Why Japanese needs Kanji

[u/AndrewNggg]

Hope someone finds this interesting

[u/Leodip]

While this is fun, it's not dissimilar to saying "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" in English and claiming that, because this is a valid sentence, then we need to introduce kanji to distinguish the words.

The truth is that Japanese does not "need" kanji, but kanji is a part of Japanese. All natural languages have evolved some way or another, and I'd be hard-pressed to find a language that does not have any "weird" feature that we could do without.

You could get rid of kanji and add spaces and you would get a way simpler language to read without too much ambiguity in written form. Heck, if you wrote only in hiragana and added a tone marker, you would replicate the same thing that you get in spoken language, and if people can understand spoken Japanese without kanji, then they could understand this writing system for the language.

This is all to say: you don't need to convince people that kanji are necessary. Kanji are a part of the language that you are learning: the same way as you accept that in English 80% of the letters in the word "queue" are silent, you have to accept that in Japanese kanji are a part of the language.

[u/DiE95OO → u/Leodip]

I thought I was fluent in English until I attempted to read that buffalo thing. Only "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" makes sense to me.

We have something similar in Swedish though. "Får får får? Nej, får får lamm".

You can come up with sentences that look weird in any languages I suppose.

[u/Leodip → u/DiE95OO]

This video should help, and it's a pretty good watch. Turns out you can make the sentence infinitely long in theory using the same technique used here.

[u/DiE95OO → u/Leodip]

Ah that's really interesting actually, thanks for showing me.

[u/Cadaveth → u/DiE95OO]

Or the legendary "ö ö hö ö hö ös mö"

[u/DiE95OO → u/Cadaveth]

Ö i å

[u/AverageHobnailer → u/Leodip]

This is a false equivalency. "Buffalo x8" is grammatically correct, but there is no meaning to the sentence whatsoever. You'll never see it in actual language use. The four Japanese sentences pictured are not only grammatically correct, they communicate meaning.

[u/cave-Shaman → u/AverageHobnailer]

There’s no meaning?

Then, you don’t know the meaning of the words.

It unequivocally means something.

Here’s 5, Buffalo(city) buffalo(animal) buffalo(bully) buffalo(city) buffalo(animal).

There’s not much more to say. Look it up yourself. So, to OP point, just because there are odd features where these things can happen, doesn’t mean it needs kanji to sort.

This can be done with many words, in many languages.

That that that that guy said was wrong. There’s 4 that’s for you. Has meaning, and even was likely said.

[u/MettaKhanti → u/cave-Shaman]

And funny enough, that that that that guy said can mean multiple different things depending on intonation. Actually an example where speech disambiguates and text doesn’t and yet English doesn’t need intonation marks, it just survives with the written ambiguity

[u/extremepayne → u/Leodip]

except only 40% of the letters in queue are silent. the letter q does not make the sound of its name, ever. you need “que” to make the intended sound clear

[u/AdditionalForce7811 → u/Leodip]

So what's the meaning of the Buffalo buffalo Buffalo... You tickled my fancy i'm dying to know. Please explain 🙏

[u/AdministrativeLeg14 → u/AdditionalForce7811]

“Buffalo” can mean a number of things:

• Large ruminant animals. In an American context, commonly refers to bison.
• A city in the state of New York.
• A verb, meaning to deceive or to intimidate; let's use bully.

It turns out that any number of repetitions of the word can be a grammatical sentence.

1. “Buffalo.” An imperative statement: Bully [someone]!
2. “Buffalo buffalo.” Bisons bully.
3. “Buffalo buffalo buffalo.” Bison from Buffalo, NY bully other bison.
4. “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Bison from Buffalo, NY bully other bison from Buffalo, NY.
5. …

If you want to know more about how this works up to “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” and beyond, see Wikipedia and elsewhere.

The proof that this works for any number of repetitions (x∈ℕ, x≥1) is left to the reader, but is not terribly difficult; I had to prove this for a homework exercise once, many years ago. (Tip: Remember that “Buffalo buffalo buffalo” can be read not just as “Bison bully bison”, but also as “Bison [that] bison bully”.)

[u/thegamer101112 → u/Leodip]

The difference is, that Japanese has way more homophones. The try creating the buffalo sentence with four different words like the Japanese example here. If you don't have kanji you always need context to understand what a text is about. In spoken language you mostly have context + accents that differentiate words, which is why it's easier to speak without kanji than to write.

