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

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

This arrived just today. I'll give a brief answer, than continue any
further discussion off line.

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

> 
> > 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.
> 
> Hmmm. Very weird. How can academic performance have to do
> anything with writing systems ? I suspect rather that there were
> other reasons for that. However, before commenting on that much
> more data on the details of the experiment are required before
> its validity can be asserted.
> 
> At least my intellectual capacities weren't affected by learning
> Kanji - they were at a certain level before and at pretty much
> the same after. However, there should be a difference according
> to the above experiment.

No, it was not studying kanji that made the difference. The difference
was that the students who studied in kanji had a deeper understanding of
what they were studying than those who studied the same material in
romaji. This is the whole point of the necessity of kanji. Japanese is
limited phonetically. It borrowed lots of words from Chinese, which is
richer phonetically. To distinguish words that end up sounding the same
in Japanese, it needs the kanji. Even over the phone, people have to
resort to explaining which kanji they mean sometimes.

The rest of your argument, about the Japanese "missing out on all the
scientific and technical evolution of the last 500 years," shows too
much ignorance of Japanese history and culture to deserve a reply. I
suggest you stick to doing sendmail exegesis for the cult novices, since
that's obviously more vital to you than something as trivial as the
Japanese language.
--
John De Hoog, Kichijoji, Tokyo
dehoog@example.com
dehoog@example.com
http://dehoog.org
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