> But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them.
Please don't make up facts just because they seem plausible to you. A quick internet search reveals that the Japanese language predates any writing system for it:
"Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 5th century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture, probably via Korea. However the Japanese were aware of Chinese writing from about the 1st century AD from the characters that appeared on imported Chinese goods."[1]
Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds before there was any way to write them down, so their syllables can't have been limited by their script (at least initially).
> Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.
You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese...
I have a couple things to add to this thread, not everything directly related to your comment.
1) Knowing the 26 letters is not remotely enough to be able to read the newspaper in English (earlier commenter made this assertion). Example: "She caught a cough. Such is life and death, dear!" How does knowing the letter "u" help you pronounce half those words? What about "g"? What about "h"? What about even if you put "gh" together? What about "e", "a", and if you shove "ea" together? In this single paragraph I've ballooned the number of letters and letter combinations needed into the 40's, and I've barely just begun. Don't get me started with borrowed words from French and Spanish (c'est la vie!).
2) Your comment: "You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese" - From direct first-hand experience, this is tough for a completely different reason than this comment thread is talking about. You've gone off on a tangent here. The reason Chinese is hard for English speakers is that tonality suggests overall sentence semantics, it does not directly affect any single word, whereas tonality affects every single word in Chinese. I thought we were talking about how syllable pronunciations were expressed by the writing system.
> Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds _before_ there was any way to write them down, so their syllables _can't_ have been limited by their script (at least initially).
You might be underestimating just how huge an influence Chinese has had on Japanese:
Japanese (as well as Korean and Vietnamese) imported Chinese vocabulary en masse, including a gloss of Chinese translation. That made Japanese much more homophonic since the tones got dropped in the process.
Just compare the kunyomi (native) and onyomi (Chinese-derived) readings for some Kanji and you'll see that the onyomi readings are usually single syllables.
"For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines (where borrowings from English are common), over half the words in newspapers and 60% of the words in science magazines."
That said, I don't really agree with GP's contention that using Kanji makes Japanese have a simple sound system. Chinese has a somewhere richer sound system even though it invented the characters (especially if you count tones), and Spanish and Italian have very simple sound systems even though they're written with alphabets.
Please don't make up facts just because they seem plausible to you. A quick internet search reveals that the Japanese language predates any writing system for it:
"Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 5th century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture, probably via Korea. However the Japanese were aware of Chinese writing from about the 1st century AD from the characters that appeared on imported Chinese goods."[1]
Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds before there was any way to write them down, so their syllables can't have been limited by their script (at least initially).
> Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.
You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese...
[1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese.htm