3 Ways Kanji are More Effective Than the Alphabet

"Japanese & Chinese characters are inferior, primitive pictographs. It's a wonder they haven't been replaced by the alphabet already." The teacher said while teaching a class I was in. Now if she could read in one of those languages I might have been more inclined to believe her. As someone who didn't know a word of either of those languages, who was utterly illiterate in both, it was hard to take what she said at face value as she lectured on in front of the class, including Chinese exchange students. After that I began to notice that these sentiments are by no means rare. They were also in books, as well as documentaries I happened to watch.

Students of Japanese often have another argument: "Kanji are too hard!" "English-speakers have no hope of ever learning them. I might as well give up" Many become  dis-empowered as they internalize this and give up after learning a few hundred kanji, resigned to their fate as they tell another bunch of Japanese learners not to expect to make much progress on learning kanji. This becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, dooming English speakers to a lifetime of Japanese illiteracy. Well, I have a confession to make. I find kanji to be a more effective way of reading than the alphabet, and here are the reasons why:

1. Unknown Words are Easier to Understand

A Japanese professor was at a conference with all these professors from Yale. He wrote the word "Pithecanthrope" on the blackboard and asked them if any of them knew what it meant. Then he wrote the word in Japanese "猿人". (enjin, lit: monkey-person) A word an elementary schooler could read and have some idea of what it meant. ―Translated from mitsuhashitakaaki.net

Cases like this have also proved useful in my own life. When studying new vocabulary for college classes, especially general education requirement classes which tended to be heavy on memorization, I would often put a single Japanese word on the back of my flashcards, instead of a definition. That one word was often all I needed to get the gist of what the term meant. Self-efficacy. "Huh?" 自己効力感 (jikokouryokukan, Self-Effective-Feeling).  "The feeling of how effective/successful you will be at something? Oh, now I get it!" I had never seen the word in Japanese before, and yet I could understand it.  

2. Specialized Jargon is Easier to Understand

 Let's look at more examples from the quote above:

hydrocephalus （水頭症, suitoushou, Water-Head-Disease）
pyroclastic (火砕流, kasairyuu, Rock-Broken-Current)
socialytic (lamp) （無影灯, mueitou, No-Shadow-Lamp）
heliotropism （向日性, koujitsusei, Face-Sun-State of Being）
anthropophagy (食人, shokujin, Eat-Person)

As you can see, specialized terms in English are often a mix of Latin or Greek root words, while the Japanese versions are comprised of simple kanji, which often give the reader an idea of what the word means. While some of the root words are commonly known, a lot are not.

Let's try another one. Random medical term! 

Pneumoconiosis

Unless you work in a medical field, you likely can't tell what this means at first sight. Now take the Japanese term: 肺塵症 (haijinshou, Lung-Dust-Disease) You can probably guess it is a disease which happens when there is dust in the lungs. Let's look at how Wikipedia defines it:

Pneumoconiosis is an occupational lung disease and a restrictive lung disease caused by the inhalation of dust, often in mines 

As you can see, knowing the kanji gave you the gist of what the word meant, without having to resort to using a dictionary.

It turns out that specialized jargon is often less impenetrable in Japanese! All because of kanji.

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3. Unknown Words are Easier to Pronounce

I can't remember how many times I've pronounced a word in English which I had previously only seen in writing incorrectly. In Japanese, kanji all have a certain set of readings, meaning if I've seen the same kanji in a few words before, it's usually fairly easy to guess how a word is read.

 

As you can see, knowing kanji is for Japanese like what I imagine knowing all Greek and Latin (as well as all the other languages English borrowed from) root words would be like for English. Kanji make understanding new words so easy I often long for the ease of kanji every time I read something in English, and find an unknown word I can't figure out from context which doesn't look like any word I already know.

Many Japanese learners fear kanji, and never learn enough of them to know these benefits. They give up any chance of ever being literate. Don't be like them, and next time you see someone talking about how "inferior" kanji are, you might want to teach them a thing or two, and then go back to learning more kanji!

Thoughts? Comments? Share your favorite kanji learning experiences or stories below!