The Case Against Kanji - Electrace
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The Case Against Kanji<br>On Accepting when Tradition no longer Serves us.. in this Very Specific Domain
Electrace<br>Aug 05, 2026
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The Precedence:
Hangul, the Korean alphabet, was debuted in 1446 by King Sejong the Great. The system was designed to replace Chinese characters, which were deemed too difficult for the common man to learn. It took several hundred years for the wheels of progress to turn, but eventually Korea finally adopted what I argue is the world’s greatest writing system. It’s a phonetic alphabet, organized into syllabic blocks. And it’s gorgeous.<br>저는 한국어를 못해서 구글 번역기의 도움을 받았어요. 한글 멋지지 않나요?<br>Japan, like Korea, first developed writing through contact with China, originally writing only in Chinese characters. It kind-of, sort-of worked for a bit. But the core issue was that Chinese characters were not made to fit with Japanese speech. Slowly, Japan developed two syllabaries to make it simpler to demarcate pronunciation and to take quick notes, and over time these became standardized and integrated more and more into the language. However, unlike Korean, Japanese still uses many of their inherited Chinese characters. These characters laugh in the face of a phonetics. It’s (arguably) the least phonetic commonly used writing system in the world.<br>Unfortunately, the resultant system in Japanese ended up being, frankly, quite bizarre. In the average Japanese sentence, you may have a mix of kanji (logographs), hiragana (the normal syllabary), and sometimes katakana (a syllabary used largely for foreign imported words and for emphasis). Collectively the two syllabaries are called, appropriately, kana. Thankfully, the kana are fully-phonetic.<br>すこし日本語が話せるので、今度グーグル翻訳を使いませんでした。
To oversimplify, hiragana are simple “swirly” characters, katakana are simple “angular” characters, and kanji… uhh… they can look as simple as kana (look at 日 above), but are often quite complicated and dense (翻訳).<br>Kanji are Hard:
Kanji aren’t just visually complicated though. If you were hoping that you can figure out how to pronounce a kanji just by looking at its components, I’m sorry to say that’s not the case. Each kanji word has kana “inside it”, called its reading. Without first memorizing the word, you can’t be sure of what the reading is just by looking at the kanji. That remains true even if you’ve seen the same kanji before in a different word. At best, you can guess based on various guidelines, but nothing particularly foolproof.<br>So Japanese is in the position where a native speaker may know exactly what a word means, and how exactly it is pronounced, but could be totally unable to read or write it1.<br>It gets worse. Reading (and writing) kanji can be so difficult that being able to do so at a high level becomes a signal of general competence and having passed high levels of the Kanji Kentei test (level 2 or the more difficult level 1) is often placed on resumes of native Japanese speakers.<br>“Ahh” you say, “That’s kind of like a spelling bee for English, but it’s taken more seriously”. And… kind of, but not really. In high-level spelling bees, you might have to spell words the average person has never heard of, like “pococurante”. The difference being that English spelling fail relatively nicely. If you mispronounce a word due to a strange spelling, you are generally understood. The same is not nearly the case with kanji.<br>With level 2 of the Kanji Kentei, you are tested on all the kanji you’re supposed to know to by the time you graduate high school. Imagine writing “Native English speaker, fluent in spelling ‘acquiesce,’ ‘conscientious,’ and 2,000 other high-school level words” on your resume2. With kanji though, it is an accomplishment to master them, because kanji are hard.<br>Why not get rid of them?
From a naive perspective, it seems silly to have some other language’s script (that maps poorly to your own way of speaking) still being the main way that you communicate in text. Are the costs of kanji really worth the benefits? Couldn’t we switch to another, better designed system?<br>Not everyone thinks so, and those “Not everyone”s come with arguments!<br>Some arguments rely on appeals to tradition or rely on the ineffable aesthetics of kanji. I won’t be covering those here.<br>Another argument is that switching over to a different writing system would be hard. And while I admit that costs would be incurred, I think that these temporary costs would be dwarfed by the costs saved by not teaching every future generation thousands of kanji. If anything, I think this argument points more in the direction of “How fast should a transition be?” rather than “Should there be one at all?”.<br>More interesting arguments to me would be ones in which we shouldn’t switch even if there were no costs to do so. In other words, the claim is that the benefits of kanji are worth the cost to teach them. Proponents of this view argue:<br>Kanji can provide a “clue” to what an unknown word...