How good is your knowledge of kanji? Could you get by in Japanese by kanji alone? A new social media app aims to test that with a unique new feature: it forbids kana input, allowing only Chinese characters.
Written Japanese consists of three components: kanji, Chinese-derived ideographs, plus the two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana generally represents grammatical elements and certain common words, while katakana is used for loan words, onomatopoeia, and emphasis.
There have been attempts to change this beautiful but admittedly complex system over the years. All of them have failed. One group that wanted Japanese to shift into using romaji (Latin characters) admitted defeat last year.
The long and the short of it is, modern Japanese uses a combination of all three writing systems to represent the written language. There’s no such thing as writing Japanese without kana.
Until now. Independent developer Daiki Yuasa (@app_asa on X) has re-released 対多 (pronounced “Tsuita” – get it? Get it?), a social media app that prevents entering kana and allows only kanji. The app bills itself as the “Pseudo-Chinese forum” (偽中国語掲示板; nise-chuugokugo keijiban).
Tsuita operates as an anonymous message board. There’s no user sign-in – you can start posting to it immediately. You just can’t include kana – attempting to will produce an error message that prevents you from posting. (The error message, of course, is entirely in kanji- 偽中国語入力必須; nise-chuugokugo nyuuryoku hissu, input in Pseudo-Chinese required.)
The app was so popular that it caught its developer off-guard. The service went down due to the crush of users and a lack of server resources. Asa announced yesterday that he’d brought it back online.
The thing that makes the app fun is that, as the existence of Chinese proves, it’s entirely possible to communicate meaning using only kanji characters. The richness of kanji plus the abundance of kanji compound words means kana isn’t strictly necessary. Indeed, before the creation of kana, systems of writing based on kanji, such as kanshiki-wabun, were used to write Japanese.
Pseudo-Chinese isn’t a new thing. It first appeared on forums starting in 2009 and became trendy on Twitter around 2016.
Users seem to be having fun with the new service. The app currently has a 4.7 out of 5 rating on the App Store. And, yes, all of the reviews are in Pseudo-Chinese.
Even media outlets are getting in on the fun. The headline of ITMedia’s story on the app’s outage is itself written only in kanji characters.
As users flee from X, services like Bluesky and Mixi are trying to become the new home for people looking for a Twitter-like social media service. Tsuita will not be that service. But it’s sure a helluva lotta fun.
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