[sakaeyellow]

I am Chinese and was born and raised in an all Kanji environment. Here is my 2 cents:

1. Original Japanese phrases do not have many homonyms. But Kanji phrases are the total opposite. I'll raise the white flag if you ask me to name ten Kanji phrases that are unique and do not have any homonym. The reasons? It's because the pronunciation system of Chinese, be it Mandarin or Cantonese, is much more complicated than that of Japanese. Chinese has tones and use tones to differentiate words with the same consonants and vowels. Japanese does not have tones and only relies on stress. And Chinese simply has more vowels, much more than 5. So to pronounce Chinese words the Japanese way, the only result is that a lot of words which have different pronunciations in Chinese are pronounced the same way in Japanese. Look at English "hall" "hole" and "ball" "bowl", which are translated as ホール and ボール respectively in Japanese, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Is it possible to erase all Kanji phrases from the Japanese language?

Copied from Wikipedia:

According to the Shinsen Kokugo Jiten (新選国語辞典) Japanese dictionary, kango 漢語 comprise 49.1% of the total vocabulary, wago 和語make up 33.8%, other foreign words or gairaigo (外来語 account for 8.8%, and the remaining 8.3% constitute hybridized words or konshugo (混種語 that draw elements from more than one language.

Can the Japanese erase 49.1% of their vocabulary? I seriously doubt it.

2. The conjugations of some verbs will change the verbs into other verbs if written in Hiragana only. Examples are 書ける vs 掛ける, 買える vs 帰る. But adding symbols to indicate the conjugations would solve this problem.

3. How to differentiate 犬を飼う and 犬を買う? How about カう(katahira mix) and かう (pure hira)?

4. Some Kanji are in fact much easier to write than their Hiragana counterparts. Examples: 人ひと, 一いち and 山やま.

5. Suddenly the Japanese will have a lot of namesakes.

If the Japanese really decide to remove Kanji from their language, my suggestions are:

1. add space between words like English and Korean.
2. add special symbols to particles to help reading faster. Or simply write all particles in Romaji. わたし wa にほんご wo べんきょうしています is much easer to read, isn't it?
3. make good use of Katakana to avoid homonyms. Do not reserve them just for loanwords.