Yes, but only because it's wildly impractical for an actual writing system. And really it's just watered down Chinese.

>>14768305
When it's vertical, yes.
Han characters are pretty in any CJKV language.

Kanji are pretty but dumb and have little value.

>>14768314
Turning chinese into a fucked up pidgin writing system is japan's greatest accomplishment

>>14768305
Japanese would be much better if Kanji weren't a thing.

But yeah it looks nice.

>>14768703
>>14768322
Confirmed for not knowing Japanese.

>>14768774
Can you explain the advantage of logographic system?

I understand it in poetry and stuff like that, like Chengyu/Yojijukugo where vagueness can be an advantage. The Wikipedia description reads "The meaning of a chengyu usually surpasses the sum of the meanings carried by the four characters" and that seems nicely summed up.
Obviously many a cultural concept must have been influenced by this peculiar system and might not exist without it.

But reading something like an university level engineering text in Japanese sounds like a nightmare and an unnecessary complication.

Would you say that this is a matter of "facing adversities builds character", and is there possibly an advantage for brain development in this kind of language, maybe in abstract thinking?

Is there something I could read about this?

>>14768774
I know a bit of japanese,but fuck kanji so much they take way too long to write and are fucking impossible to read on computers without zooming in to like 180%

>>14768946
Thinking about the vagueness claim I made, I don't think that is accurate. Also many words have various meaning. Oh well it's just some shit I wrote.

>>14768946
I'm not sure what you talking about but Japanese doesn't work without kanji. >>14768971 is totally wrong, they actually make the language easier as opposed to harder. Read any grammar guide for an explanation. Kanji are a beautiful thing, only people that have no clue about Japanese think they're not necessary.

>>14769025
Are you talking about radicals and that stuff like the kanji for "forest" consisting of three "trees"?

You're right I'm weeb level on Japanese, but I can't escape the idea that this is all unnecessary. I thank god I don't have to deal with Chinese though.

>>14768946
I'm not that anon. But here's my take on my experience with Japanese and why Kanji are mostly necessary for Japanese to work as-is now.

Ideograms are that-- they carry the meaning of an idea, grammatical constructs and even phonetics aside. You can instantly "know" what is being transmitted even if you don't know how to read it or write it as long as you can recognize it. Now, I don't speak Chinese so I don't know how they do it but using Kanji as the root of a meaning actually mostly ends us specifying it amongst the other potential homonyms (a popular example for any weeb-entry level speaker is "kami") and by using kana as grammatical aids you can make it even more malleable to a specific construct (making it a verb/adding tense/etc). Kanji are a little bit (but not exactly) like knowing Latin/Greek when dealing with certain English words, you know that a lot of words with the a- prefix (asymmetry, anaerobic, astigmatism, etc) deal with "lack of", so does the 無 kanji (無限、無意味、名無し)

Could you make Japanese work without Kanji? Sure. Spaces would probably help in doing that, but Japanese currently doesn't use a system of grouping sounds into "words" besides just knowing the common rules of grammar.

>>14769039
Read 2.5 - 2.5.4 of this
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/grammar_guide.pdf

It's a fairly basic explanation but good enough. The best one will be to learn Japanese, you'll end up being grateful for its existence.

>>14768946
Say, does reading math formulas look like a nightmare and an unnecessary complication to you? Because that's, you know, a logographic system you'll encounter in every engineering text.

>>14769141
Not that guy... but this is a completely false equivalence, Japanese uses a logographic system to represent everyday language that is successfully represented in other languages (like Vietnamese) with a restricted phonemic symbol set. Mathematical formulas are largely used to represent concepts that have no simple representation in any human language.

And yes, in many cases they do look like a nightmare and an unnecessary complication to me as an engineer, which is why transform methods were invented.

>>14768305
Aesthetically it would be even better without the squiggly lines, but then it would be just Chinese.

>>14769233
First, it's not a "false" equivalence when he's referring to a logographic system period. Second, all mathematical formulas have a simple representation in any human language.

>>14768703
>>14768322
Enjoy your kana soup.
A language with this many homophones requires some way to distinguish them.
Kanji may be "excessive" but it isn't unnecessary.

>>14769068
That's interesting. I do think Chinese may be a better example of what my problem is, apart from the obvious complicated symbols. I'm so happy that Japanese at least uses kana for particles and stuff.

