(2015-11-24, 5:58 am)Digix Wrote: It does not need to happen today, but it will happen eventually it is already hapepning
I think it is even likely that japan will disappear from earth by itself
they will likely be forced to import lots of workforce and that will make them to abandon kanji 

teaching children is one thing but teaching adults is another, and if there will be lots of "iliterate" people around they will be forced to adjust accordingly.

Show me a country that has changed their language to accommodate immigrants instead of just expecting them to pick up the language in use.

The best that Japan would do in this situation is make English the second official language of the country which is already pretty much the case already. The Japanese language isn't going to change without something drastic like a war or some massive upheaval in politics.

The problem is this isn't a topic for most Japanese; no one is complaining about the difficulty of Kanji in a country with a literacy rate of like 99%. So this idea of 'gradual shifting,' who the hell is going to do it? This is like a house with all the rooms painted green. Everyone in the house likes the color and has no problem. All the visitors that visit though complain about the color or think it'd be better if some of the rooms weren't painted green. Since none of those people live in the house, no one is going to pay attention to their opinion.

Quote:Show me a country that has changed their language to accommodate immigrants instead of just expecting them to pick up the language in use. 

that would be pretty much every big country.
it is inevitable destiny for every language
Japanese language itself is result of such accommodation of Chinese immigrants.

Quote:The best that Japan would do in this situation is make English the second official language of the country which is already pretty much the case already. The Japanese language isn't going to change without something drastic like a war or some massive upheaval in politics. 

There is just no need to change anything, all what is required is to shift usage patterns.
and this is happening, 
like for example Japanese shifted adjective use from "i" to "na" form to accommodate western style where adjective comes first.

Quote:The problem is this isn't a topic for most Japanese; no one is complaining about the difficulty of Kanji in a country with a literacy rate of like 99%. So this idea of 'gradual shifting,' who the hell is going to do it? This is like a house with all the rooms painted green. Everyone in the house likes the color and has no problem. All the visitors that visit though complain about the color or think it'd be better if some of the rooms weren't painted green. Since none of those people live in the house, no one is going to pay attention to their opinion.

This is obviously not true.
First, children cannot read all those kanji. So use of kanji excludes young people from your audience.
young adults also will face problems with some obscure symbols  and even people with lots of experience will often face some unknown symbol.

I think kanji use is nothing more than manifestation of national pride , because there are no advantages to use it.
I am not sure, but as I know people do not even write kanji they simply type phonetically and computers do all translation for them and only practical reason why they are used at all is to separate words.
also reverse is true because those who don't read kanji just use computers to convert it into phonetic version.

it is just matter of time when this useless step will be ditched.  
or alternatively  it will be just irrelevant because digital text is easily convertible into any form and people will just end typing giberish they cant understand.

Considering my opinion It is not like I can change anything or I care much. because even if I could change everything I wouldn't be able to enjoy fruits of my change.
I just see and state that japanese people are using extremely retarded and ineffective writing system.  and evolution weeds out such idiotic things.

(2015-11-24, 7:46 am)Digix Wrote: Japanese language itself is result of such accommodation of Chinese immigrants.

?? When did this happen?

Quote:like for example Japanese shifted adjective use from "i" to "na" form to accommodate western style where adjective comes first.

I'm having a hard time believing this post is serious.

Quote:?? When did this happen?

when Chinese writing system was adopted in japan.
also when romaji writing system was adopted later

Quote:I'm having a hard time believing this post is serious.

Well, I can be mistaken but from what I found while learning japanese gramar is that "na" adjectives are non japanse style.

The Chinese writing system was brought to Japan through Korea, and had nothing to do with Chinese immigration -- it was the importing of what they perceived to be a superior culture. And they never actually learned Chinese; from the beginning they were reading the Chinese in 訓読 style as Japanese. The Japanese had very little contact directly with China until modern times. From time to time they did send embassies and some Japanese went to China, but China rarely visited Japan, and there certainly wasn't any mass immigration from China to Japan.

As to your second point, -i adjectives can come before or after the noun. 新しい本 or 本（が）新しい are normal Japanese, and this kind of modification has been around since the earliest written Japanese. な adjectives are today mostly Sino-Japanese words, but the な derives from older Japanese なる, which is used with native Japanese words as well as Chinese loans.

For instance, the first chapter of the Tale of Genji has:
あはれなる者 (a pitiful creature)
はなやかなる御方々 (splendid people)
清らなる玉の男御子 (a beautiful boy like a jewel)
めづらかなる稚児 (A rare child)
うつくしげなる人 (A person who appears beautiful)
おろそかなること (Solemn things)
ほのかなる御声 (A faint voice)

Of these adjectives, あわれ, 華やか, おろそか, and ほのか are all still in the modern language as な adjectives.

