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I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away.

Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.




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