> Having a working knowledge of German, Italian, French, English was fun, valuable, and normal especially when doing business in diverse countries and with diverse peoples.

That's nice with all these very similar languages using latin alphabet and now try it with Chinese characters and tones in China or at least kanji/hiragana without tones in Japan. Characters are huge barrier when learning the language, because you don't see words to memorize everywhere you look, you see just bunch of strokes. I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin as Vietnamese did (and Chinese intended, but didn't finish), it would remove huge barrier in communication (and also tehcnologically wise, after all most of the Chinese already write pinyin anyway on smartphones/computers, which just transcribe their pinyin back to characters) and people would realize Chinese is actually very simple language, where you don't have tenses, plural, etc.

As someone speaking English/German and my other two mother languages I can still understand some Italian, French or Dutch (which is basically English mixed with German by drunk sailor), because of how similar these languages are, so picking up some of them would be very easy compared to Chinese/Japanese (well at least Japanese has much more loaned words from English than Chinese).

Do you actually speak Chinese or Japanese? Because either of those languages with phonetic characters would be a nightmare imo.

The characters actually make it easier to learn the language imo, and anyone who claims otherwise hasn't actually tried to learn seriously

Vietnam and Korea have mostly dispensed with Chinese characters and are doing fine

Strangely enough, the official languages there are Vietnamese and Korean respectively, not Chinese or Japanese.

I don't know about Vietnamese but you can really make a parallel between Korean and Japanese.

Korean was using kanji the same way Japanese are using them now, and Japan could totally switch to hiragana only like Korea went for hangul. I've had some Japanese friends who were advocated for hiragana only, and were writing (on Twitter or blog posts) in hiragana only.

Yes, once you know kanji it's easier to read that full hiragana, but there is a point to be made about how learning kanji is difficult. Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

Retro Japanese games displayed text in all katakana because of technical limitations. But it didn't stick, for good reasons. It's incredibly hard to read. Like, imagine reading an ASCII text in hexadecimal representation. That's how it feels when reading a sufficiently long text in all hiragana or katakana.

Abolishing kanjis might've worked for the Korean language, but Korean isn't Japanese. They're entirely different languages. Funnily though, that's something that the Unicode Consortium also needs a reminder on [1].

> Not just for foreigners, but also for Japanese students from first grade to high school.

This is an exaggeration. Native Japanese speakers in middle school would have no problem reading common kanjis in real life. A high schooler would be able to read as well as a grownup.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

It would work fine. Japanese people can read Kana-only text - foreigners often can't because they aren't as used to it, but Japanese children read books mostly in Hiragana and they know what things sound like because they speak the language long before they know how to read it.

can read, inefficiently

It's inefficient because it's somewhat unusual, and because when we read our brains are trained to recognise larger patterns instead of just single characters, so of course if you've spent all your like reading 東京 instead of とうきょう, the first would be recognisable much more quickly.

But that's true as much of modern Japanese as it was of Korean before they dropped Chinese characters, or of Chinese before the simplification of Hanzi.

Eventually, people would just get used to a new way of writing things and be able to absorb that quickly and efficiently.

Nah, kana take up way too much space, and with no spaces in the language that makes parsing kana only text a lot slower than kanji.

On top of that, the language itself is phonetically very simple, so if you didn't have kanji there would be way too much ambiguity in written text, which is already very differen from spoken Japanese.

Now, if Japanese invented a new Korean style alphabet that combines sounds into a single character, and introduced spaces to the language then I could see it working, but I don't think most people would want that.

Japanese children are able to cope with all-hiraganas only because the text they read are so short and simple, accompanied by pictures. No other kind of books are written in all hiraganas, meaning that no person on earth has the required training. Nor do I think it's practical because there are likely to be tons of disambiguation problems with hiragana text.

Also, as I said, what worked for Korea centuries ago won't work for modern day Japan. Hangul was developed in an entirely different era where most people was illiterate, and the means for scaling education was non-existent by today's standards. It therefore made sense to reduce the number of letters in the alphabet. However, in modern age Japan, you'll be hard pressed to find a healthy person who can't read or write. There's no reason nor desire to switch to hiraganas only, and every reason otherwise. Changing a language is probably a terrible idea if there's no documented instance of native speakers actually wanting the change.

> Nor do I think it's practical because there are likely to be tons of disambiguation problems with hiragana text.

Humans are good at disambiguating in context. Those ambiguities can arise in spoken language too (minus those that are differentiated by pitch accent, but that still leaves enough room for homonyms).

> Changing a language is probably a terrible idea if there's no documented instance of native speakers actually wanting the change.

