So when you just listen to the chorus you just hear “ai chicki chicki ban ban.” But if you look at the lyrics it uses different kanjis for the “ai” parts.
Ai can basically mean a lot of things but without the context kanjis provide it would be hard to tell.
Any thoughts on this?
4 comments
There are a few tongue twisters that’d be good examples
すもももももももものうち
They slapped different kanji onto the lyrics for fun. It’s not actually an attempt to write certain words with a particular meaning. “ai chicki chicki ban ban” doesn’t mean anything.
Did you know that it is originally a [Hungarian song?](https://youtu.be/CRjLbePQg1o)
Chinese characters can be used to keep homonyms apart yes, but there’s no doubt in my mind that profficient speakers of Japanese would be very capable of reading all-平仮名 or romanized text with spaces so long as they be used to it with little extra difficulty.
This is in fact the case with many older games that rendered everything in “片仮名”, sometimes even without spaces, and while it takes a short while to become accustomed to it, it becomes easy to read quite quickly.
The reason text without Chinese characters is hard to read is simply because one is not used to it. Æs æn eksâmpèl, hír ìz ē sentèns ìn ìngliš rìtèn ìn ē komplītli fonemìk orþografi. Obviously in a vacuum this should be easier to read and superior, but when one not yet be used to it, it is harder than what one is used to, and that cannot be underestimated.