>>12873022well it's because they didn't actually have a writing system at all before the chinese pushed one on them. spoken japanese is extremely simple since it developed without writing in mind at all, but now that they do write kanji has to pick up a lot of the slack otherwise a lot of stuff would be ambiguous and confusing
nah fuck all that. i've thought about looking into it but i don't particularly care about sounding like a native and it's totally nonessential. there are basically no situations in which not knowing it effects your ability to make yourself understood or even speak eloquently. it's a dead giveaway that you're a foreigner but white people that speak native level japanese get treated like outsiders anyway so there's no there's not really any reason to worry about it in my opinion
