>
need for kanji is self-fulfillingWell, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.