When I don’t know a word, but often at least know one of the kanjis used in the word, I can guess what the word could mean.
I also find kanji more beautiful than latin letters.
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Yes, indeed. But arabic is beautiful too.
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Ofcourse kanji helps. But only up until a point where you need to distinguish nuance between very (I do mean very!) similar kanji. But up until N2, kanji is awesome
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In addition to Japanese, I’ve also studied Spanish and Hebrew, and in those languages learning new vocabulary words felt like a huge slog, just brute memorization. Kanji add an additional visual element to word-learning that IMO makes the process much more engaging. Also, I think the way kanji interact with kana and the way Japanese plays with those interactions is fascinating.
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What I find beautiful about Arabic is that each letter has a different look depending on where it exists in the word.
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I definitely agree. I’ve started studying French, Italian, and Latin and eventually gave up because brute memorizing words felt like such a slog, with Japanese vocabulary I actually have fun.
I don’t think many people on a Japanese forum are going to disagree with you on this.
The way to really start a discussion about it would be to post a similar post, but about hanja in a Korean forum. Sometimes when I read Korean I kind of wish they mixed hangul with hanja the way Japanese does with kana and kanji.
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So, in terms of time required to learn vocab, I’m not sure I agree. I think that learning kanji shapes plus readings plus vocab is a net time extra. I’m not saying it’s not worthwhile lingual technology or enjoyable, just that I think just about everyone I’ve heard would agree that it takes extra time to do all of that for logographic versus alphabetic languages.
However, I do think there can be some time savings with respect to how mnemonic images can help learn vocab, though not enough to offset the extra time spent learning them, and I definitely think that using kanji can compress linguistic information in a way that alphabets can’t, but using one symbol, full of symbolic imagery, to hold the place of a series of random letters.
I’m not sure that anyone has tested the mnemonic capacity of logographic versus alphabetic language users to see if the former helps facilitate learning by “front loading” a lot of memory pegs on which to hang other information.
ははははながすき。
Who needs kanji 
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Can we get a kanji version?
My guess is
母は花が好き。
にわにはにわにわとりがいる
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I love retro games but sometimes I hate them because a lot of older titles just outright didn’t have kanji at all and yeah I can read it and understand it but it’s so much faster and easier to read if it has kanji.
One game I played only had katakana. Thankfully there wasn’t much text in that one.
After I’ve got used to kanji, reading Japanese in romaji is pain.
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Kanji is very helpful especially when learning new vocab (or going back to a vocab word you were struggling with after learning the kanji for it). However, it can be a pain when trying to look up an unfamiliar vocab word that doesn’t have any furigana.
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Disagree in the case of proper nouns. 岐阜 and 綾乃 being my favorite examples of two kanji you learn just for place names. As of this year, 戸籍 must now contain pronunciation of names, which I think further emphasizes just how “out of control” proper nouns are now. Heck, in most news articles, the names have furigana - what’s the point of the kanji?
Ignoring cultural impact, from a utilitarian standpoint, hard to argue for keeping kanji for proper nouns. When you combine proper noun-only and synonyms like 会う 遭う and 逢う and a few other stragglers from the “usually kana” list, the list of 2000 commonly used kanji shrinks by ~500.
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I think Hangul was invented precisely so they wouldn’t need to do that. 
They used to mixed hangul with hanja. I’m saying I wish they still did that because it would improve my reading speed / comprehension, since I’m more used to reading Japanese (my Korean knowledge is currently much lower than my Japanese). But don’t get me wrong, I really like hangul. It’s probably my favorite writing system of any languages, it’s so well thought out design-wise. Once I’m more advanced in Korean I probably won’t miss the hanja anymore.
And the reasons for the switch to strictly hangul wasn’t just for practical reasons. If that was the case it wouldn’t have taken them almost 500 years to make to switch. There was some obvious political reasons behind it, but let’s not get into that in this thread (I feel I’ve already derail the discussion too far from the original topic).
I kind of agree subjectively because it is true that knowing kanji makes reading even relatively complex Japanese feel somewhat doable because you have all these familiar symbols to help you unravel the meaning. That being said that always feels like a bit weird to say because you’re effectively claiming: “once you have spent a thousand or more hours familiarizing yourself with thousands of symbols, it really helps the reading process!”
If you had spend all the time just memorizing more vocab, wouldn’t you be at least equally as advanced in your reading ability? Plus it would carry more easily into speaking and listening comprehension.
I really like studying kanji and it’s one of the things that drew me to Japanese in the first place, but I see a lot of people arguing that kanji are just superior to other writing systems and I’m massively doubtful of that claim. Japanese writing is insanely complex, even compared to Chinese.
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In Chinese, compound words have largely taken over for what were previously small words. In Japanese it’d be like going from 田 to 田んぼ or 尾 to 尻尾. There are just too many words in the language for smaller words to work and not be confused, even in context.
In Japanese, they avoided this with how katakana has developed. Though this begs the question of whether or not adopting a Hangul or Vietnamese like system sooner would have been for the better.
The letter “E” makes English easier. Change my mind!
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