Does any language have a more complicated writing system than Japanese?

Question

kanji (Chinese characters)
plus two phonetic syllabaries (hiragana and katakana)
It can't get much more complicated - or can it?

Answer 1

I doubt it. Japanese not only uses English abbreviations to represent some words in Japanese, but Japanese also has multiple ways of reading the same Kanji. Chinese uses many more Kanji, but each one only has one pronunciation. In Japanese, some Kanji have more than 10 different pronunciations. (And let's not go into personal names and place names!!)

Answer 2

I doubt if any language has a more complicated writing system than Japanese.

But Russian is more or less phonetic (except that the position of stress is not shown) and Arabic would be easy to read if the vowels were shown consistently. As for the answerer who said 'Welsh' - you're talking rubbish ! I'm not a Welsh speaker, but I can read a passage to someone who is a Welsh speaker and he/she will understand what I'm saying. Welsh (at least the form spoken in south Wales) is almost perfectly phonetic.

Answer 3

Not French, if you want to speak correct, fluent French, it is very hard. I would have to say that English is the easiest- English is very much an oral language, if it doesnt sound nice out loud, it's wrong. After that, something like Spanish or Italian is easy. Mandarin, isn't that hard since there is no conjugation or grammar, but it doesn't sound like any western language and the sentence structures are totally different. Plus, unless you happen to live in Chinatown, it's sort-of useless.

Answer 4

Actually, all writing systems are very similar in terms of difficulty (time to learn). Even in English, we didn't learn the alphabet and then magically knew how to spell every word - we had to learn each word one-by-one.

Here's an example:

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.

We read words - not letters. So learning Kanji is just as hard for us to learn as spelling is for a Japanese person learning English.

Answer 5

I think Chinese use a lot more characters than Japanese kanji.

Answer 6

The english language is the most complicated.

Answer 7

Possibly Mandarin, of which Kanji is based off of.

Answer 8

supposively the chinese laguage has a more complicated writing system than Japanese.

Answer 9

I never knew why they didn't just use the hiragana syllabic system. It works just like ours for Cherokee does, extremely easy writing system to learn.

Answer 10

yes it can like arabic language it pretty complicated