Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Sure - it's probably safe to say that any language can he written in any writing system, if one is willing to change both the language and the writing system :)
> Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Kanō: 狩野 and 加納
Gotō: 後藤 and 五島
Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan).
The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
A lot of material for younger readers uses similar spacing to Korean, like the Pokemon games. It works well enough when you know the vocabulary being used is limited, but even there it gets frustrating.
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
So shouldn't the better solution be a few more pronounciation markers beyond two strokes, a circle and tiny letters instead of thousands of chinese characters?
But who is this solution for? Unless you change the pronunciation of the language, it would be adding markers around whole syllables to disambiguate - syllables that represent the kanji they came from (many of which already have phoentic components) - but those syllables would still be less dense and visually identifiable than kanji is for someone who already speaks the language.
It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
I mean, do you want to know or are you venting? If the former: No, spoken Japanese is not constantly confusing, because (a) some words are distinguished by intonation, (b) Japanese speakers know what the homophones are, and either avoid them while speaking, establish the context before saying them, say extra words to clarify which word they mean, etc.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
When you find yourself with a choice between "either this person doesn't understand the experience of being human or I'm not following what they mean" the latter is probably a sound choice.
Not really. I'll warrant I've clocked a lot more time on the planet, done a lot more jobs, lived in a lot more countries, studied a lot more philosophies, religions and languages, and learned the hard way through many more relationships and difficult teachers than most people who've passed through this life.
It's my prerogative to determine, and it's fairly trivial to identify, the difference between someone who has trouble forming their thoughts into words, and someone who like this poster is clearly stating an antagonistic and divorced relationship with life itself.
I'm capable and free to judge. Your knee jerk reaction itself is highly suspicious and redolent of someone else who's going through a divorce with living.
You should always question your own interpretation. Yes. When you find some evidence that you may be misunderstanding someone, then yes, you should certainly default to giving them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself whether you've misunderstood something. This is pretty basic ethics and rhetoric.
But the meaning of the poster was quite clear. It was absolutist, in fact, and it was nihilistic, derogatory and dismissive toward any notion of intrinsic human value. Wouldn't you agree?
My advice to you would be: When you find yourself intervening in a conversation to support something transparently antihumanistic and evil, by claiming without any basis or merit that the other party in the conversation is misunderstanding it, maybe you should assume that you're failing to understand something.
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via
mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants
and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
More and more I feel like anti-AI is a bigger bubble than AI. It seems like every week it expands into a new dimension - anti-Flock protesters tearing down years-old traffic cameras that were used for research into auto accidents, etc.
Like, the current thing in the news cycle is a poll that young people are now more worried than hopeful about AI. Which sounds scary, but my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction..
> my first thought is that one could find similar polls from the 80s and 90s about satanic cults or alien abduction..
There are were polls about people being "more worried than hopeful" about satanic cults or alien abductions? With the youth being the most worried about satanic cults? Just like that knee-jerk "it's the bigger bubble", that makes zero sense.
As per the GDC 2026 State of the Industry poll, "52% said gen AI is bad for the industry, nearly double the 30% who held that view last year". But sure, everybody but HN, LinkedIn, and X bros are just luddites clutching pearls in their tiny bubble. They're the weak and stupid ones, and that is why the stupid shit said about them, day in and day out, isn't actually stupid. It all checks out.
Not under US copyright law. The Bartz case ruled that if you scan a book and destroy the original it's considered format-shifting and you're likely fine. But not so for keeping the original and using the scan in its place - Internet Archive tried that (in an incredibly limited way), and publishers sued and won.
So companies scanning books already know they'll be sued, successfully, if they don't destroy the originals. So they destroy the originals.
This reminds me of the weirdest interview I ever had (boutique software agency, maybe 30 devs).
I walk in, and the CEO's secretary hands me an IQ test and says I have one hour. I do the test, then I meet the CEO and we chat about general topics while she grades the test nearby. Then she announces my IQ, and the CEO says "hmm, yes, that's above the minimum I'd consider for a developer." Then for the last few minutes he goes through the 2-3 questions I got wrong and asks me to explain why I gave the answer I did.
That was the first and only interview, and about six weeks later they call me back in and the CEO made an offer. I reply that I'll need a few days to consider. CEO: "What? Why??"
I interviewed at IBM back in the mid-90s right out of college for "Internet consultant". I was given an aptitude test and the hiring manager said that I scored one of the highest he had ever seen. He then proceeded to not give me the job because I didn't have enough experience, which is something they already knew before making me jump through hoops. It was so dumb, but it pretty much exemplifies IBM-thinking.
