If all y'all kanji haters wait around long enough, it just might happen. I wouldn't be surprised.


At least s/he'd be idiomatic.

Maybe true. Many countries (like here) have Laws that make TV stations have to record in the common dialect for the country etc. Since, for example, here all is štokavski, ekavski, common accentuation, who ever was to learn Serbian from TV shows (not one of those country and folk shows) would learn standard Serbian.

But then again, you are right about that one!

I doubt kanji will be abolished in our lifetime. People have been complaining about English orthography since at least Benjamin Franklin's day, and we haven't radically altered it yet.

I wouldn't mind a situation like Korean where characters are optional but not obligatory (in South Korea, that is. North Korea doesn't use them at all, correct?).

U dont think tht some ppl hav made radicl changes 2 englsh spelling? I luv the way most ppl can undrstnd this typ of talk evn if they dont kno specific words or spellings. Of corse some words r spelld out fuly or with a "useles letrs" like the k in kno 2 diferentiate from no. A lot of ppl teens or not talk like this informaly bcuz its easier. Just bcuz its not propr doesnt mean its not ther.

I really don't know about Japanese but you couldn't make a phonetic (or different in general) English spelling system without reunifying the many dialects of English first.

Actually, al there is to do is to simply stop using Kanji.
Every Kanji can be written using hiragana (or katakana) and just with that it shows that it is not necessary.

For example:
English: Have a nice day. (The following Japanese sentence is actually something that has that meaning)
Japanese: 良い一日を。
Romajin: Yoi ichinichi o.

Now, as for me, the ideal way to write that would not be:
良い一日を。 but rather:
よいいちにちお。

The meaning is absolutely the same, just the second one does not use kanji at all.
That is how I would like to see the Japanese writing someday. No Kanji at all!

I got to say that I like Kanji. But maybe it would be best to keep 1500 kanji, and stop using the rest.

As I don't want the Japanese to stop using kanji, I'd like to see them start using spaces instead.

Hehe... now that's a good one!
Glad someone thought of mentioning it!

In the long run, no they haven't. Despite a mountain of alarmist claims, there's no evidence that l33t and other online orthography games have had any lasting impact on the offline spelling of younger speakers (just as most teen slang is ephemeral and never gains any footing in the language).

And it's bad analogy for the simple reason that the online environment has made it easier to use kanji, not harder. Before it took a great deal of rote memorisation to keep in mind how to write anything but the most common characters. But nowadays most input methods give you dropdown lists of alternatives based on phonetic spellings. As a result, there's been an upsurge in complicated, obscure characters that were on their way out before.


This would be less of a barrier for Japanese since it's not a plurilocal language and the normative pronunciation standard is more securely entrenched.

That's right. North Korea completely abolished them.


It's pretty easy to see where the word boundaries are, thanks to kanji.