Kanji has always been a big complaint about written Japanese, not just for foreign students but even some native Japanese speakers as well, including some prominent Japanese language reformers at the turn of the last century.
I personally love kanji, and I also recognise that completely stripping kanji out of Japanese text would be disasterous for reading comprehension, perhaps outweighing the pedagogical benefits of kanji omission. As a kind of compromise experiment, I thought about what written Japanese might have been like had it followed the historical trajectory of written Korean: from texts written entirely in Han characters (cf. Man’yougana), to characters for native and Sinitic morphemes interspersed with grammatical hangul (particles and conjugations), to characters strictly for Sinitic morphemes (cf. on’yomi), and finally to pure hangul (with the occasional characters injected for disambiguation).
The sample provided here is of the aforementioned penultimate stage: kanji exclusively for on’yomi. As in Korean mixed script, traditional characters are employed, and spaces are provided to ease lexical boundary parsing.
The content of the sample was taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Ultimately, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that learning only on’yomi for kanji would offload a massive pedagogical burden for students of Japanese, domestic and foreign alike, while maintaining the chief benefit of preserving kanji use, as Sinoxenic morphemes have a far narrower range of possible syllables than do native Japanese morphemes. Furthermore, it would reduce the amount of interchangeable yet distinct characters (not to be confused with variant glyphs of the same underlying Sinitic morpheme, like 隣 and 鄰), which tend to occur most often when superimposing native Japanese words onto Han characters (e.g. 街 vs 町).
Perhaps a reader trained to only use the onyomi of kanji would potentially be able to read known words that use kunyomi with the kanji they are seeing in a text. But not learning any of the kunyomi seems like more of a detriment. Many self-study learners here seem like they’re trying to learn every pronunciation potentially associated with a kanji as a first step, rather than starting with one or two familiar vocabulary words that use that character.
One of biggest downsides to not learning kunyomi would not being able to read even very common Japanese names until you’ve been studying the language for a while. The “aha”! of being able to see the 大 in 大阪 and make a fast educated guess based on the fact that you’re looking at a map is a type of borderline magical experience for newer learners
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Kanji has always been a big complaint about written Japanese, not just for foreign students but even some native Japanese speakers as well, including some prominent Japanese language reformers at the turn of the last century.
I personally love kanji, and I also recognise that completely stripping kanji out of Japanese text would be disasterous for reading comprehension, perhaps outweighing the pedagogical benefits of kanji omission. As a kind of compromise experiment, I thought about what written Japanese might have been like had it followed the historical trajectory of written Korean: from texts written entirely in Han characters (cf. Man’yougana), to characters for native and Sinitic morphemes interspersed with grammatical hangul (particles and conjugations), to characters strictly for Sinitic morphemes (cf. on’yomi), and finally to pure hangul (with the occasional characters injected for disambiguation).
The sample provided here is of the aforementioned penultimate stage: kanji exclusively for on’yomi. As in Korean mixed script, traditional characters are employed, and spaces are provided to ease lexical boundary parsing.
The content of the sample was taken from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Ultimately, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that learning only on’yomi for kanji would offload a massive pedagogical burden for students of Japanese, domestic and foreign alike, while maintaining the chief benefit of preserving kanji use, as Sinoxenic morphemes have a far narrower range of possible syllables than do native Japanese morphemes. Furthermore, it would reduce the amount of interchangeable yet distinct characters (not to be confused with variant glyphs of the same underlying Sinitic morpheme, like 隣 and 鄰), which tend to occur most often when superimposing native Japanese words onto Han characters (e.g. 街 vs 町).
Perhaps a reader trained to only use the onyomi of kanji would potentially be able to read known words that use kunyomi with the kanji they are seeing in a text. But not learning any of the kunyomi seems like more of a detriment. Many self-study learners here seem like they’re trying to learn every pronunciation potentially associated with a kanji as a first step, rather than starting with one or two familiar vocabulary words that use that character.
One of biggest downsides to not learning kunyomi would not being able to read even very common Japanese names until you’ve been studying the language for a while. The “aha”! of being able to see the 大 in 大阪 and make a fast educated guess based on the fact that you’re looking at a map is a type of borderline magical experience for newer learners