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CK CK January 23, 2023 January 23, 2023 at 7:22:19 AM UTC flag Report link Permalink

🍎 A list with over 2,000 Japanese sentences that don't have kanji

https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences_lists/show/170911

All sentences on this list are owned by native Japanese speakers.

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sacredceltic sacredceltic January 24, 2023 January 24, 2023 at 10:26:56 AM UTC flag Report link Permalink

Maybe Kanjis are out of fashion nowadays with younger natives…

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Objectivesea Objectivesea January 28, 2023 January 28, 2023 at 8:33:22 PM UTC flag Report link Permalink

With respect, I beg to differ, @sacredceltic. It is true that after World War II, the Japanese Ministry of Education has curtailed the use of kanji to some degree, but a Japanese high school graduate will have learnt the 2,136 kanji and will generally use these appropriately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jōyō_kanji

I do not speak Japanese, but I picked one sentence at random from @CK’s list (https://tatoeba.org/en/sentence...s/show/170911) and entered it into Google Translate:

#11011895 — posted by @small_snow
バカじゃないの?

Google translated it as « Êtes-vous stupide ? » Reversing the direction of translation — that is, going from French to generate Japanese, reproduced the original sentence, written « バカじゃないの?» or, in romaji, « Bakajanaino? »

While the majority of sentences in Japanese will likely include one or more kanji, I think that @CK may just have intended to produce an interesting list of sentences that correctly use no kanji *because no kanji are needed* to express the words constituting those sentences, currently numbering 2,351.

Rather than somehow labelling these 2,351 sentences as being informal or less literary Japanese, I think the intent may just have been to help beginning students of Japanese, who will have mastered the hiragana syllabary but who have not yet learnt many of the jōyō kanji — a process which takes many years in a typical Japanese person's education.

Kind regards,
Erik (Objectivesea)