Should Japan Abolish Kanji?

[RockLee]

@GaijinPunch...erm..DUH !!!

 

[Mycernius]

I like kanji. I true that I don't know much, but It strikes me as a form of shorthand. Why write a long word when one symbol can say it. It is a bit like getting rid of @ for at. How many people here would want to write the word dollar, percent or and when you can use $, %, & ?

 

[cicatriz esp]

The only way it would be feasible (to abolish) is if they also put spaces between their words. But as Maciamo said, the sheer number of homonyms makes kanji practically a necessity.

In my eyes, "it's uniquely Japanese" and "it's been used for many many years" aren't really valid stand-alone reasons to keep kanji. A language must evolve or die. But I can't see Japanese working without it.

 

[Elizabeth]

I heard the abolishment of Kanji had been under consideration cause it takes a lot of space to program it into a computer or electronic. Also that many Japanese people are forgetting how to write Kanji, due to computers making it easier.

In fact, kanji is becoming more prevelant online and complicated characters are supplanting what used to be hiragana thanks to the very ease of word processing. Their abolition was discussed at the end of WWII for sure along with a lot of other language reforms, but for the very good reasons everyone has mentioned already there hasn't been any momentum for it since. Even Korea found itself politically and socially isolated from other East Asian nations when it experimented with this, and they are not nearly as integral to even basic comprehension as they are to Japanese.

 

[lexico]

Korea found itself politically and socially isolated from other East Asian nations when it experimented with this, and they are not nearly as integral to even basic comprehension as with Japanese.

日語學槪說 (1989, p.38) says, "Vietnam, Korea, and Japan which imported the writing system of China are often collectively called the 'cultural sphere of Chinese characters.' Of these three countries, the Chinese character system has most firmly taken root in Japan," and even Korea should stop the nonsense of trying to abolish 漢字 because it is not foreign any more but a fully naturalized writing system. The newer publications without the 漢字 identified often makes my referencing three times as time consuming. The Korean experiment will eventually cease due to the cultural dichotomy that is not welcome at all.

 

[Ewok85]

How about Japan adopts english as the national language so its easier for you? Geez, some people just dont want to make the effort....

 

[Martialartsnovice]

Wait a second, if Japan were t oabolish its kanji, as Maciamo said earlier that the sheer number of Homonyms, would make any Japanese writings ilegible, and illiterate.

One Question, I pose to everyone is this, "If they abolish Kanji, how will it affect the people trying to learn Japanese, Both Native and Non-Native Speakers." and " How would it effect the people who learned Kanji, when they were learning Japanese."

 

[smoke]

i'm afraid my knowledge of the japanese language is..well, to be honest, non-existent.
but i would imagine that abolishing kanji would be like removing a whole language.
for example in a country where there is more than one (native) language (Canada is the only one that i can think of)... i imagine it would be like removing that language alltogether, (bye bye french or english!).
but, as i said, my knowledge of the japanese language...and most every other language is limited.

 

[Leroy_Brown]

Abolish something just because it's difficult?

Then what about chemistry? Physics? Trigonometry?

Many Japanese have a hard time learning English. Let's get rid of that too.

Fat, unathletic kids are now excused from gym.

Those without any sense of rhythm can skip music.

Why even bother going to school, it's too hard anyway?

 

[budd]

only if they use english/some other language completely and totally, no backsliding

 

[lexico]

One Question, I pose to everyone is this, "If they abolish Kanji, how will it affect the people trying to learn Japanese, Both Native and Non-Native Speakers." and " How would it effect the people who learned Kanji, when they were learning Japanese."

Interesting question you raise. As far as everyday speech goes, it shouldn't be affected at all; after all writing is just an appendix to what's spoken.

On the other hand, the higher end of communication which transcends distance and time and dialects (I just read today, the Ryuchuan dialects are mutually unintelligible, needless to say with main islander from Honshu! I've gone into shock! :atchoo. So for a civilized life with government services, I guess it's sayonara without the kanji !

[woops! wrong answer.]Learning will not be affected at the beginner's level because a lot of people are leaning Japanese only using romaji. But as the learning progresses, learning will become more and more difficult because of the confusion.<--difficult to visualize.

For those of you who have already learned Japanese upto proficiency, of it will affect them negatively. Not just jealous late comers are getting it easy, but one major script is taken away, and they have to relearn new conventions of orthography transcribing all words and expressions containing kanji now in kana-only.

