Well, now you know how I feel about Hebrew. If only they'd just write all the vowels!


Yes, but the point I was trying to make is that there are homophones in native Japanese vocabulary.

You mean in modern Hebrew? In the Biblical language, it is very difficult indeed to read without knowing the language first, but that's why pointing was invented. Why haven't the Japanese found new ways of writing kanji? Even a phonetic aid would be helpful.

Why do you hate kanji so much?

And for a phonetic aid they have furigana. I think it looks ugly, but sometimes it is needed, and writers can do cool things with it sometimes too.

I "hate" them because they're complicated and not necessary and ruining my experience in learning Japanese.

The fact that we need a phonetic aid shows that the system is defective.

Right, but in modern Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Syriac/Neo-Aramaic, Urdu, etc, they don't write the short vowels. This means that readers have to recognize the words; they can't really sound them out like you can in Czech or Malayo-Indonesian. This is more or less exactly what Japanese (and Chinese) people have to do when they read. They have to recognize the words.

Well, once you start learning sinographs you can start to predict the readings of others because they have the same phonetic element. For example: <高> is read as kou in Sino-Japanese. So, guess how <膏>, <稿>, <塙>, <鎬>, & <槁> are read? That's right: kou. But, beware that this does not always work. Also, it can only apply to Sino-Japanese or on readings.

Eh? Kanji is the most fun part about learning Japanese for me. XD
They don't ruin your experience at all, I think they enhance them. As I said elsewhere in these forums; if I ever learn Vietnamese, I'd definitely learn Chu Nom with it, it would be much easier to learn and remember words and would be much more interesting too. (Same for Korean, Chinese -obviously-, and any other East Asian language influenced by Chinese like this.)

Even if the government officially stopped using kanji tomorrow I'd still learn and use kanji. Always cool to know obsolete writing systems.

And once you learn Japanese, you'll thank the kanji. They are very helpful. Otherwise people wouldn't use them. (Earlier I said that classic games etc were in kana only because the systems could not handle kanji. In a lot of the remakes of these games for newer systems, you can opt for kanji to be added, and people do this because kanji makes it easier to read. )

And the phonetic aid isn't necessarily "needed" persay. It is mainly used for: names; when the target reader wouldn't know the reading; indication of the preferred reading for words where more than 1 reading are considered acceptable for a certain context, and for writers to play with readings by making up new readings for kanji.

Lots of Japanese text doesn't use furigana.

I suppose it is an analogue to how Arabic/Hebrew/etc. are helped by the abjad system rather than hindered, because it suits the structure of the language. But it does make the task that much more difficult for the learner. As well, those languages have relatively simple writing systems. Kanji is much more complicated to learn.
For me it's the grammar.

Maybe I'd feel differently about Japanese if I knew some Chinese characters first, hmm.

There are no more.
Manchu has some Chinese influence but it was never written with sinographs & it's practically extinct now anyway.


You really think the Arabic abjad is simple?
I think it's quite complicated, especially when you get into Urdu's Nastaʿlīq. Every letter has like 3 different forms, right? And they combine with each other in different ways. I'd say that's pretty complicated.


Well, I would advise anyone attempting to learn Japanese to learn at least the 1,945 jōyō kanji (jp:常用漢字; "habitual use sinographs") first, before even learning kana. Knowing those kanji gives you a solid foundation for learning the actual language itself.

Compared to Chinese characters or even kanji, it is fairly simple. 28 letters and various ways of combining them. Hebrew is even simpler.

Nastaʿlīq is not really representative because it's a calligraphy style not used in Arabic.
I would study those but learn kana first, because it's simpler and might give me a) some idea of how to read Japanese and b) practice with the stroke rules and so on of kanji.

If you consider Ryukyuan languages to be separate from Japanese they could be one. Though I mainly just said that in case I was missing anything.



Nah, I think learning kana first would be better, because a lot of dictionaries etc only show the reading in kana anyways, and if they romanize it you don't know which romanization system they used, which might be a little confusing.

The Japanese class I went to didn't even teach kanji for first year students. I think that was a big mistake, but I don't think you should go and teach kanji before kana.



Also, take a good note of the stroke order. Especially when you are new to kanji, make sure you find a resource that tells you the exact stroke order for the characters you are learning and to stick with that stroke order. Most of the time they go from top to bottom left to right, but there are exceptions, and these will get you. I found out months later that I had been writing some characters with the wrong strokes; I switched, and after a while it was much more comfortable.

Though some characters have multiple acceptable stroke orders. You can do whatever you want for those I guess. But not many in Japanese. At least I can't think of one off the top of my head.