It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in)
To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first.
I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 year old, top of her class, was having difficulties reading news articles because of some words she did not know.
That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are.
Kanjis are of Chinese origin, they occupy a similar place in Japanese culture than Latin does in European cultures. I wish they would do like Koreans and get rid of it altogether, but it will never happen. The culture here is far too conservative for such a brutal change. They even call the furikana (kanji "subtitles" that explicit the pronunciation) as a dumbing down.
This is an example where obfuscation is confused for depth.
To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first.
I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 year old, top of her class, was having difficulties reading news articles because of some words she did not know.
That's polemical and I would not tell it that upfront to my Japanese friends but I feel like kanjis are a vastly inferior writing system compared to the alphabets they have. The reason why it still exists is to create an educational hierarchy: the more kanjis you know, the more educated you are.
Kanjis are of Chinese origin, they occupy a similar place in Japanese culture than Latin does in European cultures. I wish they would do like Koreans and get rid of it altogether, but it will never happen. The culture here is far too conservative for such a brutal change. They even call the furikana (kanji "subtitles" that explicit the pronunciation) as a dumbing down.
This is an example where obfuscation is confused for depth.