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I'm still not clear on what's motivating you to keep making these essay-length posts, constantly reiterating opinions you've already made, nest0r. They have an urgent tone like you want to effect change, but I've yet to find a single coherent theme aside from your opinion that kanji are basically superior to everything else.
Do you want other languages to adopt glyph-based writing systems? Do you want to force everyone in this thread to accept your opinion? What?
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@jajaaan You need to relax. Smile, be happy.
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@skellyfish Good luck with your finals. First JLPT1 then this? You're quite mad.
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Today again I ran into a barrier imposed by kanji in the research I'm doing, reading a 17th century Genji commentary. It says 宗紙云、此巻を帚木を号する事は... This 宗紙 appears to be either a person or commentary, but being a name, it's impossible to know the reading and so I can't look it up with any accuracy in the Koujien (it's probably not in there; it's not in the Daijirin). This means that just to determine how to read this name I'm going to have to make a trip to the library and consult several books -- looking up names like this is especially annoying because what you typically have to do is first look up 宗, then just go through all the entries starting with 宗 until you come across the right one. I've spent literally an hour just finding the reading of a name. There are a lot of references to obscure people and old writings in this commentary, and at least if they were written in a phonetic system I would be able to immediately know how to read them. (Even with an inefficient alphabetic system like English, even if you don't actually know how to accurately say the word or name, you can look it up without any additional steps. This would even be true if you were studying older periods of the language.)
This same thing came up when I was doing some work last summer in the library, cataloguing a collection of microfiches of Meiji-era publications. 90%, at least, of the time I spent on that job was looking up the reading of names and titles. This project was being worked on by 4 people and they were hoping to have it done within several years. The only reason it was going to take anywhere near that long was the amount of time it took to look up the reading of names. Sometimes you would spend over an hour looking for it and eventually just have to give up and guess.
I don't think this kind of thing occurs in any other language, except maybe Chinese, and even there I think the readings are more predictable. Obviously this is not directly a problem with Chinese characters but more a problem with the way Japan has used them, but still, when I compare these daily annoyances with the supposed stylistic benefits, perhaps it's more understandable why I grow to dislike them more and more. For my purposes, it's not simply a theoretical question whether kanji are more difficult, they clearly are.
Edited: 2009-12-19, 3:45 pm
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Well, that's kind of an extreme reaction. I was just trying to contribute concrete examples of the continuing difficulty of kanji even to someone who is fairly advanced in their studies, rather than just continue in purely theoretical terms.
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Yudan, thanks for sharing this. It does give a concrete example of the problems that kanji can create. Japanese names are kind of a particular case. I've always found it a bit ridiculous that Japanese often can't read each other's names.
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It's not just names, though; I also encounter words that I don't know how to read, and then I either have to go over to the computer and look them up that way (which only sometimes works) or make all kinds of guesses until I figure it out (or just give up). The problem is compounded by the irregular use of okurigana in older texts that sometimes makes it a lot harder to know whether the kun- or on-yomi is being used. In some cases I'm never really sure if I have it right -- I think that in 其花鳥に委。 that the 委 is read as くわし, but it's hard to be sure.
There's no doubt that the internet makes these things a lot easier to figure out, but it still interposes an extra step (and I usually don't work in front of my computer) that is due entirely to the orthography, not due to any difficulty in the language or the idea being expressed.
Edited: 2009-12-19, 8:06 pm
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