Is kana sufficient to write Japanese?
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011There is a recurring theme on a lot of blogs and forums that Japanese can only be written intelligibly using kanji. They have the idea that Japanese written only in kana (or romaji) cannot hold enough information and becomes difficult to read if not unintelligible. These ideas are mistaken. Kana is perfectly suitable to represent the sounds of Japanese, and that is all writing is, a representation of spoken language.
There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code. Read the rest of this entry »