So this has nothing to do with Western (or Chinese) usage.

Quote:The Chinese writing system was brought to Japan through Korea, and had nothing to do with Chinese immigration

Someone it brought to Japan and that is immigration, people were coming to japan. It is not like they had internet.
there is no need for mass immigration.

Also they did learned Chinese, because kanji is nothing else than Chinese language itself. it is not just a writing system it is a language. each kanji has specific meaning while pronunciation is left for a reader to decide.
eventually they modified Chinese language into half Japanese making it simply ridiculous and all they need to do is ditch last bits of Chinese legacy and shift to pure Japanese.

Quote:and this kind of modification has been around since the earliest written Japanese.

Well I can't argue on that much because I don't know better than my source.
But written Japanese is pretty common and at that time it was very much influenced by Chinese.


By the way i can confirm same thing about my own language, which was strongly influenced by Russian language and grammar.
it is not like we needed extreme immigration but impact was pretty significant.
people simply adopt things that seem to be usefull.
now I can observe pretty much same happening with English language which is making lots of impact on my language. 
We already ditched use of some letters  and adopted strange writing patterns, so I guess within 100 years my language will be very different than it is now.

(2015-11-24, 9:50 am)Digix Wrote: But written Japanese is pretty common and at that time it was very much influenced by Chinese.

Japan didn't have a written language before they adopted Chinese characters as their writing system.  Adopting a writing system to fill a void is much different than replacing something 'good enough' with something marginally better.

Japan hasn't even harmonized it's electrical system.  You'd think there would be much more of an incentive to do that(and less people needed to cooperate) than change their writing system.

(2015-11-24, 9:50 am)Digix Wrote: Also they did learned Chinese, because kanji is nothing else than Chinese language itself. it is not just a writing system it is a language. each kanji has specific meaning while pronunciation is left for a reader to decide.
eventually they modified Chinese language into half Japanese making it simply ridiculous and all they need to do is ditch last bits of Chinese legacy and shift to pure Japanese.

Chinese writing is almost completely separate from the Chinese languages. How in the world do you think a country with multiple languages communicates with ease (at least among the literate)? Through the mutual use of the same Chinese characters. Japanese uses Chinese (based) scripts because Japanese didn't have any script before the import of kanji. They use Sino-Japanese words either for concepts that didn't exist in Japanese or because they were cooler. Kana are modified kanji, the simplified numeric kanji are just that: simplified.

Digix Wrote:I dont klnow why japanese people can uses paces, But so far they use alternation of katakana and hiragana to simulate spaces.

Have you ever looked at, say, Pokemon games? There are other examples of course, but the Japanese can use spaces...

Digix Wrote:This is just political issue of strong nationalism.

Yeah, why don't we just take that to the roots and say that they only speak Japanese because of strong nationalism? I mean, they're like the evil nationalistic nations of the 20th century, forcing their citizens to be able to read their language... In fact, the only reason we haven't developed a single language for all nations is because of nationalism and not because it's a complete pain in the ass for everyone.

Digix Wrote:Simply stop teaching people certain Kanji and this will force publishers to switch to Hiragana or add furigana.
eventually kanji will just die by itself.

I think someone else already said this, but this is already proven to not be the case, since non-jouyou kanji are used regularly in all sorts of media outside of the news. This isn't an exact analogy (words instead of characters), but have you ever heard of the Up Goer Five? http://xkcd.com/1133/
Now, imagine we prescribed that only those 'ten hundred' words be used in English... Anybody who suggested it would be called stupid.

Actually, let's use a better example; this one should be a bit closer. You know those classical roots that we use in English nearly the same as kanji are used in Japanese? Well, how would you like to remove all of those, because they take up too much time in English class that could be used for learning English. Let's just chuck them and switch to Anglish instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic...in_English
I mean, this is actual English we're talking about, not some horror of a language that was developed to give our conquerors and trades partners an easier time. I mean, what other reason could there have been to adopt all those words? And anyway, if we went back to Old English, it'd make so much more sense to everyone. Oh, but it'd have to be the language used pre-Beowulf, because there were Christian influences in that, which means dirty foreign words from Greece and Rome, but that's infinitely better than the horrific beast of a language that developed during Chaucer's time, right? I mean, it hardly even looks like English anymore! And lets not even consider Modern English, because nearly the entire thing is developed from foreign influences...

