I'm seeing comments saying kanji abolition is new? There have been kanji reform/abolition activities for 200+ years, which did bring about important and necessary changes. We're in a good place now though. I've written about some of these debates:

@ScriptingJapan @LanceAoyama Wasn’t Kano Jigoro on some committee about adopting English?

@shinobu_books @LanceAoyama There were a bunch of those. Some people even wanted to replace Japanese with English or French

@ScriptingJapan Ever read this? The guys a freak, but it was interesting

@yellowbileboy OMG no that looks amazing. Clearly it's selling lot hotcakes too haha

@ScriptingJapan Anyone that says “Kanji is a bad system” is sorta missing the point entirely.

@ThunderWolfDrew The way I always phrase it is that if Japanese had no writing system, and you were hired to make one and came up with the current system, you'd be fired on the spot. HOWEVER, the current one is what we have, it actually does its job well, and the debate over it is long settled.

@ScriptingJapan I have two kana for the anti-kanji people out there: タヒ

@blockwonkel That's a typo right? You aren't implying violence you are inviting them to タピます, during which time you would enlighten them?

@ScriptingJapan Has anyone done a study on the speed of understanding with and without kanji?

@chibio Yeah there's a bunch out there. I don't know them off the top of my head because it's not relevant to what I do, but it's been studied extensively. For adults, kanji improve recognition speed, but TBH this is probably based on familiarity rather than anything inherent.

@ScriptingJapan Guess I'm a clown. I think its a massive waste of everyone's time for day to day communication, a cultural gate keeper and economic bottleneck for Japan, when you could simply fix the standard rebuttals with some spaces and a change of a few problematic words / particles.

@a_meredith There's more concerned than just legibility, even if it was as simple as you say. Cutting Japanese people off from the entire history of Japanese writing just is a non-starter in 2023.

@ScriptingJapan Forget about kanji, Japanese without katakana would be perfect 😂 you can keep kanji and hiragana

@benditoseascub1 ノーです。

@ScriptingJapan im still learning japanese and while i hate kanji (writing them feels like a waste of time) I feel like the idk enough about this language to properly uhhh critique it i guess

@OrionCasts Is learning Japanese a waste of time? If not, learning kanji isn't a waste of time.

@ScriptingJapan I'm a pro kanji person as well, I guess. Reading only kana would be very difficult. Kanji are easier to recognize and scan.

@ScriptingJapan LMFAO 😆😆🤣🤣🤣

@ScriptingJapan Anyone who thinks there shouldn't be kanji probably hasn't learned Japanese well enough to understand how helpful it actually is 😭