that the Chinese characters were simplified in the wake of the Communists taking power. That’s mostly when you see big changes to writing systems, when there’s some major shakeup in the societal order.
Of course kanji can be dispensed with; people speak to each other just fine without kanji, and you can buy audiobooks in Japan. All-kana writing is uncomfortable because people aren’t used to it, but native speakers have no real trouble with it. It’s just that changing the writing system is quite difficult to pull off and there’s no cultural will by Japan to do it.
[https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-Japanese-still-use-the-Kanji-Chinese-characters-when-it-is-so-difficult-to-learn](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-Japanese-still-use-the-Kanji-Chinese-characters-when-it-is-so-difficult-to-learn)
A combination of several reasons. One being that Hiragana and Katakana were derived from Kanji and so there wasn’t much disharmony when used together. Hangul on the other hand is a relatively new writing system with no direct connection to Hanja and therefore clashed at times (like in poetry for example).
The other thing is Japanese has less vowels and consonants than Korean and there’s no method of expressing tones (like Vietnamese, which also used Chinese characters before abandoning it). This would result in many homonyms and accessory words to distinguish them, resulting in long run on sentences.
Another reason is that people just see it as part of the culture and not interested in getting rid of it. There are lots of people with the same name but with different kanji, it’s an essential part of many wordplay and comedy, and towards the end of the year we wonder what the “Kanji of the Year” will be.
There were some movements to phase out kanji in Japan in the past but they were always a fringe group
Look at it from another angle: every English speaker knows that English spelling makes no sense. Why can’t they fix it?
Japanese without Kanji is a nightmare, and would be very hard to read.
When computer systems were only capable of reliably using romaji, everyone who had thoughts about Kanji got rid of them, as Japanese is nearly illegible without it, because Japanese people do not agree on where words break.
So every time you got an email from a new person, you had to learn how they divided things into words, and store that, so you could read their emails going forward.
There is a reason why fax machines are still in use in Japan, and it comes from the trauma of not being able to use Kanji to write the language.
This is one of the reasons why people who whinge about romaji use in this sub make me twitch. Full Kanji OK, but that’s too hard on many learners, and all kana is as illegible as all romaji. And everyone can read romaji, so romaji it is.
Also, and in general, making all of your historical writing impossible to read is not such a good thing. If Japanese stopped being written in Kanji, most of the historical signage would be impossible for most people to read.
There is media out there that is hiragana only, and let me tell you… it is a NIGHTMARE even when there are spaces.
Kanji makes splitting words, and telling apart homophones an instantaneous process.
It’s also not as hard to learn as it seems.
Japanese exists in such a way where reading it without kanji is exhausting. Hence, those who take the time to learn it won’t ever argue for its abolition.
“Rid” of kanji? It’s a blessing.
I don’t know why.. maybe they just don’t want to?
Reading Japanese texts without Kanji will be a nightmare since we are so used to it now.I have a children’s book that’s 95% kana, and it was so difficult to read.
But thinking about it now – is it possible to get used to a world of Japanese without Kanji if none existed when we had started learning, much in the way Korean is? Of course now we write Japanese without spaces, but it’s not inconceivable to introduce spacing with the adoption of Kana-only writing.
Don’t get me wrong – despite struggling so much with Kanji, I love it very much now and am learning calligraphy. But just thinking if it would have been possible to do without it.
I started learning Korean on my own, and despite my initial misgivings, it does get quite easy to read and to decipher word meanings once I’m used to it.One key difference between Hangul and Kana is that even though they are both phonetic representation of a word, a block of Hangul can represent ‘an idea’ whereas it’s not the case in Kana, and somehow, for me at least, this makes it easier to read. For example, the word 食堂 is しょくどう in Kana, vs 식당 in Hangul.
I only hate the kanji that I don’t know. But I love every single kanji that I know, since they make it so much easier to read and to figure out the meaning of new words. I also have a hard time to learn words that have no kanji. So even if kanji is a pain in the butt sometimes (quite often…) I would probably quit learning Japanese if they were removed. Can’t imagine ever having a chance of success of learning the language without it.
Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet.
生 せい 생
性 せい 성
製 せい 제
精 せい 정
勢 せい 세
Korean was always in a much better position to be able to remove hanja because there is so much more variety in how they are read that there are far fewer words that sound the same. That is in addition to the reasons others have given, the biggest of which in my view is that there is simply no reason to do so. Japan has a 99% literacy rate. The real question is, why would they?
Getting rid of hanja has been going on for long, long centuries. As for VN they too used to toy with their own kanji (which they used alongside the purely Chinese ones) but then decided to altogether get rid of them about a century ago and it worked. As for Japan kanji-banare (漢字離れ) in more casual Japanese (even written) is a de facto reality, despite being a slow process. Also, notice the prevalence of furigana.