One of the best parts of learning any foreign language is coming across unique words and phrases that just don’t exist in your native language. This is one of the things that make studying Japanese so interesting, as it is full of these kinds of words. As a result, learning them can really enrich your vocabulary and bring you one step closer to sounding like a native speaker.
Kanji and Homophones Part IV – Kun-Yomi Strike Back
In the previous installment of this series, I discussed how class divisions in Japanese society exacerbated the problem with homophones already present with on-yomi. Here I will be discussing a few possibilities to reduce the number of homophones in use.
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Kanji and Homophones Part III – A Divided Culture
As discussed in the previous segment, many homophones have arisen due to the overuse of on-yomi, which are short and phonetically limited, as well as phonological drift.
To better understand why this phonological drift happened the way it did, we need to understand the state of affairs in Japan before the modern era. Like most places around the word, access to literacy and education was limited to the wealthy, higher classes, and back then, being educated meant knowing Chinese and Chinese culture, in much the same way that in Europe, being educated meant knowing Latin.
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Kanji and Homophones Part II -The Horror of On-Yomi
As we explored in the previous segment, there is nothing inherent to Japanese phonology itself that accounts for the large number of homophones. Given the language’s inventory of phonemes and phonotactics, it is more than capable of coming up with enough unique words to avoid homophones altogether.
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Kanji and Homophones Part I – Does Japanese Have Too Few Sounds?
A common refrain heard across the internet is that Japanese is a phonologically impoverished language. In fact, they say, it is so phonologically impoverished that the language is inundated with an unwieldy amount of homophones. As a result, it is impossible to write Japanese using a purely phonetic writing system. Kanji are the only way to disambiguate words.
The truth is much more complicated. Japanese does in fact have an unusually large amount of homophones but the cause is only tangentially related to its phonology. Additionally, kanji may actually be exacerbating the problem.
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Kuwashii Japanese 