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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4067 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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some argue the Chinese writing system being too difficult to learn... but the success of Japan would seem to contradict that.

Isn't Japanese writing quite a bit easier to learn than Chinese, although still more difficult than the Latin Alphabet?

I mean, to be literate in Japanese one must master two phonetic systems (Hiragana and Katakana) in addition to thousands of Kanji characters, with each of those Kanji having potentially multiple readings, not all of which are monosyllabic as they would be in Chinese. If Japan went through the same process as South Korea and phased out the use of characters for most written purposes that would simplify things, but that is definitely not the case at present and the average educated Japanese has memorized as about as many characters as his Chinese counterpart.

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