Do you recall
an image of the alphabet while you are talking with somebody?
I often recall
an image of Kanji to understand what is being said. I believe that other native
Japanese speakers also do this. Because spoken Japanese is like a sentence
written in Hiragana, we have to figure out which Kanji is suitable for the word
or idiom which we have just heard.
There are a lot
of pairs of homonyms in Japanese since we don’t have a lot of syllabic
variation. This is because we have neither a closed syllable nor allow for
syllables with two consecutive consonants. We only have three types of syllables:
the vowel syllable, the open syllable composed of a consonant and a vowel. and
the consonant “n” or ん.
This lack of
syllable variation requires the aid of the ideographic character. We can’t
write a meaningful sentence without using Kanji. We can’t make conversation
with high level of abstraction without recalling their images.
Out of
curiosity, I wonder if Chinese people, who use Kanji (or Hanzi) and have much
more syllables than us, also recall Kanji (or Hanzi) in conversing.
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