Oh, but I've gotten off track with this strange obsessiveness about dirtied English (ignore the fact that I'm not bothering to only use true English words, just because); we were supposed to be talking about Classical Roots, which we've used to develop naming conventions for several aspects of our language, especially sciencey things, because of the predictable way in which we use them. These things are stupid, because they're not really English. We should switch to using real English in medicine, despite all this time using the current vocabulary without problems.

I think I'm done with that now... Do you at least see the level of crazy required for a native user of a language to say "we must change all of this!"? Can you perhaps see why it takes drastic upheaval to change something that seems so basic to outsiders? Kanji is a part of Japanese; Classical Roots are a part of English; removing either of them can only be seen as incredibly pointless and stupid to people who already know the language. You mentioned nationalism before; it'd take extreme nationalists to remove Chinese-based characters from Japanese (that is to say, all of the characters) and replace them with something else; they'd have to be in power; they'd have to force it upon the people.

Outside of crazies (extreme nationalists, purists, etc.), it's only foreigners who dislike the way a language works. Everybody hates English. They complain that the grammar is inconsistent, that there are too many words, that spelling doesn't imply pronunciation, etc. No one says that stuff about their own language when talking about their own ability in it.
People who successfully learn English? They don't care.
Every time I look at comments about learning Japanese (by beginners), they complain about kanji. They complain that there's too many of them, that they can be read to many ways, that they're a pain to write, etc.
I don't see anyone that succeeded complaining about them. In fact, I've seen a few people go from "I hate kanji!" to "Kanji are great!", including myself.

In the shortest, sweetest (, and coarsest) way I can come up with right now:
Get good scrub.

(2015-11-24, 1:44 pm)yogert909 Wrote:

(2015-11-24, 9:50 am)Digix Wrote: But written Japanese is pretty common and at that time it was very much influenced by Chinese.

Japan didn't have a written language before they adopted Chinese characters as their writing system.  Adopting a writing system to fill a void is much different than replacing something 'good enough' with something marginally better.

Japan hasn't even harmonized it's electrical system.  You'd think there would be much more of an incentive to do that(and less people needed to cooperate) than change their writing system.

Why replace anything? They do not need to replace anything they have to do is change usage pattern
Japnese are already using nearly pure phonetic writing system with inclusion of some random kanji symbols  at random places
No changes effort or cooperation is required. 
This is purely individual choice. 
All what matters is when individual people will decide not to use kanji or use less of it.

I do not even think that getting rid of all kanji is good idea, because some very popular symbols could be still left in use to make writing shorter  just like english people sometimes use symbol "2" intead of word "too" or "to"

Um, Digix?  You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

(2015-11-24, 6:00 pm)James736 Wrote: Um, Digix?  You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Thank you.  

@Digix

When you first start out studying, it's incredibly easy to wish that Kanji had never even been conceived of.  Truth be told, I hated them when I first started out and figured that if Pokemon could handle no Kanji, then every other form of writing could and should do the same.

I was more than a little bit clueless at the time.  

Now, over five years into my language-learning journey, I couldn't love them more.  And those Pokemon games I thought were the pinnacle of what Japanese should be?  Well, I'm now playing Omega Ruby in Kanji mode and actually wishing it used a few more Kanji than it does.  While the other members here have explained the benefits of such a system far more effectively than I ever could, the fact remains that Kanji serve as the fundamental basis of meaning upon which a good chunk of the language rests. 

They're daunting, maddening, and occasionally nonsensical, but at the same time, they're incredibly unique, masterfully constructed and among the most aesthetically-pleasing forms of writing in my opinion. I didn't come to this revelation overnight, but I can say that I tried to be open-minded about them as I learned.  And you know what?  That open-mindedness ended up being one of the biggest benefits for me in my studies, both in Japanese and in other areas.

You're more than welcome to have your own opinion on the issue and share it freely, but to be honest, your tone comes across as somewhat arrogant and even, well... 偉そう。While I realize that English isn't your first language so this might not have been your intention, it's still worth being aware of.  I applaud you for having the guts to post on an English-speaking forum, and I think it's important that topics like this are discussed openly instead of being dismissed on the spot.  That being said, in terms of mere respect, it's important that you try your best not to instinctively dismiss what other people are saying as well.  Even among language learners, methodology and opinion can differ greatly, so especially in a space like this, respect is 肝要.

Quote:Chinese writing is almost completely separate from the Chinese languages. 

Yes you are absolutely correct,  and  Japan was using Chinese  symbol language to communicate with china and each other.

however eventually this changed and changes will not stop there.

China will also ditch their writing system sooner or later it is inevitable.

