Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics

JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"

Comments

Does this have to do with socioeconomic shifts?

[HungWeiLo]

Does this trend have something to do with the shifting of the balance of power in the world?

The Japanese language is well-known for absorbing foreign words and language concepts into its own domestic use, especially from cultures / societies it deems powerful or dominant. It was Chinese during the Ming dynasty, Portuguese/Spanish during the 1600s, German during the 1800s, English from WW2 onwards.

Now that China is a relative economic superpower, maybe the trend is now to absorb Chinese words again?

Japanese students now prefer to study abroad in China rather than the U.S.