This can't have been recent. Or perhaps it was and they violated the law. A standard IQ test is probably quite good at assessing if you'll be good at a programming job but it is also quite illegal unless it has passed through a battery of compliance paperwork - which it actually cannot pass because it would require the output of IQ tests to be race-equal and they cannot be both an IQ test and race-equal. This is literally a Title VII violation.
I'm a broken record about this, but no, it's not illegal to administer IQ tests in white-collar employment, and it doesn't take a battery of compliance paperwork to do so. This is an Internet myth.
Not only Internet. It's held view among risk-management-heavy enterprises, some of which might even insist, beyond the claim in this thread, that "any anbility assessment is illegal". To be fair, maybe someone in HR read it on Facebook or LinkedIn, showed risk management a (doesn't have to be real) legal risk they could head off. So they ban people evals, even for skilled trades.
Not even brain teasers or IQ. Just: can applicant FizzBuzz? Verboten!
This is how, in a mass job application world, enterprises end up with >80% of coders, all making 6 figures, that can't FizzBuzz.
A hack to get the enterprise to assess is find the third party SWE test providers to big brand logos the board recognize, brands under the same risk governance / regulatory regimes, and ask "what do we know they don't?" First, the board know and respect those brands. Second, the question makes the board consider what they think about those in charge of the failing capabilities internally. This is something now both easy for the board to discuss, and obviously done by good references. Ok, let's try empirical evals.
Countless such broken record warranting beliefs clanging around 100k employee enterprises. McKinsey, BCG, PWC, KPMG -- all they need to do to justify 8 figure bill for the year is undo any one of them.
I can believe that. When we (devs) implemented an interactive design/coding screening questionnaire, we had an uphill battle to get HR to approve us giving it to candidates. Apparently, the company had an internal rule of "No tests." We got past it by convincing them that it didn't have pass/fail criteria: it was an evaluation of their thought process and programming ability.
"illegal unless it has passed through a battery of compliance paperwork"
"This is literally a Title VII violation."
Griggs v. Duke Power Co. held that "The [Civil Rights] Act [of 1964] does not preclude the use of testing or measuring procedures, but it does proscribe giving them controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance."
Why do you believe that prior documentation is required, and that the absence of such documentation would make the testing illegal?
Check his blog and find out. I particularly enjoyed the part where the best way to improve public transport is to keep poor people out, not to increase frequency.
You might alternatively prefer the ones about how health insurance never denies care, Luigi Mangione was a bad guy, or Democrats have made it profitable to be a victim.
Wow, I am entirely wrong here, huh? I thought that "demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance" was held to the standard that it had to be proven fair (and consequently documented to have proven job impact).
EDIT: Hang on, I decided to just test the idea with the usual suspects and I don't see how you could design this in a way that works. You'd need some kind of non-contaminated testable outcome - lines of code etc. don't work - that is considered job performance which is scientifically validated in order to be able to survive the litigation that would follow the test.
I suppose the part that was wrong was that I claimed you can't run an IQ test. That's not true. You can. It just legally exposes you to a paperwork burden involving proof that it is required for job functionality - proof which you'll almost certainly fail because software engineer productivity isn't mechanically solved yet.
Is that the distinction? Listen, I've read your stuff and generally trust you and in any case I'm open to having my mind changed on this subject, but it seems like the actual thing is "Possible, but if you do it, you're going to find yourself in a massive paperwork and legal headache".
Several (not many relative to the total industry, but several) large household-name companies publicly do general cognitive testing for white collar roles, and the companies that administer these tests have logo crawls just like any SAAS company of their clients. These companies have enormously deep pockets and would be juicy targets for employment law practices. But nothing happens, because this is mostly not a real thing.
The reason more companies don't do this is that the tests don't work well for this purpose.
I took the practice test to completion that PWC recommends and just to give people an idea of these cognitive tests. It was a series of questions that went:
> Which statement describes you best?
> 1. I usually make decisions only after I have collected all relevant information.
> 2. I usually think of all factors when I am trying to understand a business issue.
> 3. I change my interaction style based on the personality of whom I am speaking to.
With a warning when you "go too fast". The test is supposed to take 16 minutes but finishes quite fast. I must imagine that these cannot be the only category. It also wasn't even clear how someone takes one of these to practice since it's impossible to get 'better' on them. There is no evaluation provided at the end. So one must conclude that 'practice' involves 'gaining familiarity with the testing system'.
Presumably the psychometric tests are wordsum, shape rotation, something numeric, but I couldn't find one for free to look at without applying so I'm content to just accept that it exists and move on with my life.
I am positive that I have answered exactly this set of questions as part of a screening test to be allowed to take a Management Certificate course about 15 years ago.
Haha, they aren’t what I’d call an IQ test. More like a personality quiz perhaps. Did you also do a more IQ-like test that tested cognitive ability rather than evaluated inclination?
