Kanji is a writing system used in Japan and grounded in a very similar Chinese system. Rather than a small set of letters based on the sounds of words, it is a vastly larger set of characters based on the meaning of words. Students have to learn 2000-3000 characters in school, but there are upwards of 50,000 different kanji characters—though approximately half of them are more technical or otherwise largely confined to use in narrow contexts.
(Kanji characters can be combined to form a word, as the kanji for “Kyoto” is two characters, “capital” and “city,” because back when Kyoto was first written about, it was the capital of Japan. So, students must not only learn thousands of kanji characters, they must also learn the combinations used to write thousands more words.)
38 Words Written in Kanji
Japan also has a couple of (phonetic-based) alphabets, each larger than our own. But those alphabets have not supplanted kanji. They may be used alongside kanji, but kanji is the foundation of reading and writing in Japanese. (I will stop giving different links for kanji, but it is a fascinating topic that is far far far more complex than I have suggested.)
Now, our reading wars and claims around the so-called (and oft misunderstood) science of reading really boil down to how much instruction should a) lean into the use of our phonetically-based alphabet to sound out words when reading or b) push students to the more advanced recognition of words when reading (i.e., sight reading). I think it that it is pretty obvious that no educators actually advocate for purely-phonics-based instruction, just as none are against the inclusion of phonics; it is question of where the appropriate balance is.
It occurred to me this week that Japan simply cannot have these reading wars. Their primary writing system simply requires pure memorization of thousands of kanji characters. There is no fallback of sounding out words written with a kanji character. There is no fallback of sounding out words written with multiple kanji characters. Yes, one can sound out words written in hiragana or katakana, but not words written in kanji.
I wonder what this does to opportunities for academic success for Japanese students. I wonder if the challenges of memorizing kanji—both for writing and for reading—explains how much studying Japanese and Chinese students are so famous for doing. And I wonder how much we could learn about reading and writing instruction that might inform our reading wars if we looked at reading and writing instruction in Japan and China.