Hello,
I am asking this question because whenever I see articles about different languages they will always say that Japanese and Chinese are the two hardest to learn. However they always sight that this is because of their writing systems. Because of this I was wondering if Japanese converted to the latin alphabet would it become very easy or would it still be difficult?
21 comments
It would become very difficult if kanji was removed. Even if spaces were introduced between every word/particle, you would be reliant on context to tell the difference between words with identical “spellings” but different meanings, e.g 雨/飴, 行っている／言っている etc.
Well, considering how bothersome it is to read things in all Romaji or Pinyin respectively, pretty annoying and much slower to comprehend if anything.
Homonyms would get much more difficult to discern, since the Chinese Languages and Japanese Languages have fairly restrictive phonotactics and a relatively small pool of valid phonemes and phoneme combinations.
It would probably make it harder. They already kinda do that with hiragana and katakana. But without kanji you’re just reading sounds instead of actual words. So without context a lot of things would be hard to understand
pure romaji always confuse me
I can’t speak Japanese yet so take this with a pinch of salt. I was curious why Japanese use Kanji instead of a purely phonetic alphabet so was looking into it a while ago. IIRC, Korea was similar to Japan in terms of writing systems (a mix of Kanji and Hangul and decided to switch to purely Hangul so although it’s not the latin alphabet, it is still a phonetic one. I guess this means it would at least be possible without too much effort if enough people wanted it.
I know even less Korean than Japanese but I see one hurdle to Japan switching. There are a lot of words which sound the same in Japanese due to the limited sounds they use which is why Kanji is super useful. The classic example is かみのかみ (kami no kami). Just in a phonetic alphabet (latin or otherwise), without context it might mean “God’s hair”, “god’s paper”, “Paper’s hair”, “Paper’s God” etc etc. This is fixed by either using kanji or using pitch accent when spoken so to answer your question, it might make things easier but they’d have to introduce something to indicate pitch accent too.
Oh, something else I just though of. In Japanese, words aren’t separated by spaces so Kanji helps with that too. Theywouldneedtoalsointroducespacesintotextotherwisethingswouldlooklikethis.
Well, the reason fax was revived in the late 1980s was japanese did not want latin emails
Having already put in the work to learn them, I find it harder to read without kanji, but it’s worth noting that Japanese people have very little trouble communicating without kanji when speaking, so people would definitely get used to it. Maybe some rare homophones that are currently used only in writing would fall into disuse
I think it would make learning much easier for foreigners.
Imagine if all of English was written phonetically or with IPA.
All homophones (they’re / there / their) would be spelled identically and would have to be determined only through context.
Then, remove all the spaces. That’s what it would be like if all of Japanese was in romaji.
Pretty hard because of the limited sounds which differentiate meaning through kanji.
Did Vietnamese become harder when they got rid of chu nom and introduced latin script?
*cite*
I think it would be easier, but there would be a lot of culturally important stuff lost by doing so.
They actually thought of doing this after WWII.
It would become impossible, even for Japanese, so they stopped.
It would be a nightmare. There are far too many homonyms and kanji is the easiest way to distinguish them. I’m already too annoyed when I encounter a few situations when everything is written in kana, romaji would make it much more difficult.
I’ve been studying Japanese for 4 years and have N1, just for my background. I think it would make everything 100x easier.
It would be harder
Easier probably. Certainly less effort would be needed in learning the character set. It wouldn’t have to be the Roman alphabet. They would most likely need to adopt spaces and accent marks, and might need less square characters for more visual difference and whole word recognition. But the world would be blander, and kanji seem to work for the Japanese now. (Less illiteracy than 1940s and before)
I submit the following by the author and educator Nitobe Inazo, quoted in *Ideogram* by J Marshall Unger.
>The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethern who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily paper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.
*but*
1. Kanji are here to stay. I doubt it will ever change. Put in the 8 plus years to learn them as a Japanese child then that’s what you are used to using and you are used to the conventions. “And if it was good enough for me and my elite education, it’s good enough for the children of tomorrow”
2. There is a huge cultural attachment to kanji. (by the Japanese and a large amount of Japanese learners too it seems)
3. Such a major reform would be impossible at this stage. 1945 was probably the last time reform *might* have happened. There were some limited studies at the time that seemed to show promise however. (There were only relatively minor writing reforms)
However there have been times where kanji haven’t been used.
* Braille. (Although there is a kanji braille for ‘cultural’ reasons)
* Morse code, or rather Wabun Code.
* IJN messages in WW2 were in katakana. Intelligible both to Japanese and the code breakers. A critical application where intelligibility and being unambiguous is important I’d say.
* The author of Autobiography of a Geisha, Sayo Masuda, wrote her manuscript in kana as she wasn’t formally educated. (The editors reworked it to kanji)
* I read that Requiem for Battleship Yamato was written in katakana to mimic naval communications of the time. (although I’ve never found a Japanese copy myself)
* Tale of Genji. (Hiragana was developed by women with less access to education… ) A lot of poetry also uses kana.
* The other day I saw someone on the bird app posting all kana municipal signage in a park in Japan.
Japanese language doesn’t *have* to be written using kanji; it just mostly *is.*
Impossibru imo. Also, so much amazing meaning would get lost that you get from using one kanji and not the other… they should certainly stick to their current writing system
Well, I’m not sure about that. Kanji does have a lot of benefits. The other day I came across 食う. I know the kanji means something like eat, or food, and in context it was used as “to eat”, but I only knew 食べる for the verb “to eat”. Anyways, thanks to the kanji I could assume it was a verb relating to food, maybe swallow or consume. On the other hand, if it was only romaji or only hiragana, I would have never assumed that “kuu” had anything to do with “taberu”. So while writing in romaji might make is somewhat easier for us to read, it would lose many other things (that we might not appreciate because we don’t know it).
Kanji are like Greek-Latin roots for English and other European languages. Except that, while in English it is the sound that remains as a prefix or suffix (monologue, monopoly, monochrome, monotonous; all use mono- to mean one, single), in Japanese what remains is the character. If it only retained sound, it’d be a mess. Just look at how many characters are read as “chu” or “sha”. If Japanese were to change to a romaji only script, you would lose where that “chu” or that “sha” came from, whereas now it is pretty clear because of the kanji.
Better the alphabet than just Kanas, for sure.
But to be fair, thinking in Japanese is still pretty hard, regardless of the writing system
It would be easier to learn, there is no question. A lot of the effort goes into learning the writing system (including for native speakers, who spend about twice as long as alphabet-using peers acquiring literacy). But it would still be pretty hard for an English speaker due to relatively low amounts of cognate vocabulary and very different grammar.