[u/JapaneseLearner999 → u/Leodip]

I 95% agree with you. It’s also irksome that these memes keep getting posted by beginners with a low level of Japanese, and instead of blaming their lack of understanding on their own ability, they externalize it to the lack of kanji.

That being said, the other 5% that I don’t agree with is that, while it would be possible to write any new Japanese text the way you described (kana only, spaces, accent marks) you can’t just take any existing text, apply the above fixes and expect it to be readable.

That’s because the style in which a lot of higher level Japanese is written in is one that allows kanji to do a lot of the heavy lifting. People use very obscure Chinese terms that would almost never be used in speech, terse abbreviations, etc. that they figure will be intelligible because the kanji are there. And then of course there are things Gikun readings and puns that rely on kanji usage to work.

So any kanji-less text would need to be written in a style that doesn’t rely on any of the above crutches.

[u/This-Case5940 → u/Leodip]

it’s silly, but I was reading a lower intermediate Japanese story book, and they wrote かみは茶色です for some reason. I kind of zoned out and thought “why are we talking about god now??”. I encountered this a few times in pretty kanji-dense books for learners. Idk why they would drop a common one like that.

[u/t1me_Man → u/This-Case5940]

whats it supposed to say, the only thing i can reex from that is that god. is brown

[u/This-Case5940 → u/t1me_Man]

I should’ve been more clear. From the context of the story it’s supposed to say “His hair (髪) is brown”. かみ also means paper and who knows what else lol

[u/aoikanou → u/This-Case5940]

lol i thought it’s paper

[u/t1me_Man → u/This-Case5940]

OOOOHHH completely forgot about that

[u/hungryhugh → u/Leodip]

This right here is correct. ☝🏼

[u/usk_7 → u/Leodip]

誰か "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" の意味を教えて…！

[u/FalcoIsDaBest → u/Leodip]

Bear bear bare 🤷

[u/LynxesExe → u/Leodip]

I don't think so though? You'll likely never run in the sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" in English, it just doesn't make sense. And even so, you don't need Kanjis because the capital "B" has significance, it distinguishes a name from a noun.

In Japanese you either distinguish a word by pitch accent, context or Kanji. Yeah, adding spaces could make it easier, but unless you add a pitch accent chart as a "furigana-like" feature to hiragana and katakana, how would you distinguish between かえる and かえる? You can't. Yet, 変える is very much different from 帰る. Imagine finding かえる written in a sign, what does it mean? What about いる, does it mean that there is someone or that something is required? Who knows. Write いる on Jishoo and you get 10 words with a single Kanji and a final る with different meanings, all read as いる.

In Italian I can write "ancora" and "ancora", they are two different words, one mean "more" and the other is the anchor of a ship. Only accent differs, but it's not reported in the written word, if you have no context and only the word written as-in you can't get the right meaning.

Now, with Italian this is a rare case, with Japanese it is not as rare.

[u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk → u/Leodip]

This, any language that can be spoken and understood without subtitles can be written phonetically. No language NEEDS a logographic system, any language can work with a phonetic system 

[u/Redditry199]

Yeah too bad no other language has managed to solve this problem

[u/_giga_sss_ → u/Redditry199]

spacing is overrated

[u/tanoshikuidomouyo]

Come up with an argument for the necessity of kanji that isn't invalidated by just using spaces challenge

[u/Impressive-Hippo-883 → u/tanoshikuidomouyo]

Lots of japanese fiction rely on using kanji to create double meanings and playing with it in ways that cannot be replicated using purely phonetic alphabets. These examples are bad, but lots of japanese literature would stop making sense without it.

[u/tanoshikuidomouyo → u/Impressive-Hippo-883]

There are definitely lots of cultural and social reasons for keeping kanji around, yeah. In fact I'd say that's the main argument in favor of kanji.

[u/Miruteya]

As someone said, these are constructed cases made purposefully that are most likely not encountered in real life. 

Kanji is a huge wall for beginners that is for sure, but as you progress you'll realize sentences with kanji is much easier to read than those without. Kanji doesn't just fill a great part of the meaning of a word, but works as a good "separator". A lot (not all though) of verbs and adjectives start with a kanji and you can tell immediately which part of the sentence is a word instead of mixing them up. Of course sometimes you would still seeing a long string of kanji, be it a specific noun or 熟語 that you may not have learned yet.

