They should do something with the written language cause it’s a mess. It feels like it’s convoluted to the point that it’s deliberate.
I came from learning Mandarin and felt glad they went through simplification of hanzi - learning it is hard, but at least every character has one pronunciation (excluding tone changes, 行, and 了, but they’re really predictable). Learning that that’s not the case with Japanese kanji (Onyomi and Kunyomi) was confounding.
Seems like every other language that had adopted the Chinese writing system in the past went through some kind of simplification for the sake of promoting literacy - Korean, Vietnamese, and even Chinese itself. Japanese seems to want it every which way - keep the traditional characters, incorporate both native Japanese and Chinese pronunciations of them, and add in three different phonetic writing systems. No, I’m totally not mad about it.
The coexistence of Kanji and Hiragana is already the result of simplification. If you look at a Japanese document from the 1880s or whatever, it’s almost all Kanji because every single word theoretically has a Kanji. At some point it was decided that it was too hard to teach everyone so many kanji so some words were allowed to be written in hiragana instead.
Less kanji being taught has also resulted in some very weird bullshit. For example, dermatologist is 皮膚科 (hi fu ka) but the middle Kanji appears not to be in common usage so often it’ll be written as 皮フ科 with a katakana Fu instead.
So idk if you really want to ask Japan to simplify again, they kind of have a cursed monkey paw approach to it.
They should do something with the written language cause it’s a mess. It feels like it’s convoluted to the point that it’s deliberate.
I came from learning Mandarin and felt glad they went through simplification of hanzi - learning it is hard, but at least every character has one pronunciation (excluding tone changes, 行, and 了, but they’re really predictable). Learning that that’s not the case with Japanese kanji (Onyomi and Kunyomi) was confounding.
Seems like every other language that had adopted the Chinese writing system in the past went through some kind of simplification for the sake of promoting literacy - Korean, Vietnamese, and even Chinese itself. Japanese seems to want it every which way - keep the traditional characters, incorporate both native Japanese and Chinese pronunciations of them, and add in three different phonetic writing systems. No, I’m totally not mad about it.
The coexistence of Kanji and Hiragana is already the result of simplification. If you look at a Japanese document from the 1880s or whatever, it’s almost all Kanji because every single word theoretically has a Kanji. At some point it was decided that it was too hard to teach everyone so many kanji so some words were allowed to be written in hiragana instead.
Less kanji being taught has also resulted in some very weird bullshit. For example, dermatologist is 皮膚科 (hi fu ka) but the middle Kanji appears not to be in common usage so often it’ll be written as 皮フ科 with a katakana Fu instead.
So idk if you really want to ask Japan to simplify again, they kind of have a cursed monkey paw approach to it.