I agree but that has something to do with sociological reasons. I wasn't advocating for changing Japanese.

As late as the Edo period, there were entire genres of literature that were written almost entirely in Kana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaz%C5%8Dshi

Clearly, people were able to read that.

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

Perhaps Americans would take the first step and switch from imperial to metric, then we can discuss and tell everyone what to do.

Yes, they should, but not sure how is it relevant to what I WISHED for, I didn't tell anyone what to do and I'm clearly not an American.

> I really wish Chinese switched completely to pinyin

That's like wishing English would switch to IPA because English spelling is wildly inconsistent - which English would you choose? People who speak different dialects can still understand each other using written Chinese, whereas Pinyin is for Mandarin only.

almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters, it's just redundant at this point, part of tradition without practical meaning

> almost everyone using smartphones and computers already use pinyin anyway when they are inputting Chinese characters

Cantonese speakers don't use Pinyin.

Prior generations of Europeans were also xenophobic as hell, to the point of going to war with each other. I really don't understand which idyllic past you refer to here.

Everybody has gone to war with eachother in every continent all the way through history.

If you go live in a country (long-term, which 10 years is), you should learn the language and not expect the locals to try to conform to your not-knowing the language... you're there, it's their country, their language, not vice-versa. How can you expect a country where people employed there don't know the local language to even work? Imagine a postman, a service worker, etc. not knowing german.. how is that going to work? When stuff like this happens, you get immiggrant ghettos and yes, in turn xenophobia, because people there cannot get normal jobs and expect the germans to adapt to them instead of vice-versa.

If I live in the country for 10 years, then it is my country too. Perhaps it is in my interest to learn the language, and perhaps it isn't. There are plenty of countries in the world where people get by perfectly fine without even having a unifying language.

Do you guys know how every language came to be? It was through the interaction of people from different cultures, and it is an ongoing process. Germany was not even a country not so long ago. I reject the normative notion that learning a language is central to being a positive member of a community.

Yeah, sure, you're able to get by without learning anything in some places... but you are a foreigner who came to their country, and instead of you adapting to the local culture (..well language), you expect literally everyone around you to adapt to your culture (..language) and use a non-native language to interact with you.

Imagine a brit going to france, driving his car on the "wrong" side of the road and saying "it doesn't matter, people just drive around me, it's not an issue".

> If I live in the country for 10 years, then it is my country too

Lol no. You’re not a sovereign individual. You’re part of a society, and every society is the product of people who have a culture that’s been cultivated over generations. Japan is a creation of the Japanese—the fruit of generations of Japanese people building a society according to their culture—not some foreigner who’s lived there for a fraction of a lifetime.

Japan is not a a lone entity as well. It exists in a concert of nations. It buys and sells products from elsewhere. If you showed how modern Tokyo looks like to a Japanese from only 100 years ago, they would have a breakdown. Meanwhile, to the average Westerner, Tokyo is perfectly understandable, although of course unique.

Let's just take one example. John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s. Should America make some silly rule like you propose, and say that people like him are not welcome there, or that America does not "belong" to them? I suppose you support giving back the land to indigenous tribes then?

You are not seriously comparing yourself to Neumann, are you?

I can’t see how you get that impression from the comment? Can you explain to me?

> John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s

Not at all. Bangladesh, where I’m from, has computers too, but its government, institutions, infrastructure, constitution, etc., are still what Bangladeshis and the British created. Society is a product of culture, and culture runs deep and is extremely sticky.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. All those things you mentioned are not at all a product of the people of Bangladesh alone, they are a collective effort. You live in a system of government invented in Europe, your infrastructure is more and more owned by China, your predominant religion is not from Bangladesh originally. You talk about countries as if they are some independent silos of people who have lived in the area for millennia, and I find that to be absolutely unjustified.

1947-71 doesn't exist according to him.

Sure, they’re a product of centuries, and the British, Mughals, etc. The British for example built many of our institutions, and we inherited British common law. Our constitution has language in it that you can trace back to the English Magna Carta. Modern Bangladeshi society fairly claims all of that. But who the country isn’t the product of, and hasn’t been shaped by, is some immigrant who has been in the country just 10 years. It’s an absurd assertion.

My wife’s family fought in the American revolution and were among the first pioneers to settle the Oregon coast. That frontier culture reverberates through all of America to this day. By contrast my family came here in 1989 to a country that was fully formed in its modern incarnation. It strikes me as absurd when people assert out of misplaced political correctness that America is my country just as much as it is her country. It reduces culture and nationhood and citizenship to a shallow and impoverished concept.