Quote:Have you ever looked at, say, Pokemon games? There are other examples of course, but the Japanese can use spaces...

I don't play Pokemon games. and this is irrelevant, because yes they can use spaces, but they just dot use them for unknown reasons. maybe they are allergic to spaces who knows.

Or maybe they think that meaning of space is pause so they use spaces as synonyms of comas.

Quote: In fact, the only reason we haven't developed a single language for all nations is because of nationalism and not because it's a complete pain in the ass for everyone.

yes precisely because word is full of grammar Nazis who attack everyone trying to make a change.
maybe you cant even imagine that but where I live we even have language commission which is taking care of purity of language and even runs constant propaganda on how properly we must speak, if you are public person and you wont speak properly you may even be fined.
English is similar, because if you try to publish something in not perfect classical English you face wrath of grammar Nazis. who can't just ignore what you wrote they must actively mix you with dirt.

Quote:Now, imagine we prescribed that only those 'ten hundred' words be used in English... Anybody who suggested it would be called stupid. 

there is no need to prescribe anything or limit anything, just let people do what their want.

You completely miss my point.
languages develop and change naturally, if that development is not stopped by fascist grammar Nazis, 
you do not need to tell people how to write and peak they will select what is best on their own.
You do not need armed police force smashing people with sticks because they used wrong word.

kanji has absolutely nothing to do with japan Japanese language or culture it is nothing more than relic which will eventually die because it is simply obsolete and meaningless waste of time.
And once again you do not need to replace anything it is already replaced. There are plenty of books and other stuff where kanji is not used. where it is used it is nothing more than annoyance. You cant even type them on keyboard.
Abolishing kanji would be  less noticeable than abolishing capital letters in English.

Quote:I don't see anyone that succeeded complaining about them. In fact, I've seen a few people go from "I hate kanji!" to "Kanji are great!", including myself.

That is because you want to be part of the club and do not dare to go against the rules.
people rarely criticize system they live in.
You simply like to feel superiority and do not want to admit that all what you learned is was completely useless waste of time. Can you tell any reason why Kanji is great? besides your ability to feel superior against those who cant read it.

Quote:You're more than welcome to have your own opinion on the issue and share it freely, but to be honest, your tone comes across as somewhat arrogant 

What exactly do you mean by that? Am I supposed to praise something I hate or what?
I do not learn Japanese because I enjoy that process or because i enjoy complexity and of writing systems.

my goal is to learn it so that i can read and understand what is written and spoken and nothing more, language is nothing more than tool for me. I am not even trying to learn Japanese I want to understand it and I want tools to be maximally efficient.

I can easily see that this forum has more members who actually learn Japanese because they enjoy learning itself, but I do not see any reason to get angry on each other just because of our different views.

I just expressed my opinion and It is not like I am forcing it onto anyone, neither I can change anything.
However I can see that people who see language as tool instead of seeing it as piece of art are majority.

Unfortunately I failed to find any explanations of kanji advantages, besides supposed problems of homophones which is not a problem at all.

Quote:They're daunting, maddening, and occasionally nonsensical, but at the same time, they're incredibly unique, masterfully constructed and among the most aesthetically-pleasing forms of writing in my opinion. I didn't come to this revelation overnight, but I can say that I tried to be open-minded about them as I learned.  And you know what?  That open-mindedness ended up being one of the biggest benefits for me in my studies, both in Japanese and in other areas.

Language is not supposed to be "aesthetically-pleasing" language must be efficient, flexible, with right amount of redundancy for error recovery.

(2015-11-24, 6:34 pm)Digix Wrote: there is no need to prescribe anything or limit anything, just let people do what their want.

There is so much to pick from from all the posts but I'll just pick this.

You seem to be of the thought that Japanese people are going to some how come to the idea that they will get rid of Kanji, and that they'll come to this realization using your Second Language learner line of reasoning. The fact of the matter is, they won't! This has been repeated over and over again: Japanese do not have trouble learning kanji on the scale that L2 learners do. They do not suffer from the same problems that you as a second language learner of Japanese do. The only things they have to struggle with are learning to write the characters and remembering the pronunciation (ie: recognition). They do not struggle with grammar, they do not struggle with the meaning of a word. If they know the pronunciation, they know the word.

Learning kanji to Japanese people is like learning to spell a word in English/French/German/etc. You don't see many first language English learners complaining about how hard it was to learn the spellings of so many words in English once they are adults. You don't see English speakers talking about standardizing phonetic spellings and then changing all words to match those spelling, do you? Even when so many people actually have bad spelling and rely heavily on spell checkers to help them write documents.

