[kirakira]

I think you totally missed the boat.

Originally Posted by sakaeyellow

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

Getting rid of characters doesn't mean getting rid of words, the Koreans did it and their language have even a LARGER share of Chinese derived words.

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)?

Not valid since these characters are *retrofited* AFTER characters were introduced. They functioned fine before Chinese characters through context.

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.

How many characters are below 3 strokes? That's right, not a lot.

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

They will have to go through the Korean route, i.e., each Kanji reading MUST be represented by ONE symbol, not 1-3 like がく、しゃく、てつ etc. otherwise, in its present form, kana introduces all sorts of headaches when strung into a sentence, ergo they MUST kill Kana and introduce a new alphabet.

However, 2 things prevent Japan from doing that like Koreans:
- Hangul was introduced way before the 1950s when Korea ditched characters so the Koreans didn't exactly invent a whole new alphabet to kill characters
- Japanese just does not have enough sounds to get over the homonym situation. 50 sounds no where near enough when modern Chinese had almost 500 and 4 tones in its toolbox or Korean which is up in the hundreds.

In short, it's not going to happen, the economic cost of change is almost impossible to justify whatever perceived gains (easier for western people to learn the language? err why would anybody in Japan care?)