Your last statement is closer to the real situation, but you make it sound like it's certain that you will be called upon to defend the legality of your actions.
But I'm not aware of any evidence showing that is true.
And, even if it were true in the past, it seems that the DOJ believes that was based on a misinterpretation of the law. So it is less likely be true since June 2026: https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1444871/dl
Related, I read Lovecraft for the first time a while back and the xenophobia was so overt it was almost humorous.
The story was basically a police detective uncovering ritual cult activity by immigrants (from some unspecified place) in a NY slum. And the narrator (the detective) goes on and on about these strange foreigners and their dark skin, weird languages, heathen religions, etc.
But it only occurred to me after finishing that, though the reader is told from the start that weird cult stuff will ensue, the detective doesn't actually find anything nefarious until pretty late in the story. So with the story's timeline it's mostly just a cop being suspicious of foreigners for being foreign, until many months later he suddenly discovers unspeakable horrors of etc. etc.
You may be interested in the novella "The Ballad of Black Tom", which is a re-telling of "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of the immigrants in the New York slum, and why they decide that maybe dealing with eldritch horrors is a better alternative than trying to reason with this detective that keeps on hassling them for no reason.
I still think SO was done in by the weird way they handled similar questions. They encouraged veteran users to flag new questions as dupes, even if the "original" question was years old and unanswered. Who does that even help?
Imagine if the system had let veteran users link a new question to an existing answer rather than a question, and if the asker finds it solves their problem they can accept it. At least that way new joiners would have a chance of getting their question answered.
Looking back it feels like SO was one of the first really gamified sites, and the people running it got weirdly focused on the point-economy aspect. They ran the site almost like "points" were a finite resource, and not to be handed out unless the user really deserved it.
The vast majority of duplicate closures use already answered questions as duplicates. So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well. In my observation this is usually the case, though the answer might be more generic.
I have also seen bad duplicate closures that weren't actually exact duplicates. But people talk like this is the only kind of duplicate closure that actually happens. I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed, or if people are missing that their question is actually answered in the duplicate.
I was extremely active on SO and other SE sites in the late 00s and early 10s. In those days it wasn't too bad, many duplicates were actually duplicates. However that really did start shifting. This is anecdata of course, but even questions that linked to possibel "duplicates" and pre-expalined why it wasn't the same question were often just closed as duplicates of the exact question that was linked. This happened to me several times before I got fed up and moved on with my life.
SO was a really rewarding place to ask and answer questions in those early days. It really is a crying shame what they did to the community by empowering the worst of the community to be the bosses.
> So ideally that question should have answers that apply to the new question as well.
The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
> I've no idea if the rate of bad duplicates is so much higher than I observed,
Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it. They only looked at the signal "does somebody with points think these questions are similar", and discarded the signal of whether the new user got any value out of the site, and I think that's what did them in.
> The point is who decides. If you ask a question and I flag it as a dupe, I might think the answers on the other question apply to yours, but only you know whether they solved your problem or not.
The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question.
By policy, whether a question is a duplicate depends on whether answers at the target answer the question that is actually present in the "question" post. The details required to adapt that Q&A to the originally motivating situation are irrelevant.
In fact, there doesn't need to be an originally motivating situation in order to ask a valid question.
In fact, you don't actually need to know an answer in order to ask a valid question. It is perfectly acceptable, and even encouraged, to ask a question you know how to answer already, and provide the answer. (But both question and answer must meet standards, which are independent of who is asking and who is answering.)
> Sure, and neither does SO! They didn't even measure it.
This fundamentally can't be measured. Especially not when the claim of "bad duplicate" usually comes from people who are demonstrably not interested in what the policy is.
> The site is not about solving your problem. The site is about answering your question.
The point stands either way, reread my comment. When you ask a question on SO and somebody posts a regular answer, you the asker decide whether they've answered your question/solved your problem/Xed your Y/whatever else. Until you accept it as correct, SO assumes the posted answer did not X your Y.
In contrast when random people flag your question as a dupe, they the random people decide that the other question Xes your Y. If they misread your question, tough luck, SO assumes they are correct even though you're the only one who actually knows. That's the point I was making.
> This fundamentally can't be measured.
Again, reread my comments. If SO let other people suggest that an existing question Xes your Y, and gave you a button to accept their suggestion, then SO would know roughly how often dupe flags are correct.
I will say, moderation is a valuable thing on websites that intend to be useful for people. Wikipedia being another example. Ynews also has moderation.
Sites like Quora don't have good moderation (nor social media sites) and they become less useful for "how do I do X" questions.
LLMs do the moderation of the underlying source and just give you the answer.
I always find it strange how many HN commenters appear to have unconsciously added "exclusively" or "without exception" to the text of the comment they're replying to.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
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