What do you think the likelihood of the US, the UK, and Australia changing to a phonetic spelling system for English words is? Do you think propaganda would actually work to change that? If so, then I think you vastly overestimate how much people think this is a real problem. If not, then why the hell do you think the Japanese would care?

EDIT: Actually I do want to comment on this.

Quote: language must be efficient, flexible, with right amount of redundancy for error recovery.

Most languages that have arisen over the years through natural processes do not have all of these traits. They may have 1 or 2, but not all. Most languages probably can't be described as "efficient."

(2015-11-24, 7:06 pm)Digix Wrote: What exactly do you mean by that? Am I supposed to praise something I hate or what?

...

Language is not supposed to be "aesthetically-pleasing" language must be efficient, flexible, with right amount of redundancy for error recovery.

You don't have to praise something that you don't like of course, but throwing around flat out insults like 'nonsense', 'idiotic', and 'retarded' does not make your point any stronger. While all the insults have been directed at the writing system itself, such accusations certainly make it seem like those adjective apply to the Japanese themselves. After all, who but idiots would use an idiotic writing system? Whether that implication was intentional or not, it's certainly going to be inferred. Being a little restrained in the use of such terms would go a long way towards softening your tone.

At the same time that you're giving out such forceful judgements, you're also showing that you haven't studying anything about the actual history and development of the Japanese language - or the history and development of languages in general. Studying a foreign language is one thing, studying etymology and language history is quite another thing, and the first does not give insight into the second. (Studying etymology and language history does give a -little- insight into the modern language itself, of course, but not enough so for that to be an efficient or sensible way to get better with a language. It is interesting though, to many people.) If you want to convince people of your point, you should have solid facts to back you up. A lot of the history of the kanji is available on the web, and the rest can be found in books that are not terribly expensive.

As for being aesthetically pleasing or not - well, of course language need to be functional first and foremost. And Japanese is functional, of course. Millions of people carry out their education, daily lives, and business affairs in Japanese every day. However, a language does also have to be aesthetically pleasing. There's no practical reason for this, but nonetheless, in fact people do write poems, novels, songs, calligraphic works, and so on. It's essential to have aesthetically pleasing elements to a language for that to be done, and the more those aesthetically pleasing elements are brought into popular consciousness by artists, the more those elements are reflected in mundane use of the language. This is an inevitable part of language development, and whether you appreciate those aesthetics or not, for a great number of people the aesthetics are an important and indispensable part of the language.

Quote:You don't have to praise something that you don't like of course, but throwing around flat out insults like 'nonsense', 'idiotic', and 'retarded' does not make your point any stronger. While all the insults have been directed at the writing system itself, such accusations certainly make it seem like those adjective apply to the Japanese themselves. After all, who but idiots would use an idiotic writing system? Whether that implication was intentional or not, it's certainly going to be inferred. Being a little restrained in the use of such terms would go a long way towards softening your tone.

There is absolutely no reason to assume that those words are directed towards any people.
only reason to call them idiots is probably not for getting rid of idiocies in their language. But this is not exclusive problem of Japanese people. In my language we have exact same problems and problem is not stupidity, but grammar Nazis and elitists I mentioned before. When i talk to people many of them admit that changes should be nice but they are afraid to say it loud and attempts to change written language are typically seen as illiteracy.

For example my English language lacks "a" "the" articles mostly because I only use them when they have meaning not all time,  but pushing that style into wider use would be quite problematic because It is seen as mistake instead of deliberate choice.

Quote:If you want to convince people of your point, you should have solid facts to back you up. A lot of the history of the kanji is available on the web, and the rest can be found in books that are not terribly expensive.

History of kanji is pretty much irrelevant in this discussion and obviously  I know basic history.
However nobody address my claim that kanji is simply redundant and excessive feature which lacks any real purpose.
It is not contributing for purposes of language besides probably making some puns and construction of subliminal messages where you can give alternative meaning to nearly any word you want.


I am trying to study etymology as supplementary tools to extract meanings.
in fact I know that kanjis re not just symbols but entire words  of 1-4 letters
so originally it was not that stupid writing system because you only needed to learn something like 200 radicals and use them to construct desired meanings.
however eventually everything went terribly wrong as it happened with most big languages.
now symbols lost their meaning and turned into complete nonsense.

Quote:There's no practical reason for this, but nonetheless, in fact people do write poems, novels, songs, calligraphic works, and so on. It's essential to have aesthetically pleasing elements to a language for that to be done, and the more those aesthetically pleasing elements are brought into popular consciousness by artists, the more those elements are reflected in mundane use of the language. 

