> While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.
English seems on the way to be on the fast track to being universally understood.
> Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all.
In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese. What you lose in richness you more than make up in efficiency, especially in Japanese which doesn't have the same difficulties of Romanizing that Chinese does with tongues and inflections.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese.
Japanese already has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - so if anything replaced kanji it would be these. However Kanji makes reading Japanese a lot easier (if you know the characters), as it helps with:
* parsing sentences - kanji make word barriers clear
* disambiguating similar sounding words - Japanese have many words that sound the same, but mean different things - these words have different kanji
* reducing text size - one kanji character corresponds roughly to two katakana or hiragana characters (for example, this means Japanese tweeters can say much more in the same number of characters http://twitter.com/kharaguchi/status/22214712818)
So for Japanese, using kanji appropriately is more efficient for the reader than the syllabaries, and certainly romanized Japanese.
> In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.
That's also a trade off. If a character has best match with visual imagery you can't write very fluent and fast. The stroke place and order has to be modified and best optimized for speed hand writing.
English seems on the way to be on the fast track to being universally understood.
> Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all.
In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese. What you lose in richness you more than make up in efficiency, especially in Japanese which doesn't have the same difficulties of Romanizing that Chinese does with tongues and inflections.