You are saying then that millions upon millions of Americans have no country. You obviously know that you would not have always had the "privilege to marry a white woman", and probably know that Oregon in particular has a nasty history in that regard. Not that it is alone -- in my family we've kept the newspaper articles that ran at the time my grandparents eloped from Misourri. They have headlines like "Kansas City woman marries Chinese", "she confirms he does speak English", "is pregnant with his son", ... etc. My father of course, when he came around, wasn't seen as an American boy in 1930s Kansas. His experiences there left him feeling like a "twilight child" for the rest of his life, caught in between foreign and native lands and not belonging in either.

Why is that alright? Were the anti-miscegenation laws wrong, but the newspapers not?

If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American. The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.

> caught between foreign and native lands and not belonging in either

That’s just a state of affairs that arises when people immigrate. Nobody gives up the culture of old country completely in a single generation, nor do they fully maintain that culture either. Desire for belonging can’t change who you are, which is a product of your parents and their parents and their parents.

> If you're from here or reside here and are committed to the future of the country, you are American.

That defines “American-ness” as an individual characteristic, but nationality is a group concept. When you go visit America and say Japan you can easily observe aggregate group differences in culture, customs, attitudes, etc. That’s what makes one place america and the other place Japan. And if your ancestors were the ones who cultivated that culture, customs, and attitudes, and you were born and socialized into them, you’re more American or Japanese than someone who wasn’t.

> The country in its history has mostly not offered that assurance, and the law and culture behind it was badly racist.

You’re conflating race with culture and national origin. For example, most Bangladeshis wouldn’t consider me Bangladeshi, because I was raised in the US. Obviously that’s not “racist”—I’m the same race as 95% of that country. It’s because I was raised in a foreign cultural environment that’s alien to Bangladesh. For the same reason, it’s not “racist” for Americans not to consider me American. Because I’m not. As a first generation immigrant there’s huge swaths of my socialization and world view that comes from old country, not from America.

And that’s true of my kids too, who are being socialized very differently than the cousins from my American wife’s side of the family. Maybe generations from now their grandkids will be American, both in the sense that they’ll be assimilated into the dominant culture, but also in the sense that continuing south Asian immigration to America will have changed American culture, the same way that Germans and Italians did. But in the meantime there is no better way to describe them than observing that they have one foot in each world.

You might be interested in Vivek Bald’s book “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America”

I disagree thoroughly. This was an extremely important issue for my dad, he literally imparted this lesson on us from birth (I know that might sound strange): we are to expect no more or less from our country than any other American boys, and it is no more or less ours than it is theirs. I can't put it the same way that he did, but anyway but it's in no way an "absurd", "shallow", merely "politically correct" attitude. People feel strongly about this. In politics because of the serious backdrop of family separation/deportation policy, the "shithole country" nationality, in general 18th-21st history on this continent (not to be discounted), etc. And personally because it's not like rare to have your own family story in America, even if your folks never set out to Oregon in a wagon!

... and don't get me wrong that is pretty rad. I have driven to and from St. Louis from the West coast a few times, and it is insane that anyone ever packed their family and shit from there to there in anything less than a huge truck/family minivan with cruise control air conditioning and radio all set to maximum.

Strong statement about a country that completely reinvented itself in 1868 (largely by copying the West) and then was forcefully reinvented (again by the West) in 1947.

As you age and require more and more services from the state of those countries do you think that country should provide you with an interpreter? You might encounter government employees, healthcare professionals or elderly care that does not speak English.

And the new generations will increasingly become xenophobic again as arrogant foreginers with no will to learn local language move in.

It's a massive trend in Europe again and it will not end well for the expats.

Yes and then maybe expats will go contribute their skills elsewhere, in a clear loss to the arrogant locals who think speaking language X is more important than living peacefully and contributing to the social welfare that depends on a young workforce that Europe can no longer produce.

It will be a three-way loss. For the natives who lose out on services, for the expats who clearly actively chose being expats in a particular location over all other options available to them and finally for the natives where the expats relocate who have to suffer those assholes (in exchange for services).

It is still a thing, however, not for hardcore leftists. They will be very fast in calling you a nazi or at least faschist if you utter sentences like that. I am guessing they dont want to see their utopia fail, so they ignore everything which would be evidence against their view of the world.

And its fucking sad, because I used to see myself as part of "them". However, this inability to reflect about ones own failings has totally alienated me.

Prior generations were more likely to remain in a specific geographical area (eg. central or western Europe) and so taking the time to learn these specific languages made sense. Learning other European languages as a European is also not that far of a leap (unless we're talking Hungarian or Finnish).

Modern generations are constantly on the move in a globalised world. It's not uncommon for that European to end up working in Asia nowadays, where their knowledge of other European languages is useless.