Once again, nobody is obligated to obey anyone.
If you want to do all that pointless stuff ,it is your choice but most people dont care about all that and it is just equaly wrong to deny them right of choice. There are people who use cars for transportation and there are people who collect them as pieces of art and praise designs of some ancient car used in times of  WW1 when any sane person would say that such car is simply horrible in all possible aspects.
I am well aware that japan has some interest in calligraphy but I am pretty sure this is pretty obscure interest nowadays when people are forgetting how to use pen and even paper itself is getting phased out.


As I already said there is no need to pass laws baning kanjis with treat of prison time.
people can just stop bothering in using them.
Juts think yourself, how do you write kanji text here?
there are no kanji keys on keyboard, you are typing in romaji or other phonetic way, and use computer to translate it into some giberish. 
So what exactly is purpose of that conversion? why you wont just leave it as you typed originally?

Quote:Japanese do not have trouble learning kanji on the scale that L2 learners do. They do not suffer from the same problems that you as a second language learner of Japanese do. The only things they have to struggle with are learning to write the characters and remembering the pronunciation (ie: recognition). They do not struggle with grammar, they do not struggle with the meaning of a word. If they know the pronunciation, they know the word.

I am not suffering from that either, what I suffer is use of  kanji along with  hiragana  because I have to learn 2 languages. kanji and phonetic. japanese gramar is prety simple and you do not need it most of the time.
if it was pure kanji I could just learn meanings and ignore phonetic.
In current situation i know some kanjis but dont know phonetic, and in other times I know phonetic but don't know kanji. 
and what piss me off is that people are randomly using both forms even in same text. some even go as far to mix hiragana ant katakana in one word like this でス.

I think learning pronunciation of kanji is stupid idea in first place, because it is easier to learn meaning and translate it into pronunciation of known Japanese word later. 
sometimes kanji even get useful because you can deduce meaning of some word from combination of meanings so you need to learn less words. also kanji radicals themselves provide some information about their meaning.

But nothing of that is useful for Japanese people who do not need meaning. 

Quote:What do you think the likelihood of the US, the UK, and Australia changing to a phonetic spelling system for English words is? Do you think propaganda would actually work to change that? If so, then I think you vastly overestimate how much people think this is a real problem. If not, then why the hell do you think the Japanese would care?

Haven't you ever talked to Chinese or Arabian people? they often use phonetic spelling system for English.
If teachers stopped treating phonetic spelling in English school as punishable mistakes it would probably take over everywhere

Quote:Most languages that have arisen over the years through natural processes do not have all of these traits. They may have 1 or 2, but not all. Most languages probably can't be described as "efficient."

Actually this is not right, all languages begin as pretty effcient and sound structures that are easy to learn, but eventually they get fused together into nonsensical hybrids.

Japanese language is still pretty good by itself in terms of those requirements.  I think Russian language is best of all. my native language is too excessive but has very high error tolerance since all words are like independent sentences. 
an English is very bad language in all aspects and it is getting worse each year.

(2015-11-24, 9:16 pm)Digix Wrote: There is absolutely no reason to assume that those words are directed towards any people.

...

If you want to do all that pointless stuff

...

use computer to translate it into some giberish. 

You asked why you were coming across as arrogant, and I attempted to provide some constructive criticism as to why that was and how you could mend it. You can argue all you want, but when you continue to use loaded terms, which you are continuing to do by calling the entirety of language arts 'pointless' and standard Japanese writing style 'gibberish', well, I don't think you understood my point at all.

It's also contrary to fact to say that 'most people' don't care about language arts. Granted, most people care primarily about language arts to the extent of movie and television dialogue and song lyrics, but those too are language arts, and most people -do- care about those things. My entire point about aesthetics, in fact, is that because people enjoy aesthetically pleasing language arts, that languages will be affected by that.

Language is not engineered, it's a natural phenomenon. People communicate with each other using the language in the same way that others use the language. Of course, with a very rigid government and state education you can force change into a language from the top down, but aside from that language grows organically and not according to any plan or system. You can rail all you like that it isn't as efficient or logical as it could be, but that won't change the nature of language. Whether you like it or not, that nature includes aesthetic elements and emotional attachments, traditional writing systems and spellings... and people reacting badly to an excessive use of perjorative terms.

Digix Wrote:That is because you want to be part of the club and do not dare to go against the rules.
people rarely criticize system they live in.

Uh, have you seen the way I've expressed my opinions on this forum? Even in real life, I'm hardly the kind of person to want to fit in no matter what; I only like things that are efficient and effective. Written Japanese without kanji doesn't work well.

