alt Hacker News> You can't just use China's writing system and try to make it fit to your language
And yet we took the roman alphabet and adopted it to english just fine, why was that okay but adopting the chinese writing system into Japanese wasn't?
> you can argue that they're not really literate, they just limit themselves to using a small portion of their 'kanji' and write little hiragana hints that tell you how to pronounce the written symbols for all the rest.
You can argue english speakers aren't really literate, they just limit themselves to a subset of english vocabulary, and memorize word pronunciations to understand when "ea" is pronounced like "e" as in "sear", or "air" like in "wear".
Like, I do not get at all what you're arguing here. In every language people only know a subset of the total vocabulary, and people general limit themselves to the subset that's actually used. In phonetic languages, sure you can pronounce an unknown word, but that doesn't mean you have any clue what it means. In non-phonetic languages, like English and Japanese, you may not even be able to pronounce an unknown word. In hieroglyphic languages, like Japanese and Chinese, you may be able to derive the meaning and pronunciation of a new word just from looking at the component characters and knowing their individual reading and meanings, often with better success than trying to guess an unfamiliar english word from its roots.
Roman letters works somewhat with English because they are both phonetic. Japanese is phonetic too, they have an entire different hiragana alphanet with all the sounds of their language. There is no word in Japanese that you cannot sound out with that alphabet. In Chinese every symbol has a sound, a Chinese sound. Not sure how much you understand about Japanese but you can't just derive the pronunciation of a new word just from looking the components.
I do agree that English is terrible too. English is a mess of Latin, German, French words which is why spelling bee competitions are a thing in English but it would be stupid to have them in other languages such as Spanish and in fact Japanese too. In Spanish you can spell any word regardless of how long and confusing it might seem. Japanese too, using hiragana you can spell the sound of any Japanese word regardless of how how long or rare it is, good luck writing it though, a Japanese spelling bee is not possible but a written one is.
My argument is that the Japanese writing system is a big mess but spoken Japanese is not. Spoken English is a mess too. Any language were you have competitions about who can spell and write the words of the language is a big mess of a language.