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In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words. Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to

In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words. Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai". The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji. Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.

loicd 4d ago
> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first. I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic. In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
- kazinator 4d ago
  > need for kanji is self-fulfilling Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone. Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite. > the phonetic kana system The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own. But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
  - notrustincloud 4d ago
    Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work." and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else. So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable. Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru. 庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
    - kazinator 3d ago
      I made a variant of this one myself: 中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
  - loicd 3d ago
    > But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin. I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst. As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes takes more time.

loicd 4d ago

> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first. I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic. In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.

kazinator 4d ago
> need for kanji is self-fulfilling Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone. Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite. > the phonetic kana system The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own. But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
- notrustincloud 4d ago
  Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work." and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else. So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable. Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru. 庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
  - kazinator 3d ago
    I made a variant of this one myself: 中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
- loicd 3d ago
  > But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin. I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst. As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes takes more time.