 

[GaijinPunch]

@Gaijinpunch...erm..DUH !!!

So why are you caining me for pointing out the obvious?

 

[lexico]

isn't it possible that some people voted but didn't reply?

That surely crossed my mind, too. But the misleading question also got you misunderstood, I think. Your first response was terse (yest, the spacing too, but otherwise gave me a headspin : p), and I'm not sure which "No" you were talking about. But either way, it's a thing of the past. Cheers!

 

[Dekamaster]

It's part of the culture so I guess Japan would be giving up some of its heritage by doing this.

 

[Glenn]

I'm getting sick of this discussion (not necessarily what everyone here is saying, just that it keeps coming up), so I'm going to just post some links to pages that address the issue pretty well, and hope that I get at least most of them.

http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/sjis/glossary?SASE=/cgi-bin/j-e/sjis/index.html#xref2 (a different take on the "niwa niwa niwatori ga niwa iru" saying)
Re: Why use kanji?
Re: Why use kanji? (and the whole thread that these messages are in)

From the last message, and perhaps the most pertinent pieces of information:

It's a common misunderstanding that logograms are obsolete and phonograms are modern. In fact, linguists have proven that a human being can read logograms faster than phonograms if trained to read. There are some Japanese who have been trying to write Japanese only in kana or only in alphabets with no success. If you write Japanese without kanji, you will forget the meanings of morphemes. The disadvantage of logograms is their difficulty to learn, but the fact that developed nations such as Japan and Taiwan have a very low illiteracy rate indicates it is not so hard to learn kanji as you might think, if good education is available.

同音異義語への異議 (in Japanese)
鈍化する思考力 (in Japanese)

The last two aren't exactly along the lines of the question, but they discuss homophones and the use of kanji vocabulary instead of foreign words, respectively.

I know there was at least one other discussion about this on this forum, but I can't find it now, and I don't really feel like looking.

 

[lexico]

Thanks Glenn for bringing some (forum) historical perspective. I can fully understand older memebers' distaste for the absurd questions and debate being repeated, but like they say, no question is a dumb question, but only a cold audience. And you are not as cold as you make out to be!

Please let me add just one minor point.

logograms are obsolete and phonograms are modern

It is technically misleading to call kanjis "logograms" as opposed to "phonograms," as John DeFrancis had struggled to demystify the misconception.

Of the some 49,000 characters of the Kangxi characters, which is highly significant for Japanese, less than 20% are "visual representations," non-phonological "ideograms," or "pictograms" if you will.

More than 80% of all possible kanjis in fact represent sounds of the words by way of semantic-phonetic compounds 形聲字 or phonetic loans 假借字. The common term "ideogram" is also misleading for the same reason; only a small percentage of all kanjis are truely pictographic 象形字. This is more true when considering the on'yomi readings 音讀, and less true with the kun'yomi readings 訓讀.

 

[mr.sumo.snr]

A poll about katakana loanwords, namely their overuse, might be of interest.

As would some opinions as to the effectiveness of Japanese-language study (kokugo) in elementary and high schools.

(Some of the best discussions in my private classes are about the differences between English language education in the UK and Japanese-language study in schools here - it utterly astounds my students, many of them grade school teachers, that an eleven year old in the UK might be given a four-page creative writing assignment for homework - I DO tell them the pages are probably B5 and not A4 !!!!)

 

[Glenn]

Please let me add just one minor point.It is technically misleading to call kanjis "logograms" as opposed to "phonograms," as John DeFrancis had struggled to demystify the misconception.

Of the some 49,000 characters of the Kangxi characters, which is highly significant for Japanese, less than 20% are "phonographic," i.e. non-phonological. More than 80% in fact represent the sounds of the words by way of phonetic-semantic compounds ﾅ蛋ﾃ｣ﾃ淒ｽﾅ｡ or phonetic loans ﾋ愿ｯﾅｽﾃ佛ｽﾅ｡. The common term "ideogram" is also misleading for the same reason; only a small percentage of all kanjis are truely pictographic 窶佛毒蛋ﾅｽﾅ｡. This is more true when considering the on'yomis 窶ｰﾂｹﾃｦﾂ､ﾅｽﾅ｡, and less true with the kun'yomis ﾅ単ﾃｦﾂ､ﾅｽﾅ｡.

