(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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I would actually say that Chinese is as hard or harder, because the total number of characters you need for basic literacy is higher, as I understand it. (I read Japanese relatively fluently.)
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My (very surface level) understanding is that most Chinese characters be broken down into semantic/phonetic components which drastically decreases the total learning load. Compared to Japanese kanji which have 2+ readings and semantic meaning drift from the original Chinese.
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