☆ENGLISH ONLY☆コミュのTake kanji out of Japanese?

Well, I'm currently learning kanji and it's come to a point where they are overloading my brain and I get confused because a lot of them look very similar and have the same radicals, etc. Learning kanji is a complete pain, but then again, reading a sentence written entirely in hiragana is also a pain. Therefore I would say the best thing that could happen would be for furigana to be included above ALL (or nearly all) kanji in written texts... I mean, occasionally even Japanese people can't read a certain kanji word in a text, so I think it really would be quite useful for everyone, Japanese and non-Japanese alike.

Actually, there were some Kanji-abolishment movements in Japanse history. But nothing has been realized though in Korea and Vietnum it has.

Certainly, it is difficult to learn for the bigginers. But for the native Japanese speakers it would be terrible situation without Kanji.

Because Japanese is a language which has a lot of "homophone." For example, thinking about the word of "ko'en," we cannnot imagine which one is suitable for without Kanji.

And most of personal names, we cannot distinguish each other without Kanji.

Once my English teacher (from England) told us he had studied 20 kanji every day categorising with parts, and it was interesting like solving puzzles.

Why don't you try?

I agree with 2..

Without out Kanji it would almost be impossible to differentiate written words.. Cause many words would be "written" the same way without Kanji..

So you wouldn't know which word the person is writing about.

As hard as it might be, It serves its cause =]

Try learning Chinese... It's completely written in "Kanji". lol

Tis my 2 cents n e way.

Kanji is tough to pick up comprehensively. But I think that the difficulty of the written word applies to all languages. They all require quite a large effort to learn to fluency.

My biggest difficulty with kanji is that you cannot "sound" out the writing, so it's a pain to "look up" new words in the dictionary. On the other hand, because Japanese is phonetically simpler than English, and many words share the same sounds, a Japanese language without kanji would suck because written word differentiation would then become a chore. I agree with リサ that there should be more furigana above kanjis.. even if there's some huge public outcry over the "dumbing-down" of the next generation.

Kanji is something you need! All Kanakana or Hiragana is really really dificult to read!
Once you start reading Kanji, you reading speed will be 2-3 times faster than just reading other characters.

リサ＞The tough time will pass eventually. Just keep working through it. You will learn to recoginize them by instinct eventually. Also I'd say furigana would be nice on public signs, menus, notices etc.. but i don't think Japanese people would like it all over their magazines and novels. I find many times those really hard words have furigana anyway for the Japanese readers.


Thad>I agree somewhat. A lot of people I know complain about kanji, but that is because they are too lazy to put the time into learning it. They enjoy speaking Japanese cuz that is not so difficult for them to learn to do, but they complain because they want to use it in a job but nobody takes them seriously because the have no real certification under their belt. I think it is pointless not to learn both written and verbal Japanese if you have dreams of being in Japan or doing a job that has something to do with Japanese.

Guchi> Yeah, but the good thing about kanji is many of them that look similar also have similar readings. So usually just by popping an educated guess into and electronic dictionary you can find the word or kanji you are looking for.

ガネ>Totally agree.

Taking kanji out of Japanese is not very practical. How many people live in Japan today? I'm not sure but its a lot, and they can read Kanji (except children). If kanji were abolished, then what would stop people from using kanji they already know? Would the government force people not to use kanji? I have never studied the 'kanji-abolishment' movements, so I don't know what they proposed, but seems like an incredibly difficult task. Just take into account the hostility you would face you tried to remove kanji from tha language. People would not take the change lightly. Not to mention, the entire country would have to be reformatted, which would involve a LONG transition period in which all signs, print and on-line media, and advertisements would have to changed to comply with the kanji ban. The curriculum in Japanese schools would have to fundamentally changed. It would be an enormous hassle that would fiercely opposed. If there was a ever a time that phasing out kanji could have happened, its gone now. It might have worked after WW2, when Japan's infrastructure was in shambles, but it would be an unnecessary strain on modern Japan.

TWENTY TWO> well everyone does hate mondays.... haha

Hate to say this. But that's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. As a Japanese person, kanji makes reading much much easier. For example, if someone writes:
わたしはいしゃにいく。
What do make of it? Is this person going to a dentist? or to a doctor?
Or how'bout this?
ぼくはげいがいたい。

C'mon. Seriously. It's like, "let's take out numerals/abbreviations from English and spell out everything with alphabets."
Much easier to read and write "8" than "eight", "AIDS" than "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" and "花" than "はな".

ニッキ＞”I find that I read Japanese a lot faster with kanji, and sometimes I won't recognize a word written in hiragana right away written that I would've if it were written in kanji... does that make any sense? ”

I could not agree more.