Digix Wrote:You simply like to feel superiority and do not want to admit that all what you learned is was completely useless waste of time. Can you tell any reason why Kanji is great? besides your ability to feel superior against those who cant read it.

It's much easier to read Japanese when there are kanji. This isn't as much of a problem for natives, but it does serve to compress information for them. As a foreigner, I find it much easier to read Japanese with kanji because it requires less thought than kana only, and I (along with others I've spoken to) have found it much easier to learn vocabulary with kanji. As for the kana, I find them more difficult to read in large chunks, because they're easier to confuse and take longer to look at (mainly just things that get dakuten; it's not a problem with normal Japanese script, which includes kanji, but a page full of kana, especially if it's not perfectly clear, can lead to some pretty basic mistakes; though they are quickly corrected, that's a huge waste of time); romaji is even worse, since it approximately doubles the length of kana only text (not always applicable to single words) and makes easy recognition nigh impossible.

Kanji wins by these points:
-Compression:
Which of these is most compact? 社長　しゃちょう　shachou; as far as character count goes, we first trade two characters for five (you might argue three, but I'd say you're wrong, since the change in size is relatively recent and they're still individual characters), then five for seven. You can argue that the romaji is actually more like seven-halves, because they're half-width characters, but in this case, I'm defining compression by the number of characters needed to convey the same word.

-Distinction:
Which includes both the loose meanings they carry as well as their ability to easily distinguish between words, whether they're pronounced similarly or not: 社長　V　部長 or しゃちょう　V　ぶちょう or shachou V buchou. Just at a glance, the first two are easier to distinguish and assign meaning to. You might argue that, if one of those other systems was the one in regular use and had been studied, that it would be true for those as well; I won't argue that's not the case, but I will argue that the first set, objectively, is the most distinctive (they also convey the relationship between these words more directly than the others).

As for me feeling superior... I feel superior to brats that complain about such petty things as learning something they don't need. I also feel superior to people who complain rather than trying to reach their goals. You know that otherwise healthy fat guy who constantly complains about being fat, but still takes the elevator to the second floor and drives his car to go next door? Yeah, that's what you sound like.
Is that a bit mean of me? Maybe, but if you're going to claim that I must have some kind of superiority complex to hold my opinion (especially with that nasty tone), I don't feel any qualms about expressing my impression of you being a whiny brat.

Digix Wrote:my goal is to learn it so that i can read and understand what is written and spoken and nothing more, language is nothing more than tool for me. I am not even trying to learn Japanese I want to understand it and I want tools to be maximally efficient.

If you don't want to learn Japanese, why learn it? I can't think of any reasonable situation you could be in where you'd need to learn Japanese, especially since you already know English. If it's for business, someone can be hired (or communications can be with someone who knows English; there's no way that learning another language is cheaper); if it's for entertainment, much of it has been translated either officially or unofficially (and there's always other content); if it's for speaking to random people... then that counts as wanting to learn the language, because there are plenty of people in the world.
Basically, you either want to learn the language or you don't.

I'm not trying to discourage you from learning Japanese, but I do have to wonder what odd motives someone could have to learn something like this when they hate it.

As for grammar and spelling nazis... You don't understand the purpose of written language, do you? It's a separate entity that's meant to make communication at a distance easy. If you let people just change shit around at whim, you defeat the entire purpose. That doesn't mean that written language doesn't change over time (change in common expressions and incorporation of slang happens all the time, especially in fiction; but it's still used in an easily understood way) or that individual writing styles can't vary, but it does mean that standardized grammar and spelling is needed for it to be easily understood outside of local communities. You know what, I'm just going to leave this here, now that we can embed videos (go to 0:54 for a good one):

EDIT: Fabrice, the video embed broke
EDIT2: fixed itself...

The benefits of Kanji have been noted already in this thread, or in links people have posted. If you don't care to read them, why bother arguing?

Kanji were a giant pain in the ass, until they became second nature. And they -will- become second nature if you read enough. Just as much as the alphabet is. No bloody way would I want to read Japanese only written in Hiragana. It would be like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

Just compare how many kanji are in use with how many compounds are in use. For every kanji you learn you unlock quick understanding of all kinds of kanji compounds.

[Zgarbas]

Digix: if you think that you have to learn 2 languages, 'phonetic' and'kanji', then how do you feel about non-kanji languages where spelling differs considerably from pronounciation (English and French). I was talking to my Hispanic friend the other day; they don't phonetically diferentiate b from v, so you can imagine his surprise when he ra across 'baseline' and 'vaseline': not a single letter matches the sound. Also, the abundance of homographs. Does that count as two languages?

