>>715528125Yeah, kana isn't the killer, the brutally liberal use of Chinese characters is.
It's great for artistic works and written expression, sucks for learners.
In Chinese you have 1 character and that 1 character has 1 reading (very, very rarely 2).
In Japanese your character can be read in:
- Early Middle Chinese (呉音)
- Late Middle Chinese (漢音)
- Song-Ming period Mandarin (唐音)
- Modern Mandarin (宋音)
- ANY Japanese word that could relate to that concept (訓読み)
- A bunch of completely unrelated words because the word was used as an euphemism for the thing
- A bunch of completely unrelated words because the word was used in a rhebus referring to that thing.
- Common misspellings of any of the above.
And that's just the sound of things. Then you get into meanings where they had to come up with ways to deal with words that Chinese differentiate but Japanese do not. So now you can write two identical Japanese sentences with different characters based on what the CHINESE would tell apart with words but Japanese do not and they both have different implications (聞く and 訊く, for a random example).