Comment by Tor3

I can read only a limited number of kanji (or rather, words written with kanji), but even that makes reading much easier. Books for small children are written in Hiragana, with spaces, and in theory that should be as easy to read as English.. after all, it's easy to learn Hiragana, anyone can do that in a short time, and with practice you can learn to read it fast. But it's still tricky to read all-Hiragana sentences, even with spaces. Not sure I can explain why, more than the usual (and true) argument about the particularly large number of homonyms in Japanese. It's more than that. It's just much faster and easier to read 私 than わたし