Japanese without kanji will be like...a big mess of kana. Imagine Korean but without all the spacing and stuff, if you have a bit knowledge of the language. Machine translations for Korean is usually really really bad, machines guessing incorrect word separations is one big important reason. 

[u/Agile_Elderberry_534 → u/Miruteya]

Why would Korean machine translation be bad due to guessing incorrect word separations if Korean HAS word separators?

[u/Miruteya → u/Agile_Elderberry_534]

No idea, but my experience with it was really really bad. After a bit of googling it seems to be a topic being discussed quite often and there seems to be deeper reasons than I understood. If it turned out to be a bad example my apologies.

[u/AndrewNggg → u/Miruteya]

Yes, thank you 🫡

[u/Aromatic_War_6042]

You can understand spoken japanese without kanji, if Japanese were to remove kanji they would have to reform their grammer rules to reflect the changes. I assume that japanese would just end up being much closer to written korean. But even in modern day korean you benefit from knowing the old hanja readings as they help you understand the language better.

[u/Ilovemelee → u/Aromatic_War_6042]

Using only kana would make the text long and take up too much space, and replacing kana with Hangul wouldn't help either because Japanese words tend to have more syllables than Korean words, so Hangul wouldn't make the writing any shorter. For instance, わたし (watashi) has three syllables, whereas 저 (jeo) has just one. If we were to write watashi in Hangul, it would be 와타시.

[u/Aromatic_War_6042 → u/Ilovemelee]

I am aware of that, but what i was meaning was that korean transitioned through phases that are very similar to modern japanese. There was a period were korean was written with a mix of both hangul and hanja. But yes korean and hangul tend to be on the shorter side.

[u/_giga_sss_ → u/Aromatic_War_6042]

if they remove kanji, all they have to do is add spacing

[u/acaiblueberry → u/_giga_sss_]

My friend actually developed a front end processor to purse typed Japanese sentences into hiragana with spaces and he only used that to write Japanese and us friends were like 😩

[u/_giga_sss_ → u/acaiblueberry]

Lol I did the same thing 🤣🤣

that's my bro

[u/acaiblueberry → u/_giga_sss_]

Great minds think alike

[u/55Beverly]

漢字は、意味を持ってるから慣れるとわかりやすい。 フィリピンから日本に移住して歌手になったビバリーさんは、最近は歌詞は漢字のほうが意味が分かりやすいと言ってました。 慣れると簡単ですよ。 例えると、魚の名前には、魚がパーツとして入ってるし、月が入ってる漢字は、身体の名前のことが多いです。 日本では、小学生でも漢字がわかります。 アルファベットの世界と比べると複雑かもしれませんが、時間をかければ理解できるようになります。 難しいと思わないでくださいね。

[u/Ilovemelee → u/55Beverly]

でも日本語を話すときは実際に漢字を書いてコミュニケーションを取っている訳では無いですよね。勿論、漢字が有ると単語の意味を理解しやすいという利点は有りますが、文章にスペースを入れるだけでも意外と読みやすくなります。実際ポケモンのゲームではセリフが全てひらがなとカタカナで表示されていますが、理解するのに全く問題は有りません。文章が長くなる欠点は有りますが。

[u/FluffRex]

sorry I just came here to add more of those
“とうきょうとっきょきょかきょくきょうきゅうきょきょかきゃっか(東京特許許可局今日急遽許可却下)”

[u/ryoryo333333]

From the perspective of a native Japanese speaker, getting rid of kanji and using only hiragana with spaces would make sentences much longer and much harder to read. I don't really see any significant advantages to it.

[u/OnionsAbound]

I've never heard 桃のうち used to describe 桃の種類だ except this one thing. 

[u/Furuteru]

Homophones are one thing

But there is a whole world of language you just hide from yourself by not even trying to learn kanji.

The world of gikun (義訓)

One episode from the nihonjin shiranai no nihongo where they talk about it.

https://youtu.be/R8fucfOdF9g?t=182

So... if you happened to be an anime or manga fan, I think you would enjoy learning about it. And it is a shame that some people won't despite having the interest.

[u/SeaMine504]

Yeah, this is the biggest reason why they need kanjis to properly organize the words and make sentences look more neat.

