Kanji is frustrating to write, but a joy to read, IMHO. Yes, you need to learn 2000 (or so) characters, but, let's face it -- you've got years to do it. I can now read words that I don't know and have a pretty good idea what they mean -- something that would be practically impossible phonetically in Japanese. In fact, when I'm faced with new vocabulary, I often ask people to write it for me (just in the air) -- as soon as I see the kanji I almost always know what the word means.

I've often thought how superior this writing system is from roman phonetic characters (which bizarre historical spelling anachronisms to boot) ;-) I appreciate that you don't agree, but I hope you'll also understand that I have no intention of grading your education level on the number of kanji you know.

Kanji has aided in my study of the Japanese language in ways I couldn't fathom before trying to do so. I made it to N5-level proficiency [1] after a few semesters of study and only begrudgingly studied Kanji because it was required by the text. I hated it and really only wanted to speak and understand spoken Japanese.

Then I discovered Wanikani [2], a spaced repetition service that focuses on teaching Kanji reading. Unlike Anki decks, Kanji is literally the only thing Wanikani focuses on, but it does so incredibly well. With diligence it's even possible to learn all Joyo Kanji within about a year.

After taking Kanji seriously I began to understand the root meanings of the vocabulary I had known all along. It let me form associations I previously wasn't privy to and enabled a much faster uptake of new vocabulary. Instead of remembering why the syllables さいこう (saikou, pronounced "sigh co") means "best" or "utmost", I can simply recall the kanji: 最高. The character 最 means "most" and the character 高 means "tall". "most tall" = "utmost".

Japanese is extremely logical like this, as is their grammar. For fans of logic it's really top-notch.

If you're learning Japanese, please don't do yourself a disservice by skipping Kanji. A fully-integrated learning approach that includes reading will yield dividends in the long term.

[1] http://jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html [2] https://www.wanikani.com/

Making it a pre-requisite to write a single sentence in French, however, seems like a waste of time and goodwill.

I learned kanji first before speaking. Learned to read and listen for about a year before venturing out to conversation clubs and the like. Without a shadow of a doubt reading massively, massively, massively boosted my ability in all other areas. Fastest way to learn new vocabulary.

But I gotta be honest - I used to love kanji and found joy in it. These days I think Korean really got it right with their writing system. That shit is super logical. Kanji is a giant, beautiful pain in the ass.

And in the old analog days, even if you're an expert with keys and stroke counts, it was still much faster to search a roman character word in a dictionary than a Japanese word you don't know the pronunciation of.

The same ambiguity mentioned in this article that makes it hard to learn and approach for beginners can be and has been wielded to great effect by writers in both literary and comedic works in ways that have no real equivalent in languages without similar mechanisms.

It's yet another one of those things that makes Japanese such a joy to learn.

Date formats would really only require three:

- 年: year

- 月: month

- 日: day

We debate about both separators and order of presentation, but using three characters as suffixes would add some semantics where none really existed, and you might have to make some assumptions about which way the day goes and which way the month goes.

For those that don’t know, 3月 is March, 12月 is December, 31日 is the 31st day and 2019年 is the current year. So April 12th 2019 which might be presented as 2019.04.12, 4/12/2019 or 12/4/2019 would instead be written as 2019年4月12日 or 12日4月2019年 or even 4月12日2019年.

The beauty here is the ideographs provide enough semantic meaning on their own that the order of presentation stops mattering and they are perfectly fine date separators. They are always appended as suffixes to the numeric designator and they don’t add much to the cognitive burden for anyone learning how to read. We already mix Arabic numerals into just about every writing system, Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, et cetera, we have distinct punctuation marks in most writing systems, and we pretty much all know the difference between $12.34 and £12.34 and how 56¢ differs from 56%.

This is a small example, but I hope it provides some context to some who don’t know any kanji the power and precision that ideographs can provide at a glance.

One more thing, while I offered up these three specific ideographs specifically as date separators, they do provide standalone meanings as well.

年 is a counting word for years. It doesn’t have to be AD, and in Japanese or Chinese they do have their own calendars, but 2019年 is still unambiguously understood to be 2019 anno domini.

月 is a standalone word for the moon, which is functionally why it is used as a month counter. 日 is a standalone word for the Sun. This perfectly preserves the association between months to the moon cycle and days to the solar cycle, which I think is pretty cool, and it certainly does so a lot better than mere dots or slashes or dashes.

And, seriously, the rest of the world considers it totally illogical to use MM-DD-YYYY. In almost any country, MM are the middle digits. 4月12日2019年 is a format I have never seen used.

My point? Writing systems are flexible, and more so the more semantic notations you can integrate and propagate through society. You would never see 4月12日2019年 today, but hypothetically it wouldn’t matter if you did because it is inherently unambiguous so long as you understand the meaning of the Kanji involved.

Besides that, while you won’t see 4月12日2019年, you still might see 4月12日.

But face it: you say I have years to learn them. I could learn 3 languages with the effort wasted to learn kanjis (which are half a language because then you also need to learn the pronunciation of words). No, I'll perfect my English instead and learn spoken Japanese, as it is almost a separate language.

In terms of communication, evolution, ease to learn and use, kanjis are an inferior system. It took me a long time to accept saying that, because I am of course biased as a lazy gaijin, but really, seeing how easy Korean feels compared to Japanese was the nail that convinced me that there is a fundamental truth in that.

Interestingly, hangul (the Korean alphabet) was adopted to replace chinese characters and was opposed on the ground that it made the written language to easy to learn. Hah.

The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge variety of words whose readings are all permutations of a handful of syllables - words like koutai, koutei, taikou, teikou, keitai, koukei, taitei, etc, etc.. And it's not just a matter of keeping them all separate - a proficient speaker might know two or three unrelated meanings for any given reading. Kanji are what makes that possible. I mean, it's challenging to learn even 10 kanji, but once you do it's far easier to learn 100 or 1000 compounds made out of them.

So if you want to say kanji are annoying or not worth your time, that's obviously fair enough - but they're not useless and they're not just there to obfuscate things.

Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn?

(Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)

Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down.

It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)

You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks.

Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.

With somewhat phonetic spellings you can link vocabulary you read to vocabulary you hear.

In Korean (just like English) you can much more easily misspell a word and be understood. In Japanese you often times cannot even “give it a go”, unless you are aided by a IME, which is essentially phonetic.

Things are nowhere near this simple. If there was any value to abandoning kanji it could be done tomorrow, but the reality is that all-kana text is incredibly hard to read, and trying to learn Japanese's myriad homophones would be nigh-impossible without kanji to disambiguate them.

Kanji are complex and archaic, sure, but it's not just conservative values keeping them around. The Japanese language just isn't feasible to learn or to use without them.

The reason Kanji are used instead of Kana are due to the vast number of homophones from a language limited in the number of phonetic sounds it has. It is how you can tell はし「橋」 from はし「端」 from はし「箸」. Sure, context would almost always let you know which word is used but that requires some additional parsing. Other languages have more sounds, thus fewer homophones, and this becomes less of a problem to determine which witch is which. Or as just shown - "witch" and "which" can be spelled differently even when they sound the same, something less possible with kana. Japanese has an insane number of homophones and reading kana-only sentences quickly becomes a headache because of it.

I don't "read" sentences that contain kanji. I glance over the sentence and understand what it is saying. It's like watching someone act out a scene vs reading the scene's script. Although I am still learning Japanese, for sentences where I know all of the kanji, I can understand the Japanese much faster than the English translation (my native language).

Well, to be fair, that's true for any language. Learning English by reading does not work: ask any Korean (or Japanese) who went through public English education in the 80s or before.