Japanese Kanji Challenges

Actually this is just incorrect.Spoken Japanese is much more ambiguous. There's a reason subtitles are ubiquitous here. Americans who didn't understand the language tried and failed to get rid of kanji after world war 2. The langauge just does not work without them.Additionally spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones such as 雨 and 飴. Long strings of kana are difficult to read period. Native Japanese people struggle and can easily be confused by them in my expe

Japanese has a couple syllabary to fall back on. If you don't know the Kanji for a word you can use the hiragana/katakana version which is pretty much 1:1 with how it sounds. If you use too much hiragana can become a bit unpleasant to read though.

Complexity of Hiragana and Katakana is exaggerated by learner. Difficulty of remembering many Kanjis (for write) is real.

as a hindi speaker, looks like learning japanese (apart from kanji) won't be hard

The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say.And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere.It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but you might be wrong. Also

I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don&#

Japanese people don't need to see the kanji when, say, a news story is being read to them. They figure it out from context like everyone else. I'm pretty sure they could switch over to using hiragana and katakana or even romaji exclusively without much trouble if they wanted to. To some extent this is already happening as more foreign words for things are being adopted. They don't waste time trying to come up with Kanji for every new concept or device but instead they just create a Japanized pro

Japanese is very syllable-poor and so there are a colossal number of homonyms and homophones. In speech a lot of these are distinguished by tone and pronunciation, but in writing kanji is the only way to tell them apart. Reading kana-only Japanese is not impossible, but it's a fast path to a headache and leads to huge numbers of ambiguities even in the best case.

A good chunk of the roughly ~2100 Kanji have two versions of expression. Some of them have upto 8-10 ways of usage (although very few). As a Japanese resident,(1) It isn't fun. Not everyone of us knows the whole set and have to keep a digital dictionary in smartphone(2) We don't assume the names of people based on their Kanji, because (surpise!) people do get offended by minor changes in pronunciation e.g Yamasaki vs. Yamazaki, with similar Kanjis.That's why I always pref

Well the good news is that the kana are really low hanging fruit. You can learn them in a day and as long as you continue learning Japanese you will be constantly exposed to them. There are only just over a hundred of them and, unlike English, they are only ever pronounced one way[0].Kanji are significantly more effort, with 2k characters to learn and multiple pronunciations for each. Interestingly, while you will probably hate Knaji at first and wonder why they are still used, you will come