Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.
Japanese has fewer sounds and a lot more homophones than English, so purely phonetic writing becomes a lot more ambiguous. Children grow out of it at an early age.
Furthermore, kanji often allows the reader to skip phonetics altogether, because the symbol itself carries the meaning. It’s a bit like how people understand emojis without having to make a sound for them in their heads.
As a result, the Japanese are able to read very fast in their native language, so switching to a different system would carry significant drawbacks.
There's an advocate group for all-kana Japanese that existed since 1920, just decade or two after pseudo-Chinese styles was deprecated and kana-kanji mixed as-spoken text became the standard, before even kana switched from katakana to hiragana, and they don't even use all-kana text on its official propaganda page anymore[0], so there's that.
No you don’t. There’s actually a lot of research showing that native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes. And people who read fastest read in even larger groups of words, to the point of eliding segments of sentences or paragraphs entirely.
Chunking is incredibly important for reading speed, and reading hiragana is much closer to reading letters than words. My reading speed in Japanese is nowhere near native, but the way I’ve gained speed so far is almost exclusively by increasing my minimum comprehension unit: I see word patterns, common grammatical constructions, etc., and I don’t need to read them.
> native English speakers don’t read letters, they read word shapes.
Don't try to teach children to read this way, though: it's a high-level technique that comes with practice and familiarity, with near-instant fallback to lower-level techniques as appropriate, or the resort of dyslexics who cannot read any other way. Teaching children to use the approaches used by struggling readers will tend to produce more struggling readers than necessary.
In the real world nobody is masochistic enough to not adopt spaces if writing without kanji.
Old Japanese videogames couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations. They wrote in all kana but used spaces to make the text easier to read.
Modern Japanese children's books and eg. even Pokemon games still? Same thing, kana and spaces.
When Korean transitioned away from Japanese-style mixed script to purely alphabetic writing, what did they do? They adopted spacing.
The only time "but Japanese doesn't have spaces" comes up, ever, is when people argue against the removal of kanji. It's not a realistic scenario, in light of very recent history and current practice.
In a world where hiragana and katakana are adopted to eliminate characters, it's not that hard to imagine also adopting spacing. Hangul for Korean did not originally have spaces in the language.
