Japanese language learning
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Some reasons for learning kanji

•  Kanji, or Hanzi as it is pronounced in China, is probably the world’s favourite writing, with around a fifth of all people able to read it to some extent
   
• Kanji is old; its around 4000 years since the first basic characters began to take shape, that means the earliest tortoise shell writing belongs to an age that looked as old to a Roman as the Roman times look to us. This gives us a window into a time when we in the British Isles were emerging from the Neolithic age.
   
• You can meet simple words you have never seen before, written in a range of Eastern languages and actually have a fair chance of knowing what they mean
   
• To those who think they need to know thousands of kanji, remember the 500 most frequently used kanji accounts for 79% of newspaper kanji (Hayashi, 1982).
   
• Kanji will help you break a long sentence into smaller grammatical units; if you read Japanese in hiragana, the lack of gaps between words can make it difficult to identify which are the verbs, nouns, particles and so on. Kanji clarifies the nouns or stems of verbs and adjectives. 
   
• Kanji differentiates the numerous homonyms in Japanese from one another.
   
• Kanji is more than mere letters; the characters are imbued with meaning so it can be considered as vocabulary, which is learned progressively over a long period of time as you do in English

Reason for not learning kanji

• Because it’s easy.

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