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Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. In Korean, i

Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. In Korean, it works similarly as well though, most people nowadays are quite used to not incorporating Hanja in sentences over multiple decades, to the point where it would be impractical to mingle Hanja in Korean.

latentsea 2y ago
Yes, so basically the arguments around lack of Kanji leading to worse readability are actually hitting upon the fact that readability suffers short-term not because Kanji enhances readability,but because they're simply not used to processing the language only through kana, and that were they to acclimatize to that, it becomes readable again and in fact easier to read than before.
- pcwalton 2y ago
  I do wonder whether kana might be slightly easier to read if ん were written as part of the preceding syllable like it is in hangul.
  - latentsea 2y ago
    Kana would be slightly easier to read if we spent as much time reading in Kana as we have in Kanji. Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.
    - mmis1000 2y ago
      I don't think so. Kana just don't have enough entropy compares to Kanji. A kanji can be compose with up to twenty strokes with high variety of stroke patterns. Those excessive complexity make it identifiable even in extreme situations. (Blurry or tainted or whatever situation). In some case, a kanji with half of its size masked still be decoded without any ambiguity. But this will never work with an voice based language.
pezezin 2y ago
> Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago. The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese. It is already a problem in Chinese, but even worse in Japanese due to the smaller phonetic repertoire.
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  > Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English while afflicted with a strangely selective amnesia hole for entire words. Such that reading a word like 'shoe' would not instantly evoke an association with a piece of footwear but would have to be (admittedly very rapidly) sounded out letter for letter each time, instead of scanning the entire unit as a whole. That's what reading a word normally represented by a familiar kanji character but "expanded" into hiragana feels like, and slightly more pronounced if it's, for some hipster reason, written in katakana.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    > Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults? As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
    - akasakahakada 2y ago
      > every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write This stupid phenomenon is due to the fact that Japanese Gov decided to teach only arbitrarily 1000 kanji to school kids and this number decrease every 10 years. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E6%BC%A2%E5... You can see how stupid it is. > People complain that kanji being used in the prefecture are not include in the list (no included so no obligation to teach in school) e.g.阪鹿奈岡熊梨阜埼茨栃媛, so the gov finally add those to the next revision. While at the same time Chinese people are learning 3X more. No one ever complain about the difficulty of Chinese character after all.

latentsea 2y ago

Yes, so basically the arguments around lack of Kanji leading to worse readability are actually hitting upon the fact that readability suffers short-term not because Kanji enhances readability,but because they're simply not used to processing the language only through kana, and that were they to acclimatize to that, it becomes readable again and in fact easier to read than before.

pcwalton 2y ago
I do wonder whether kana might be slightly easier to read if ん were written as part of the preceding syllable like it is in hangul.
- latentsea 2y ago
  Kana would be slightly easier to read if we spent as much time reading in Kana as we have in Kanji. Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.
  - mmis1000 2y ago
    I don't think so. Kana just don't have enough entropy compares to Kanji. A kanji can be compose with up to twenty strokes with high variety of stroke patterns. Those excessive complexity make it identifiable even in extreme situations. (Blurry or tainted or whatever situation). In some case, a kanji with half of its size masked still be decoded without any ambiguity. But this will never work with an voice based language.

pezezin 2y ago

> Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago. The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese. It is already a problem in Chinese, but even worse in Japanese due to the smaller phonetic repertoire.

ChainOfFools 2y ago
> Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English while afflicted with a strangely selective amnesia hole for entire words. Such that reading a word like 'shoe' would not instantly evoke an association with a piece of footwear but would have to be (admittedly very rapidly) sounded out letter for letter each time, instead of scanning the entire unit as a whole. That's what reading a word normally represented by a familiar kanji character but "expanded" into hiragana feels like, and slightly more pronounced if it's, for some hipster reason, written in katakana.
- pezezin 2y ago
  > Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults? As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
  - akasakahakada 2y ago
    > every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write This stupid phenomenon is due to the fact that Japanese Gov decided to teach only arbitrarily 1000 kanji to school kids and this number decrease every 10 years. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B8%B8%E7%94%A8%E6%BC%A2%E5... You can see how stupid it is. > People complain that kanji being used in the prefecture are not include in the list (no included so no obligation to teach in school) e.g.阪鹿奈岡熊梨阜埼茨栃媛, so the gov finally add those to the next revision. While at the same time Chinese people are learning 3X more. No one ever complain about the difficulty of Chinese character after all.