> I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point.
Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn?
(Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)
> Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system
Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down.
It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)
> Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it.
You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks.
Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.
Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn?
(Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I don't know much about Japanese history beyond a single class in college, which focused on the modern era.)