111–120 of 347 posts
That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?
I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: http://eepurl.com/ccistz
Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
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It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…
Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost. I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortu…
Japanese kanji come from Chinese characters, but has become very different too. As a native Chinese, I think there is a clear link between modern simplified Chinese and 'near ancient' Chinese character. Here 'near ancient' means characters used up to 汉(漢, Han) Dynasty. Before Han, Chinese was very different too. There has always been a simplification process and a link.
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I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that so…
> I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese Writing Japanese entirely in Latin characters would be no different from writing it entirely in hiragana. Have you ever tried reading that way?
Having read English language papers on Japanese linguistics, I can also say that reading the Latin is easy too.
I've just spent the last few hours learning all about languages how they developed and each culture's spin on adding as much meaning as efficiently as possible to written symbols. I've always loved languages so this was more of a brush up plus learning.
It seems and rightly so ambiguity is death to any characters and efficiency is also fundamental to the character.
I'm not Korean but I like their style literally I like how their language style is so efficient in context to mouth position. It was created because Chinese characters didn't suit Korean language. Japan also streamlined Chinese characters to better suit their culture.
Mayan is another wild language full of meaning in such compact symbols. I had a hard time following their characters.
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> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler…
Removed the "do not" As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. Bu…
It can also be nice to use a “balanced base”, with digits for negative numbers, e.g. in a base ten context you’d have digits for –4 to 5 (or if you’re willing to have multiple expressions for the same number, –5 to 5).
A balanced base twelve multiplication table might look like this: http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png
By the way, I'm happy your site is rockin! I saw it when you launched candyjapan and I am happy for you =)
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It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…
When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual eli…
The ghosts part was not supported.
http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQUYAZMEUYILAZKO.sht... http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQRNKOCQUYUYAB.shtml
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Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people. Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in curren…
Logographic systems have some major disadvantages: • It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). • Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it…
I don't think English is much better in these cases. In fact, the writing can be so divorced from speech that spelling bees are a thing.
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Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people. Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in curren…
Logographic systems have some major disadvantages: • It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). • Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it…
If you're bringing computers into it, isn't text entry in Japanese usually done phonetically anyway?
