Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[John De Hoog <dehoog@example.com>]

Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com> wrote:

> > well, as some other people pointed out, you can't get rid of Kanji and
> > still have an intelligible Japanese, really.  I think what needs to happen
> 
> Don't buy that still. When i learned Japanese it was written all
> alphabetical and I had no trouble understanding that. Am I
> smarter than other people ? Sure not....

If you stay with basic stuff, it works OK. As soon as you start getting
more deeply into the language, and find out that there are many words
with the same pronunciation but written with different kanji having different
nuances, you will realize (well, most sensitive people will realize)
that to force Japanese into the alphabet is to strike a deep blow at the
heart of the Japanese culture. Is that what you want to do?

Anyway, you are trying to repeat history, perhaps because you are
ignorant of the experiment tried by the American occupation forces after
the war. They took groups of students and gave them all-romaji
textbooks. After a while, the academic performance of the romaji
students fell behind that of their kanji-studying counterparts. Then
they took a random selection of ordinary citizens and tested their
understanding of kanji. To their surprise, they showed a very high level
of literacy. The experiment was dropped from that moment.

This discussion is not unrelated to computers, or even to Unix. When
people start telling a culture to shape itself after computers rather
than sticking to their richest traditions, their priorities are entirely
screwed up. Rather than telling people to adjust to computers, you must
make computers adjust to people. That goes for the language processing
systems as well. Let the Japanese and Chinese use kanji, but build
better systems for handling these languages. (And I don't mean Unicode.)

--
John De Hoog, Tokyo
dehoog@example.com
http://dehoog.org
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