What would be a situation in which the lack of kanji would cause genuine confusion?

6 comments

1. べんとうは はしで たべた。(with chopsticks/on the bridge/at the side (of the bento box))

2. Kanji help to disambiguate between homonyms. In speech, there’s usually a dialogue so if there’s confusion then the speaker can be asked to clarify things. With writing there’s way less opportunity for that so kanji helps there. No specific examples spring to mind, but I’m sure (i.e. have no idea if) the argument is sound.

3. かみはくろ paper/hair/god is black

4. It’s not exactly confusion but at first when I would play old games without Kanji I would find it a little more difficult and slower than with. It does get better though.

5. What’s probably more likely to happen is that kanji help avoid parsing errors since written Japanese doesn’t have spaces so in all-kana text it can be hard to figure out where one word ends and another starts, and sometimes that can create ambiguity.

6. It’s not like Japanese fundamentally wouldn’t be able to function like this, but there are a lot of small reasons like culture or homonyms. And think not about everyday conversations, but something more official like jurisprudence or something more technical. Would it really be ok to add a solid amount of vagueness and completely rework all documents?

   Partially such problem of learning kanji is overestimated. The problem lays not so much in amount natives need to learn, but entry level. Look at such situation, if we show new kanji to a native person, they wouldn’t be able to read it, right? More likely just to give some guesses, but not much more than that. It’s entry level, people need to know what it means. But look at such example in English, if I wrtie wtih a lto of misateks, is’t stlil mroe or lses redalbe, adn we eevn cna gte qutie dceetn at it. Why it’s so? Because we have memorized how words look like, we basically look at beginning, end and overall shape. Our fluent and fast reading is a result of memorizing tens of thousands of words, so we don’t spend much of time and focus on that. So when we speak about any native, we have thousands, potentially might be tens of thousands of hours spent on such unintentional learning and there is no difference here between English and Japanese. Look at kids, they are fluent and can talk very fast, but their reading speed is much slower and for a kid there is no much difference in amount of efforts needed to memorize the shape of a word like “Japanese” and the shape of 日本. It’s going to take years, more like 7-10 years, before they will be able to read with 200-300 words/minute speed (but also partially because they still develop, adults can usually learn to read fast in foreign languages significantly faster).

   Another side is that even if we use alphabet, not always we can predict it’s pronunciation. I mean, we kinda need to know that word like “know” is pronounced rather as “nou”, there is no much indication for that in letters alone. Overall it’s easier to guess, at least our attempts would be quite decent and more or less accurate, but sometimes using kanji wouldn’t be much different from using a combination of k-n-o-w letters for “nou” pronunciation to get a meaning like “have knowledge”.

   Summing it up, using kanji definitely makes it harder to learn, but actual difference when we look at any decent level of language knowledge becomes rather small.