You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad.
Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.
It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.
Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.
Likewise, in my native Finnish:
- Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon.
- Koko kokkoko?
- Koko kokko.
ie.
- Kokko, assemble the bonfire.
- The entire bonfire?
- The entire bonfire
It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.
Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:
kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire
kuusi palaa = the spruce returns
kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire
kuusi palaa = the number six returns
kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire
kuusi palaa = six (as above) return
kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire
kuusi palaa = your moon returns
kuusi palaa = six pieces
Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony?
> Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean.
> Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.
J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.
All good points. I really can't explain why it is perfectly okay for natives to listen to Chinese/Japanese yet it is so hard to parse Pinyin or Kana when reading, even when spaces are provided.
Maybe it is because we still think in individual characters when reading. As a previous post mentioned, there are many homophones for a given word, let alone for a single character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86%E3%81%97%E.... It's not a problem in a conversation because we track context. Yet when we reading, we, at least psychologically, look for specific meaning per character or per word. Say, when I see こえん, I'll have to figure out if it means a park, a small yard, sound, or something else. Of course, I could figure it out from context, but I'd give up that precision and the warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing the corresponding characters, like 故園, or 子園, or 呼延。We'd solve this problem by giving up learning the individual characters and focus on words or phrases, but then it would be a drastic change.
While typing the above, I also realize that maybe the reason we don't mind homophones during a conversation is because we've already learned the associated characters. Using the example above, when I hear the word "こん” and it means "呼延”, I would know that it's an ancient family name that was associated with many famous generals because of the meaning of the characters. Or if the meaning is "故園”, I would get all the poetic feelings as it is precisely these two characters, not the sound, that deliver the meaning of ancestral land, or childhood home, or place left behind, and etc. And when we study the Chinese and Japanese poems, we focus on the masterful use of characters, and every character matters. Is it 推 or 敲 in 僧敲月下门? Why are the characters in 大漠孤烟直 so compelling and masterful even though each character is so commonly used? It's hard for me to imagine how homophones can differentiate such meanings.
Of course, I'm not saying that removing characters can't be done. I'm just trying to figure out the current state and why many people and I are in favor of learning characters.
Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.
It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.
Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.
Likewise, in my native Finnish:
ie. It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:
Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony? Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.htmlSimilarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.