demonsword@vasia.com wrote:

DJ>> My penultimate goal will be to READ your fanfic in nihongo
DJ>> and hopefully make sense of it.
DJ>> My ultimate goal is to be able to watch original Japanese
DJ>> anime without subtitles and make sense of it!

DJ>I rather suspect that the latter will happen long before the former.

Not if you consider one thing: a Nihongo word processor will
present its data in full kanas, without kanji! If that fanfic ever does
get translated to Nihongo, reading it will be much, much
easier!

Yes... and no.  I've found that solid kana is very difficult to read,
whereas mixed kana and kanji (in the normal mode of nihongo)
is much easier, despite my very small kanji vocabulary.  Kanji
with furigana is the ideal for learners, I think.

The problem revolves around homonyms.  Japanese has far more
homonyms than English, and many of these homonyms have
differing kanji.  (The removal of kanji from Japanese was considered
as part of the post-war thing but was eventually discarded precisely
because of this problem.)

--
David Eddy -- Senior Consultant, Progress Software Melbourne
dje@progress.com
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/8341