Not nearly as many as in Japanese. Japanese has a very small amount of sounds compared to English, and indeed most languages. The vast majority of combinations of sounds in the language can mean multiple things, some more than five different things. I'm a native speaker of English, and I speak Japanese relatively well, so you can trust me when I say that the two are not remotely on the same level at all when it comes to homophones.Originally Posted by gezegond
Which is not to say that kanji are necessary for every language, of course. Scrapping Chinese characters worked for Korean. But it worked there because Korean has a much larger amount of sounds (and hence sound combinations) than Japanese. It wouldn't go nearly as well in Japanese. And even then, Korean still often uses Chinese characters for legal documents, textbooks, etc... to avoid confusion.
Nope. They use kanji because it makes the language far easier to read, spaces or no, and because Japanese would be substantially more confusing and difficult without them than with them, both for native speakers and non-natives. Also, about 3500 is enough to read anything outside of ancient texts. Most native speakers won't know many more than that, and some will know less. 9000 is a ridiculous estimate even for a Chinese speaker, nevermind a Japanese one.
Believe me, you're not the first to suggest that Japan scrap kanji, and you won't be the last. I was the same. :'D But the idea has been discussed by many people both inside and outside of Japan, and the fact that they haven't scrapped them yet is kind of evidence to the fact that they're completely necessary to making Japanese a viable written language. The only people who complain about kanji, by my experience, are those who either haven't studied the language very much, or who have studied and failed. Anyone who learns Japanese to anything beyond an introductory level learns very quickly that kanji are absolutely crucial to the language functioning correctly.But still I find it quite redundant. If the Japanese would stop learning kanji and use that time to do something more productive, I bet their GDP would go up significantly.
Also, it's kind of strange to be insisting that kanji are inefficient and blocking the spread of Japanese as a world language when you look at the example of English. English spelling is far, far less efficient and logical than kanji is, being full of rules that make absolutely no sense, and words which often require learners to learn their pronunciation on a case by case basis. Worse, while you can make an argument for the utility of kanji, there is no such argument to be made for the craziness of English spelling. It's completely unnecessary. We could invent another ten or fifteen characters for the alphabet to cover our large sound palette, and have a written language that is completely logical and phonetic, but we insist on inflicting the difficulty of painful, illogical spelling on the world's population. As far as I've noticed, it hasn't exactly hindered the progression of English as a world language.
