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0 pointsFerret74461y ago0 comments

As someone who isn't even fluent in Japanese, I find it easier to read text with Kanji (in contexts where I am relatively fluent) than without.

Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.

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latentsea1y ago

This is because this is how you've trained your brain to process Japanese.

Korean includes white space for this reason, and since everyone gets used to reading it with no Hanja, they don't find it awkward.

So, it's perfectly possible to ditch Kanji and add spaces and have a way more accessible language.

Ferret7446OP1y ago

That doesn't solve the homophone issue though.

localfirst1y ago

usually a parenthesis with corresponding character is used to be explicit or to avoid confusion but its strictly for chinese loan words like:

ex) 시간 (時間)

compared to furigana (note that its not even possible to display the phonetic hiragana): 第二巻

younger generation are no longer learning Chinese so more English/European loan words are directly used which ironically fixes the issue.

it is impossible to converse in Korean without using English/European loan words

ex) 아이러니 (irony)

This allows new ideas/concepts to quickly disseminate in the collective Korean psyche. Constantly new words are being invented, slangs used by primary/middle school are unknowable.

Abbreviation/concat combos to create totally new words:

ex) 씹상타치 (way **ing above average) also written as ㅆㅅㅌㅊ (wfaa) literally means

Dwedit1y ago

If you look at old Japanese video games before the hardware could do Kanji, they used spaces to separate words. But when the game was capable of Kanji, the spaces went away.

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