Although man'yōgana gave the Japanese a means to represent spoken Japanese on paper, sentences written in man'yōgana were quite difficult to read. Since Chinese characters were used for both representing the meaning of words and pronunciation, a lot of confusion could happen when a native Japanese speaker would read something written in both kanji and man'yōgana. The above examples in man'yōgana would be difficult for even a native Japanese speaker to read, especially for a modern Japanese person. On top of all that, writing everything down quickly was nearly impossible, since an entire Chinese character was needed to write down a simple Japanese syllable, some of which could have been written by up to 30 strokes of a pen.