Kanji

A lot of people don't like kanji or at least find it to be the hardest part of Japanese. I also agree that it is a pain in terms of trying to figure out what pronounciation to use, but when it comes to reading, I need to see the kanji. Since Japanese doesn't use spaces when writing sentences, long strings of hiragana is just frustrating since I'm trying to figure out where one word starts and another begins. A lot of students are put off by the combination of hiragana, katakana, and kanji, but the way I see it, it seems to be a more aesthetic alternative to having spaces in the sentences. In any case, with kanji, it is much more easier to see the elements of a sentence if they are included than if they were replaced by their phonetic equivalent in hiragana. Moral of the lesson? Study kanji.