Should Japan Abolish Kanji?

Kanji can be very succinct, eg. Newspaper headlines where a lot of information can be indicated with just a few kanji. Another consideration is the slight difference in meaning in homonyms written with different kanji, eg. 回答 and 解答. These nuances would be lost without kanji. Nuances are also expressed in literature when authors can choose between different kanji for a word to emphasise a shade of meaning. Kanji have historical context and often pictorial value which would disappear when using kana or romaji alone.

千里の道も一歩から

mdchachi said:

Because it's the lingua franca of international business. In my current company it's shocking the lack of English capability of some people. Not just vocally but even written. Of course to be fair, these people whose career was spent on the domestic market probably never expected to be thrust into an international company like they were after they purchased an American company. Lucky for them they can get by somewhat with Deepl. Plus the help of others like myself and some of the Japanese who are more bilingual. The good news is this situation helps keep me gainfully employed.

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Well, now you're kind of shifting the goalposts.

Of course a Japanese person who's involved with "international business" (which is -- maybe difficult to understand for an American IT exec living in the US -- a small percentage of the Japanese population) should have some English ability. But honestly, that's on their company -- to either put people with English in that position, or if they put someone with no English ability in that position, to train them to improve.

But honestly, there are lots of totally normal Japanese people living in Japan who feel compelled to achieve some level of English ability and feel inferior about themselves because they haven't achieved it that literally makes no sense.

And honestly, though I respect you a lot, you've admitted to giving up on learning kanji and using DeepL to translate and ChatGPT to write emails, so I mean, on some level you're not exactly aspiring to reach a high level of language proficiency anymore, are you?

But really, I literally don't understand how the average monolingual English-speaking American has any right to **** on a Japanese person or the Japanese education system for everyone not speaking better English. They should just be grateful that nobody expects an American monolingual English speaker to be good at any other language.

bentenmusume said:

And honestly, though I respect you a lot, you've admitted to giving up on learning kanji and using DeepL to translate and ChatGPT to write emails, so I mean, on some level you're not exactly aspiring to reach a high level of language proficiency anymore, are you?

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Yes and no. I joined WK last year and made it quite a ways as I finally found something that works. Admittedly I've stalled for several months now. There's not a lot of motivation since I've never aspired to read Japanese books or consume Japanese media.
And, no, I don't use DeepL to write my emails. Normally what I do is write the email and then use DeepL to translate it to English to make sure I didn't do something stupid or unintended. But for incoming mails I'll often use DeepL or the embedded translation feature in Outlook just for the sake of time.
No apologies.

mdchachi said:

There's not a lot of motivation since I've never aspired to read Japanese books or consume Japanese media.

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Same.
And on top of that my disdain for a writing system that is just so very impractical on so very many levels.

You have really got to stretch so very hard to find ways in which it is beneficial. And even when you think you found one, just a little scratching of the surface reveals there is practically no difference with more or purely phoenetic systems. For example people say you can write more with less space. Nope. You can write in English in super tiny letters and it will match the space of a similar sized line of kanji. After all, the number of actual penstrokes and lengths are so often equivalent anyway. You can even arrange phonetic letters to fit into a kanji size space. Look at this:

愛
lo
ve

If I was writing this on paper I could eliminate the space between the line and it would fit perfectly and its easy to figure out what I wrote.

Given the lack of material I find interesting plus sheer annoyance with such an unnecessarily clunky system, I have only one single reason to want to study and that is just to get citizenship.