(2015-11-24, 9:57 pm)Digix Wrote: I am not suffering from that either, what I suffer is use of  kanji along with  hiragana  because I have to learn 2 languages. kanji and phonetic. japanese gramar is prety simple and you do not need it most of the time.
if it was pure kanji I could just learn meanings and ignore phonetic.
In current situation i know some kanjis but dont know phonetic, and in other times I know phonetic but don't know kanji. 

I get that English probably isn't your first language, but this makes no sense to me. This sounds exactly like what I was talking about when I said "things L2 learners suffer from".

When you learn a compound kanji word, like 問題 you probably learn it means "problem" (that's the semantic meaning) and then you also have to learn that its pronunciation is もんだい. If writing is important to you then you also have to learn that as well. To a Japanese person, Pronunciation and Semantic meaning are intertwined because they know もんだい means problem so all they have to do is associate that with the the Kanji. They get to drop an entire stage of learning when dealing with Kanji that most L2 learners can't, because you don't have a relationship between words (just words, not kanji) and meanings.

To illustrate this more clearly.
Japanese have to learn:　問題　＝　もんだい
You have to learn: 問題　＝　もんだい　＝　problem (or whatever it is in your L1)

This gets even harder for some words because you have to keep track of long vowels like.
You: 兄弟　= "kyodai"　=　きょうだい = siblings (or brothers)
Japanese: 兄弟　＝　きょうだい
Pronunciation wise きょだい　and きょうだい can sound nearly identical and unless you, as a L2 learner, are specifically encoding/learning the long vowels as well, this will trip you up. To the Japanese though, they don't struggle with this, they intuitively know its a long vowel.

(2015-11-25, 12:48 am)Zgarbas Wrote: Digix: if you think that you have to learn 2 languages, 'phonetic' and'kanji', then how do you feel about non-kanji languages where spelling differs considerably from pronounciation (English and French). I was talking to my Hispanic friend the other day; they don't phonetically diferentiate b from v, so you can imagine his surprise when he ra across 'baseline' and 'vaseline': not a single letter matches the sound. Also, the abundance of homographs. Does that count as two languages?

English pronunciation is not so different from spelling because there are some rules to convert spelling into pronunciation.
for example "i" in english is not i, but "ai", "a" is not "a" but "e",  "e" is "i" and so on
 I still have to learn 2 languages or there is simply no time to apply those rules. but in I come across some word I don't know I can reverse engineer it or produce pronounciation from text

Homograps obviusly do not count as another language, because they make less words no more.

@Digix Wow, just wow. I know there's no non-condescending way of saying this, but, like, are you for real? If you're trolling, then congrats, you really got people going there! On the off chance you're serious, a word of advice: next time you try to use facts to back up arguments in favour of a radical proposition, stick to factual information that can't be disproved in a single google search. There are way too many examples to rip into (and boy, do I want to rip into all of them!), and the most glaring ones have already been addressed by others, but if I force myself to limit to just one:

Quote:like for example Japanese shifted adjective use from "i" to "na" form to accommodate western style where adjective comes first.

yudantaiteki has already showed why the part about the Japanese language deliberately "shifting" this particular usage in order to "accomodate" anything has no connection to reality, but even the part I highlighted is easily disproved. Behold. Apparently about half of the languages of Europe (and of the Americas, on the off chance you're counting their indigenous languages as "Western" as well) have the adjective follow the noun, while the only place with a major concentration of this feature in the greater Northeast Asian region is in the southwest of China, with the rest of the region dominated by adjective-noun languages. So, no part of that statement is true. If you're seriously aiming at changing people's minds, do try to avoid such howlers at the very least. (If you're just trolling though, rock on, you're doing great!)

Oh, also:

Quote:I think Russian language is best of all.

I'm a native speaker of Russian, but I don't really have anything serious to say in response to this. LOL, just LOL. Not sure if you know this, but not only is the belief that English is far more efficient than Russian pretty widespread among native speakers of the latter, some Russian "patriots" actually take this as a point of pride, as another example of the the great Russian Soul contrasting with the cold, calculating, soulless Anglo rationalism. Don't be surprised if your praise comes across as an insult to such people.

(2015-11-25, 5:09 am)vonPeterhof Wrote: @Digix Wow, just wow. I know there's no non-condescending way of saying this, but, like, are you for real? If you're trolling,

I'm glad I'm not the only person. I couldn't shake the feeling that he's trolling. But then there are a few people on this board that seem to project their own problems with Kanji onto the Japanese themselves. So who knows.