Funky Love Bunny> I speak now in hindsight, but for me I think learning Japanese without kanji would have been harder and caused me many more comprehension problems in the long run. and I don't think it would increase productivity in typing because errors would very easily go unnoticed. In fact, if anything, the onset of computers has solidified the fact that languages based in symbols are convenient and here to stay with us.
your third point I agree with, because for most people kanji looks intimidating, and is seen from the start as "difficult" thus you are probably right to assume more people might try to learn Japanese.
your fourth part i disagree with because both hiragana and katakana were derived from kanji, albeit hiragana was less direct. not mention modern Japanese has so many loan words from English, to say the language would be "totally Japanese" would be incorrect I think.

Kanji is great because it allows me to read a book much faster. Kanji doesn't represent sounds, they represent ideas so it feels like they get processed by my brain fatser. I can go through a Japanese novel in a day, when it takes triple the time to get through a novel of similar length in English.

Wakana> great examples.

non-Japanese speakers can use kana as a sound reference. It's better to study with kana first to know how to pronounce.

by the way, i strongly believe any language should be learned by the sound first. Grammer and writing should come way after Ample amount of sound training, that is speaking. (In fact everyone learned his mother tongue that way.)

But writing definitely needs kanji. Otherwise it looks too dumb, like everyone becomes a knee-high tot.

And regarding personal names, kanji is necessary for one's "identification" (too exaggerated, maybe).

My name 理絵　sounds "ri-e" meaning "logic and art." But there are much more "ri-e" like 理恵(logic and blessing),　利枝(benefit variously ramified?),　里江(hometown and gatherring point).....

I think male names have much more variations. I identify myself as 理絵, not 里江. I hope Japanese learners to understand the meaning and values of kanji more deeply.

I think removing kanji would make things a hell of lot harder... to many homophones. I also have a hard time reading things in plain hiragana as my brain doesn't have the visual clues which come along with kanji to process things faster

This is from Tae Kim's Grammar site for additional reading

"Some people feel that the system of using separate, discrete symbols instead of a sensible alphabet is out-dated and overly complicated. In fact, it might have not have been a good idea to adopt Chinese into Japanese since both languages are fundamentally different in structure. But the purpose of this guide is not to debate over the decisions made thousands of years ago but to explain why you must learn kanji in order to learn Japanese. And by this, I mean more than just saying, "That's how it's done so get over it!".

Some people feel that Japanese should have just switched from Chinese to romaji to do away with all the complicated characters that was bewildering the foreign white devils. In fact, Korean has adopted their own alphabet to greatly simplify their written language to great success. So why didn't it work for Japanese? And I ask this in the past tense because I believe that the government did attempt to replace kanji with romaji shortly after the second world war with little success. I think anyone who has typed at any length in Japanese can easily see why this did not work. At any one time, when you convert typed hiragana into kanji, you are presented with almost always at least two choices (two homophones) and sometimes even up to ten. (Try typing kikan). The 46 or so character alphabet of set sounds in Japanese makes it hard to avoid homophones. Compare this to the Korean alphabet which has 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Any of the consonants can be matched to any of the vowels giving 140 sounds. In addition, a third and sometimes even fourth consonant can be attached to create a single letter. This gives over 1960 sounds that can be created theoretically. (The sounds that are actually used is actually much less than that, though I don't know the exact number.)

Since you want to read at a much faster rate than you talk, you need some visual cues to instantly tell you what each word is. You can use the shape of words in English to blaze through text because most words have different shapes. Try this little exercise: Hi, enve thgouh all teh wrods aer seplled icorrenctly, can you sltil udsternand me?" Korean does this too because it has enough characters to make words with distinct and different shapes. However, because the visual cues are not distinct as kanji, spaces needed to be added to remove ambiguities. (This presents it's own set of problems of when and where to set spaces.)

With kanji, Japanese doesn't have to worry about spaces and much of the problem with homophones are resolved. Without kanji, even if spaces were to be added, the ambiguities and lack of visual cues would make Japanese text much more difficult to read."

Sort of like removing spaces from English.
It'll make things really hard to read.
Plus, novels would use up more pages, resulting in wasted resources.
Plus, Kokugo (language) teachers would have too much time on their hands.
Finally, half of all Nintendo DS titles in Japan would become useless :)

>But writing definitely needs kanji. Otherwise it looks too dumb, like everyone becomes a knee-high tot.

this only applies to native Japanese, by the way. Foreigners are free to use as many kanas as they want. It's not embarrassing at all. How else can you do when you don't know kanji?