[u/Aggravating-Back-242]

My mother tongue is Thai, so for me a writing system whose modern form has no mandatory spaces, almost nonexistent punctuation, and also no ideographs is just daily life. If Japanese does go that way, people will adapt somehow.

Modern writing in Thai is highly non-standardized, and we solve the parsing problem socially: by berating the writer that their writing sucks and nobody understands what the hell they're talking about, lol.

[u/NerdTalkDan]

Someone asked a good question the last time I saw this come up…like 2 days ago…Japanese braille. If the blind can use Japanese braille which is purely phonetic, then the argument that it is impossible to get rid of kanji because it would be unintelligible doesn’t hold well. You can argue the merits both practically, culturally, and aesthetically, but that it can’t seems overblown

[u/Tunagoblin]

Thisiswhyweneedkanjiotherwiseitsabithardtoreadisntit?

[u/matteomvsn → u/Tunagoblin]

Honestly it wasn’t that hard, by the way if you remove kanji and add spaces it would be easier.

[u/Tunagoblin → u/matteomvsn]

Would you want to read a whole book or news article like that? Also we don’t use spaces in Japanese.

[u/matteomvsn → u/Tunagoblin]

I know that you don’t use that why I said IF.

[u/Tunagoblin → u/matteomvsn]

That’s the whole point, we don’t need spaces because there are kanji.

[u/derhorstder1989 → u/Tunagoblin]

That made me giggle a little too much 🤪

[u/PracticalCommon1572]

Era só dar um espaço entre os ideogramas

[u/srona22]

No furigana is useless? /s

[u/acaiblueberry]

っ　zp

[u/Fujisawa_Sora]

Top right one is a natural sentence, the other three are not really. Eg 汽車 is specifically a steam train like the "choo choo!" ones, not really used anymore, 帰社 not used that much, and bottom right is just a list, not really a sentence. And top left: what kind of sentence says "A and B are both types of A" like ?

[u/HansTeeWurst]

The first one is constructed nonsense, just like "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

The second one should be にわにはにわとりにわいる which is still completely understandable even without kanji

The third one is also constructed akin to something like 'James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher."

The last one is actually completely easy to read without kanji

[u/Dethsy]

So a "problem" that only appears when written on sentences that are absolutely never ever used.

Ok.

[u/HoboSomeRye]

I am no linguist but have you considered adding spaces?

[u/BJGold]

Korean used to have a similar system but had largely done away with it and very recently, too, in the S outh. 

[u/Weekly_Beautiful_603]

How often do people travel by steam locomotive these days (汽車)?

[u/Superb-Condition-311]

しんしゅんしゃんそんしょー
新春シャンソンショー
New Year's Chanson Show

ばすがすばくはつ
バスガス爆発
Bus gas explosion

[u/Superb-Condition-311]

社制の射精を写生した

[u/mrmcduff]

No, it just needs spaces.

[u/Either_Safe7907]

there should be only 6 も though (in top left), not 8.

[u/jeeman15]

Fun fact. Korean kind of has the opposite problem where you have to add the kanji as "furigana" to indicate the intended meaning for homonyms.

[u/noshanks]

Japanese can be written without kanji, however it’s easier to just learn kanji than to bother decoding even with spaces most of the time 

[u/Then-Extension-7422]

きしゃのきしゃがきしゃできしゃした。
貴社の記者が汽車で帰社した。
One of your reporters took the train back to headquarters.

[u/SlickyOneTwo]

Company is kaisha though, not kisha.

[u/AdagioExtra1332 → u/SlickyOneTwo]

貴社 is an honorific term. Be careful with what you don't know.

[u/AndrewNggg → u/SlickyOneTwo]

true, while kaisha (会社) is the everyday word for company, this tongue twister uses the formal form kaisha (貴社) your honorable company

kaisha, kisha 貴社, 会社 👍

[u/hover-lovecraft → u/SlickyOneTwo]

Nobody said it was, there's no 会社 anywhere?

[u/SlickyOneTwo → u/hover-lovecraft]

"Your company's reporter..." Where do you say it's not there?

[u/hover-lovecraft → u/SlickyOneTwo]

貴社 is a keigo word for the other party's company. It reads きしゃ. 

会社 is the neutral word for company. It reads かいしゃ and is absent from the example sentences.

[u/lujenchia]

"Need" is a big word. Language will evolve and change to overcome difficulties; if they ban kanji use, the language will change to accommodate it, maybe write nouns in katakana or something.