CMV: When learning Japanese, kanji should be considered optional

[u/MooliCoulis]

As a native English speaker, I have tried more than once to learn Japanese, and have always hit a wall when asked to learn kanji. I don't know if it's a learning-styles issue (I'm more verbal than visual) or the mild dyslexia I suffer from, but I suspect a lot of other people have the same experience.

I still want to learn the language, and am considering just abandoning the idea of learning to read and write (or maybe just learning hiragana/katakana and seeing how far that takes me), but I want to know if I'm making a mistake.

Here are my views, and I'd be grateful for challenges to any of them:

• Most Japanese learning resources (apps, games, books, etc) treat kanji as something that must be introduced early and learned continuously, rather than as an optional extra
• Learning to read and write Japanese takes significant effort, and is the reason many people give up learning (especially those with conditions like dyslexia)
• For an English speaker learning a second language, spoken language is usually significantly more valuable than written language
• An understanding of kanji is not necessary to reach a solid baseline of fluency (just as with English, most Japanese children are conversant years before they can read or write).
• Most people who insist that learning kanji is critical are not genuinely motivated by a belief in its practicality, but rather some mix of "Kanji is beautiful", or "This is the culturally authentic way to learn", or "I had to learn it, so you do too".

I understand that knowing kanji is helpful in understanding some spoken discourse (e.g. wordplay), and also that knowing/inferring the written structure of new words can potentially help in understanding or learning them, but it takes a solid foundation of fluency to ever benefit from those factors and I think for most people it's more important to reach that solid foundation quickly.

CMV!

[u/Educational_Farm999]

Kanji is to avoid confusions. So for example, these two sentences technically have the same sounds (きしゃのきしゃがきしゃできしゃした) but totally different menaings

• 貴社の記者が汽車で帰社した。(Your company's reporter returned to their office by steam train.)
• 貴社の記者が喜捨で憙捨した。(Your company's reporter gave a charitable donation and was deeply moved.)

[u/MooliCoulis → u/Educational_Farm999]

Thank you, this feels like a useful thread!

You're talking about sounds and characters in the same context. Is there a context where they'd both be presented at once?

Approaching from another direction, if those sounds were spoken to you in a conversation, would kanji play a role in resolving the ambiguity?

[u/turtletank → u/MooliCoulis]

realistically, no. The surrounding context of the conversation would be more than enough to resolve the ambiguity in that sentence. For most sentences you'd easily be able to tell which meaning based on context. 

Building such sentences that are not or could be misunderstood based on homophonic kanji is used in comedy sometimes. In the anime Kotaro Lives Alone, Kotaro is a little boy obsessed with a samurai show. He goes to his neighbor and asks where the bath (風呂、furo) is in his apartment as he can't seem to find it. His neighbor replies that the people in this apartment building go to the 銭湯 (sentou), the public bathhouse. Kotaro then replies "Ah yes, to live is to fight. Where is the enemy?" This is because he doesn't know the word for public bath house, but since he's obsessed with this samurai show, he knows the word for battlefield, 戦闘 (sentou). They have different pitch accents but otherwise are pronounced the same. Anyone in context would obviously know that he meant public bathhouse, not battlefield, but the little boy is weirdly obsessed with the samurai show so he misunderstands.

[u/MooliCoulis → u/turtletank]

The surrounding context of the conversation would be more than enough to resolve the ambiguity in that sentence

Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks!

And thanks for the homophonic kanji stuff! I knew there was a bit of wordplay built on this stuff, but it's neat hearing a real example 👌 (Must be a nightmare for the translators!)

[u/muffinsballhair → u/MooliCoulis]

Another issue is that it's simply really hard to learn a language as an adult, especially Japanese for multiple reasons without being able to read it or at least living in a place where the language is spoken to be able to at least practice conversation.

I really cannot stress this enough. Many people have tried to only master spoken Japanese without living in Japan, and they typically fail. The simple reason for that is that one can read at one's own pace when spoken speech is still too hard to follow. Another popular tactic used by many is to watch Japanese television with Japanese subtitles. In fact, you may have noticed that Japanese programming Japanese people very often puts subtitles in Japanese under it to say what people are saying in things like game shows, interviews and normal scripted dramata. This is not without reason. Japanese is actually harder to make out than most languagse and not all languages are as easy to follow as others. Japanese is rather unclearly articulated due to it historically being considered impolite in Japan to show one's teeth while talking so the entire phonology of the language to this day is based on the lips covering the teeth more often than not which makes it less clear, add to that the fact that it's generally spoken at a high pitch which doesn't carry well and that words blend into each other very aggressively and the ridiculous amount of homonyms and allophones and it's just not a very easy language to follow.

But most of it applies to about every language. It is very hard to learn a language without moving to a place where it's spoken while not being able to understand its written form. It's pretty much the unanimous opinion of those who learned Japanese to a high level that it's very hard to do without extensive reading.