Comments on: On Getting Rid of Japanese in Japan

By: Shan

Shan — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 10:49:02 +0000

Interesting how Korean went down a different path. Even in the last 10 years, I’ve noticed the small amount of Hanja they used even back then disappearing at an extremely rapid rate now.

By: ikalwewe

ikalwewe — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 09:41:31 +0000

Hi. Great blog. I wrote a short paper in college all in hiragana because Kanji was hard. The teacher was pissed!

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 08:43:22 +0000

I love your blog, and this entry, but to most Chinese speakers/readers, kanji/Chinese characters still look like stuff. The weirdness isn’t because of copying the weird cracks on the turtle shell (that’s likely just history being rewritten for legend’s sake). The oldest characters are clearly simplified pictures http://www.hanzim.com/Images/charEv.gif Over time they’ve been simplified and revised so much that many no longer look like the original, but many still do.

By: Urashima Joe

Urashima Joe — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:29:35 +0000

I recommend this article.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-foreign-language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem

Part of the problem with Kanji is how they are taught, especially to foreigners, not the characters themselves.

By: kamo

kamo — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 01:10:57 +0000

I love this stuff. You’re absolutely bang on about the language communities investing so much in acquiring ‘prestige’ forms of language that they’e unwilling to give up that investment (keigo being another example). You see similar stuff in academic circles, where despite claims that ‘more accurate vocabulary increases precision’ very often the jargon acts as a shibboleth allowing covert filtering of people who are ‘allowed’ to join the discussion.

I went back to look at some of my beginners Japanese textbooks recently. They’re all in hiragana and they are so hard to read now I know a few kanji. I just don’t recognize those words any more and, as you hint at, picking out word boundaries without the visual clues offered by kanji is a nightmare. Especially if you don’t know all the words…

I love the look of the kanji. I love that the educational system devotes to much time to what is an essentially aesthetic pursuit, but yeah, I do often wonder if that time might not be better spent.

Language Log had an interesting discussion on this not so long ago – http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4214