>>1021995
The Japanese language has a lot of words that sound the same, but have completely different meaning. When talking to someone you use context
and pitch accent to figure out if the other person meant HaShi as in Bridge or Chopsticks or something else, whereas in writing you use different Kanji, so 橋 and 箸 respectively. There was an attempt when the USA occupied Japan, to use a Latin style alphabet, but again it could never have worked, because they have less sound groups than the English have. As such, the Japanese use all three of their alphabets: Chinese Kanji(over 2000), Hiragana(46) and Katakana(46 as well), as follows, most of their words are in Kanji, maybe with Hiragana above if it's a rare Kanji, they use Hiragana for grammar(connecting words, conjugation and so on), and Katakana when it's a foreign word like hamburger, or when it's a well known word, but the kanji is obscure like the Kanji for mouse(kids know how to say mouse, but not even adults know the Kanji as it's not part of the required Kanji a highschool student needs to know. Of course there are exception, such as children's books and games, like Pokemon which are entirely in Hiragana. Oh I should also mention that the Japanese language doesn't, usually, use a space between words, so those Hiragana characters also act as a space between words.
Now the Chinese have it even worse, as they have even less sound groups than the Japanese have, so when it was proposed for them to ditch the Kanji and use a Latin alphabet, a politician wrote this poem as a joke(mp4 related). The poem does have a meaning when you read it, so it's not just random words, but when you read it, it all sounds the same. Imagine writing this phonetically in English and preserving it's meaning. If you are curios, here is what it says:
>In a stone den was a poet Mr Shi, who loved eating lions and determined to eat ten.
>He often went to the market to watch lions.
>One day at ten o'clock, ten lions just arrived at the market.
>At that time, Mr Shi just arrived at the market too.
>Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows.
>He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
>The stone den was damp.
>He had his servant wiping it.
>The stone den being wiped, only then did he try to eat those ten lions.
>While eating, he just realised that those ten lions were in fact ten stone-lion corpses.