Yeah, it's one of those mysteries. I never know what to call them and be 100% accurate. "Characters" apparently isn't good enough, and neither are the more scientific terms from what you say. Anyway, I thought that this was a good chance to post information on the six ways of forming kanji.

 

[Mycernius]

Learning will not be affected at the beginner's level because a lot of people are leaning Japanese only using romaji. But as the learning progresses, learning will become more and more difficult because of the confusion.<--difficult to visualize.

For those of you who have already learned Japanese upto proficiency, of it will affect them negatively. Not just jealous late comers are getting it easy, but one major script is taken away, and they have to relearn new conventions of orthography transcribing all words and expressions containing kanji now in kana-only.

I have found that while I am trying to learn basic japanese that I use a notebook and transcibe the romaji into kana. As I improve I will then try to put the kanji instead of the kana, as and when it is needed. Mind you I think I approached Japanese the wrong way. I looked at the kanji first, then the kana and then the actually language.

 

[Martialartsnovice]

Hey, dont some other languages have more than one script for writing the recording the spoken words. A bit off topic, I know but Ithink this might be a concern for everyone who speaks a foreign language.

 

[Ewok85]

Really it comes down to that Kanji is an integral part of Japanese and has been for a very long time. To exclude it on the grounds that it is difficult to learn is a petty reason. And even if they did what would the solution to the problems that would arise?

 

[lexico]

I have found that while I am trying to learn basic japanese that I use a notebook and transcibe the romaji into kana. As I improve I will then try to put the kanji instead of the kana, as and when it is needed. Mind you I think I approached Japanese the wrong way. I looked at the kanji first, then the kana and then the actually language.

I honestly don't think there is either a right or wrong way to learn Japanese or any language. Whatever sparks your interest, you can rest assured that you are lucky to bw endowed with it. A lot of times someone might want to learn the language, say for business only, while holding a grudge for having to do it. Go for it by all means.

Somewhere in the forum was said, don't worry about not having the best study method and waste valuable study time. Just go with what seems to be adequately reasonable, and you will make progress. You are actually employing two approaches, and that is giving you a strong advantage when compared to people who dread the thought of learning kanji. It's actually fun once you get the hang of it (you probably already know this), and it only gets better, I promise!

 

[Leroy_Brown]

Imagine if the Chinese decided to abolish Kanji

 

[ToMach]

Please let me add just one minor point.It is technically misleading to call kanjis "logograms" as opposed to "phonograms," as John DeFrancis had struggled to demystify the misconception.
Of the some 49,000 characters of the Kangxi characters, which is highly significant for Japanese, less than 20% are "visual representations," non-phonological "ideograms," or "pictograms" if you will.
More than 80% of all possible kanjis in fact represent sounds of the words by way of semantic-phonetic compounds ﾅ蛋ﾃ｣ﾃ淒ｽﾅ｡ or phonetic loans ﾋ愿ｯﾅｽﾃ佛ｽﾅ｡. The common term "ideogram" is also misleading for the same reason; only a small percentage of all kanjis are truely pictographic ﾂ湘崘蛋ﾅｽﾅ｡. This is more true when considering the on'yomi readings 窶ｰﾂｹﾃｦﾂ､, and less true with the kun'yomi readings ﾅ単ﾃｦﾂ､.

Saying that Chinese characters are in majority logograms/logographs is not totally wrong I think : most of them are used to represent whole words or morphemes. But all writing systems using logograms also sometimes use them as phonograms to represent sounds without relation to the meaning of the words they usually represent. Since this is a universal property of logograms, it is not wrong to say that Chinese characters are mostly logograms, even if sometimes they are used as phonograms.
This is different from the etymology and nature of the character : some were created as pictures representing objects or concepts, some encoded both meaning and pronunciation, and few encoded only pronunciation. It doesn't matter which of the six categories a character belongs to, it can be employed in only two ways : as logograph, to represent a speech unit of meaning (word/morpheme) or as phonogram, to represent a speech unit of sound (vowel, consonnant, syllable, mora, etc).
But since Chinese characters were borrowed by several different languages which developped sometimes their own uses, but they still more or less remained the same graphs, linguists refer sometimes simply to "sinographs", which englobes real Chinese characters and Sino-Japanese/Korean/etc ones.

 

[orochi]

Hell no. Half the reason Japanese is as beautiful as it is is because of kanji.