Kanji only, no kana

« previous post | next post »

A giant step backward — about a thousand years.  Writing regression.

'Pseudo-Chinese': New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji", Jay Allen, Unseen Japan (12/18/24)

Whatever possessed some folks to do this?

Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."

Or is that stress-testing your Chinese knowledge?  What kind of language results?  Natural, normal, native Japanese?  Or some kind of hentai Nihongo kaibutsu 変態日本語怪物 ("abnormal Japanese language monstrosity")?

Written Japanese consists of three components: kanji, Chinese-derived ideographs, plus the two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana generally represents grammatical elements and certain common words, while katakana is used for loan words, onomatopoeia, and emphasis.

There have been attempts to change this beautiful but admittedly complex system over the years. All of them have failed. One group that wanted Japanese to shift into using romaji (Latin characters) admitted defeat last year.

The Rômazi Sekai (World of Romanization) may have thrown in the towel and disbanded, but I think they gave up too soon.  The trend of history is for people in the aggregate to use fewer and fewer kanji in comparison with kana and fewer and fewer kana in comparison with letters of the alphabet.  Just you wait and watch.

Tsuita operates as an anonymous message board. There’s no user sign-in – you can start posting to it immediately. You just can’t include kana – attempting to will produce an error message that prevents you from posting. (The error message, of course, is entirely in kanji- 偽中国語入力必須; nise-chuugokugo nyuuryoku hissu, input in Pseudo-Chinese required.)

The garbage in is Pseudo-Chinese, and the garbage out is Pseudo-Japanese.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Christian Horn]



8 Comments

  1. unekdoud said,

    December 28, 2024 @ 1:43 pm

    Well of course the name has to be written in kanji only. I would directly translate 対多 as "complement many", but a "versus many" interpretation would be fitting for an anonymous messageboard.

    Speaking of which, seeing that term threw me back about 15 years in internet history.

  2. ~flow said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 5:47 am

    Bring your pitchforks, folks.

  3. Christian Horn said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 7:18 am

    I was wondering about good methods to illustrate this "restriction to Kanji" to people not familiar with Japanese writing. As Kanji are used besides Hiragana/Katakana, my approach was "so if you could use only 9 letters of the alphabet to write English, how well could you express yourself"?

    One comment in the thread was hinting that one could start to use the remaining characters to "encode" the wider variety of characters.. that would of course work, but the question "can you express everything in plain Kanji" was not with that hack in mind. :)

  4. ~flow said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 9:15 am

    Since each Hiragana and Katakana sign originated from Kanji, one could of course use Manyogana-like spelling, ex.: 朝食はとても美味しかったです。 becomes 朝食波止天毛美味加川太天寸。

  5. Jonathan Smith said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 8:29 pm

    @~flow certainly not as that would make sense and be based in historical fact :D

  6. Matt said,

    December 29, 2024 @ 11:16 pm

    I was wondering about good methods to illustrate this "restriction to Kanji" to people not familiar with Japanese writing

    Imaginus networki systemi socialis quad ne permissis texto sed Latine Codibus

  7. ~flow said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 4:01 am

    What I don't get is the amount of scorn in the OP and some comments. This is just some people having fun with their own language and challenging each other to come up with creative solutions while staying on the playing field—like they do in any game.

    Be it said that none of this is new; when you read pre-WWII Japanese materials you'll often find a much higher ratio of Kanji, and still today (well ~30yrs ago) when university students produce some kinds of promotional pamphlets they'll likewise often resort to unusual creative orthographies and word choices; I've seen pamphlets that I could just read top to bottom although they contained almost only Kanji and very few Kana. Should we ridicule the students for doing so?

  8. Swann said,

    December 30, 2024 @ 9:17 am

    see e.g.

    https://x.com/POWER_AREA/status/1675801794117791744

    for examples of a similar kind of humour that already exists on twitter/discord

RSS feed for comments on this post