(For people not familiar, Japanese has two identical syllabaries, plus the roman alphabet, plus a few thousand required Chinese characters, each with multiple readings and unrecognizable calligraphic forms. It's a little rich)
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Also, lest people think I am picking on other people's languages, I confess fully and without reservation that English spelling is a hate crime and Polish should be written in Cyrillic.
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I vaguely recall some video about Mongolian (or maybe Tibetan — I realize those are very different languages) which suggested it might be worse (maybe?) — I think it was “NativLang” on YouTube, but I don’t have good enough internet here to check…
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And yet the Japanese have some of the highest literacy rates in the world. It’s mostly a disaster for foreign learners. It’s also hard to measure since the phonetic kana alphabets take very little time to master and can always be used as a back up.
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It's a disaster for children, too, in terms of hours of schooling burned on it. But everyone loves their writing system so I am not trying to start a war here. I just want to know if anyone outdid Japan on this axis of insanity.
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It probably takes longer to learn a significant portion of chinese characters. Hell, chinese characters are so complicated that to learn them, they learn a combinatory alphabetic system first (bopomofo in taiwan, and pinyin in the PRC) that is used only for that purpose !
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Anyway, how do you define "master reading and writing" ? After all, given how nonsensical the english orthography can be, one might say it also takes years to learn
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At least with Japanese you can fall back to Hiragana. While Chinese has only one system, it’s just much less forgiving if you want to try and make all the rare words in your text easier to read.
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Yeah, I think the little mini-glosses on rare kanji (or ones the reader might not know) are one of the coolest things about the way Japanese is written.
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