Japanese is very syllable-poor and so there are a colossal number of homonyms and homophones. In speech a lot of these are distinguished by tone and pronunciation, but in writing kanji is the only way to tell them apart. Reading kana-only Japanese is not impossible, but it's a fast path to a headache and leads to huge numbers of ambiguities even in the best case.
Japanese doesn't have tones, it has pitch accent, and pitch accent applies to words, not phonemes. You would have to invent a system where pitch accent could be indicated for each word. The difference between 橋 (bridge) and 箸 (chopsticks).. the pitch accent is slightly different. But written the same in Hiragana: はし So there would have to be something (wavy line above the text?) to indicate pitch accent. Not sure how that should be done. And then there are the words with little or no pitch accent difference, only context.. in kanji they're different, would be the same in hiragana, so how do you encode that.. compromises would have to be made. I'm sure people have tried to come up with something, somewhere. Maybe.
But then again.. it's that other problem: Reading when there's kanji is much faster. Even for beginners. If you don't understand a word in kanji then it doesn't work, but as soon as you understand it it's way easier and faster to read.
> You would have to invent a system where pitch accent could be indicated for each word
Really not hard to do. A symbol on the syllable bearing the pitch accent would solve the issue
> And then there are the words with little or no pitch accent difference, only context
What's happened is that effectively a written "shorthand" has emerged that has evolved somewhat separately from how people speak. Losing kanji would mean losing this shorthand, in favor of writing more closely akin to the way people actually speak, but this is how the vast majority of written languages work. Preserving this shorthand seems like thin gruel to justify the complexity of kanji.
Pitch accent is not accent as in English, it's not any "the" syllable. If you've ever seen any of those videos about it, you'll see these down-up-flat patterns over the whole multi-syllable word. From high to low, from low to high, or low to flat plus/and other variations.
I wouldn't compare kanji to shorthand. Shorthand is typically not easy to read, normal writing is easier. Reading written, fully-spelled English is fast. Reading hiragana is slow (and I've been reading hiragana for a long time)- it's slow, and mentally much harder than reading with kanji. The only issue (and that is of course an issue, but tiny compared to Chinese) is that there's a lot to learn before everything can be read fluently. But reading only hiragana is just.. too hard, for any serious amount of text. It's not hiragana per se, it's the language itself with its limited set of phonemes which contributes to the difficulty.
Pitch accent in Japanese is deterministic based on the mora that is "accented". While it's true the effect of this accent "spreads" across the entire word, you only need to mark a single mora to know the effects word-wide.
> Reading hiragana is slow (and I've been reading hiragana for a long time)- it's slow, and mentally much harder than reading with kanji.
What's the ratio of hiragana-only text that you read compared to Kanji? And does the hiragana text uses spaces between words? My strong suspicion is "low" and "no", respectively. Familiarity breeds comfort with any writing system, and word breaks are a fabulous ergonomic tool for easing reading.
When I started Japanese a long time ago I would read (small) children's books because all I could read was hiragana. With spaces, for the smallest children. And that was all I read and could read.
And yet.. as soon as I could read various words with kanji, the reading got easier and faster.
No, it wasn't because of vocabulary, which has only very slowly increased over time. The reading difference is instant and very noticeable. I can't read hiragana fast enough (matching speech) to follow subtitles which are all in hiragana, for example, while I can if there's kanji (though only if I can read it, there's still lots I can't read). This can be changed forth and back and tested with sites like Animelon, for example.
> I'm sure people have tried to come up with something, somewhere.
Perhaps related is the abjad used in Arabic and Farsi. Vowels are written with diacritics above or below the main part of the character, which represents a consonant. However, in modern Arabic, the vowels are rarely written and are inferred from context.
The bigger problem for Japanese is the absence of spacing between words. Even if you write everything in hiragana with spacing, it's significantly slower to read than when kanji is present without spacing. The mixing of kana and kanji usually provides a hint as to where word boundaries are, because there are few cases where kana is followed by kanji in the same word (eg お and ご), and kana which follows the kanji are most often a continuation of the word (okurigana) or a particle. Some words are usually written in kana despite having kanji available, and their presence can sometimes make it more difficult to read because they might look ambiguous with a particle or okurigana, and you have to figure out from context what was intended, which slows down reading slightly.
I can't help but feel these languages are just silly, or at least very badly designed. Maybe in the future, when AI is good enough to translate everything in real time, we will just find a language that is best and teach children that instead. It would save a lot of headaches, and probably also cure dyslexia.
To call a language silly is.. silly. I don't know Chinese. But for a person like me, Japanese is incredible. It's so extremely logical. Exceptions are almost non-existing. Sentences are modular. Etc. I love it, as a person with a programmer's mind.
It has very few phonemes and that's one reason it's hard to "fix" the writing system, but that's also one of its good points, for someone learning the language.
As for "translate in real time", that won't happen because from Japanese to English it would mean to translate before the sentence is done, knowing the intention of the speaker before the speaker says anything. For the simple reason that in Japanese the verb comes at the end while in languages like English it's typically the second word. Using an AI wouldn't be any better than when I used to translate for my wife and the other way around. It works but is hardly satisfactory for anything more than occasionally (speak, wait to hear the translation, speak back, ditto).
A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.
As for dyslexia.. I don't see the connection. Dyslexia is a problem of reading and writing, and it exists independent of the language, and also the writing system (it has been sometimes claimed that Japanese children are less affected by dyslexia than people learning Latin-based languages, and I for some time kind of thought so too.. but I have since seen multiple cases of dyslexia related to Japanese as well, it's the exact same problem)
Rates of dyslexia are much higher in countries with less phonetic spelling systems. The general conclusion from this is that, while dyslexia may exist at equal rates in countries with phonetic spelling, its effects are diminished to the point where many individuals with it can read unimpaird.
> A Star Trek universal transparent real-time translator will not happen.
I never claimed it would. A delay of a few seconds between speech and translation is acceptable, much the same way actual translators do it.
I would like to see actual research into dyslexia vs spelling systems, because I've tried to find it and I haven't been able to. Instead I see only claims as the above, which, so far, appear to be based on "common sense", which doesn't actually work here. Common sense says that languages with complicated spelling rules (English, French) should affect dyslectics more than straight-forward languages like Italian and Finnish, but it doesn't, to any noticeable effect.
As an individual I only have anecdotal "evidence", but for what it's worth - I already mentioned that I've seen dyslexia in Japanese children, but not only that - I've also seen that dyslectic bi-lingual children have dyslexia both in Japanese and in their European language.
Unless I see real evidence I'll continue to assume that dyslexia is simply under-reported in e.g. Japan. As has been the case for so many other things - nobody speaks of lactose intolerance in Japan, though it obviously exists.
Yes I was interested in this myself so, before posting what I just wrote, I looked into it and went through the sources on a few papers. I ended up at this fairly authoritative-sounding book which made the claim, though I don't remember the source they cited and I can't be bothered to find it again. The claim made was not that dyslexia wasn't present in other languages, but that its effects were reduced in phonetic ones. The same way that someone in a wheelchair still has broken legs, but can benefit greatly from the installation of ramps.