>>14769077
There was some new things for me there. I do celebrate that each language has it's own unique features (making certain things almost untranslatable to another language).

About "2.5.4 Why kanji?", I've thought that if it works when spoken, why not on paper... but this did make me think it a bit further. Thanks.

>>14768305
It's one of the reason I started to study it, so yes.

ITT: bawww kanji is too hard japanese would be better without it idiots

I'd say it's among the top 3 most beautiful languages, at least for everyday use.

Where Japanese falls down for me is in official texts where you can wind up with 20 kanji strings. For me, the dichotomy between kana and kanji makes the language incredibly visually interesting, and it's backed by a logical underpinning of kanji for words, kana for vocab. They've even gotten around the issue of newer loanwords by using katakana to achieve the same effect of breaking up text.

>>14768314
>And really it's just watered down Chinese.

That's "Simplified" Chinese

>>14769472
Japan could write using only kana just fine. Just play the million text adventures that were developed on PCs back when they could only process katakana or, if you are looking for a classier example, read classics like the Genji Monogatari, which were originally written in hiragana.

The reason kanji sticks is because it actually quickens reading. Yes.
I bet you already know of that chain mail where letters in a word are all jumbled up but you can still understand the meaning of the text just fine. Well, that's how our brain works when processing text.
Even in alphabetic systems we don't read words l-e-t-t-e-r b-y l-e-t-t-e-r, unless it's your first time ever; you just recognise the general shape this word forms and subconsciously associate a sound to it. It says a lot that our grandfathers learned how to read by beeing presented full words and not through spelling.
The Chinese writing system is just another way to tackle this brain process.

Anyone here learned Chinese after Japanese? I'm really interested in trying that since I can pretty well translate Chinese text in my mind into what it vaguely means based on my 3000ish kanji knowledge. I'd still have to learn the readings, tones and China-only characters but it seems something I think I could do.

The katakana are gross.

Yes, even though it is slow to learn I do like Kanji for simply having it's own meaning. Although the concept of onyomi and kunyomi are something difficult to distance from just understanding what the Kanji would be in english.

I would say that is the hardest part of leaning Japanese, unless you only want to read and not speak you have to distance yourself from your native tongue.

>>14770681
How can anyone remember what 3000 different characters are?

>>14770730
Can you remember 3000 different words? Then you can remember 3000 characters. It's not like they're all wildly different or something.

Actually kanji is great. I can't imagine learning Japanese without it.
If you take into consideration the number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese it's only natural that such writing system was invented. Some of you might say that kanji are primitive, but remember that whatever dialect you may speak you would still understand written text. Without these characters ethnic tribes would have never been united thus never creating country called China.
On top of that kanji are great to train your brain. People are often saying that "chinks" are intelligent. That's because they are from an early age learning thousands of characters. This helps with child development.

>>14770730
Chinese characters are constructed in a logical way that makes remembering them possible. You have your semantic part which hints you for category in meaning and your phonetic part which tells you how it's pronounced in words. Very often the phonetic part is logically chosen to match the core meaning of the character so it's not just the sound.

>>14770702
Mostly agree, though learning to read it can help with vocab retention.. or in my experience anyway.

>>14770730
some people go for 漢検１級, which is something like 6000. Now THAT I find insane, and most Japanese natives don't get to that level

>>14770702
I find the most difficult part of the language is being able to interpret when you should be polite or informal, the layers of it in Japanese culture can be confusing, and I have often offended someone without meaning to

>>14769233
Well, since you point out Vietnamese, did you know that most modern Vietnamese today confuse the words "bright" and "dark" when used in compound words, such as the planet Pluto? Pluto is supposed to be "dark world king", but people mistake it as "bright world king" and get confused over the planet's poetic name.

Ironically, "bright" and "dark" are homophones.

>>14770963
Similarly, the Korean word for carrot is "tang-geun", which literally means "red root". "Tang" is a native Korean word meaning "red", and "geun" (根) is a Sino-Korean word meaning "root". However, "Tang" is more commonly known as the Sino-Korean word for "pertaining to China" (唐), and many Koreans mistaken the etymology of carrot as "China root", which is wrong.

(Note: Carrots do not come from China, they come from the Middle East.)

>>14768305
I can read this.