Rhythms, Rites and Rituals. Dorothy Britton

is a great hindrance to Japanese learning English. I call it their ‘Katakana Prison’.

      It is of course possible to write everything in Japanese just using kana, but even a few of the beautiful Chinese characters expressing whole words sprinkled through the text make the meaning easier to grasp quickly at a glance, so one hopes they will never be completely abolished. But I hope very much that they will bring back that custom they used a long time ago when Japan was not a hundred per cent literate as they are now. It is called furigana, and prints tiny kana next to difficult kanji for the benefit of people like me who have not memorized them all!