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Japanese writing system basics

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#121

Post by vacri »

sdrothrock wrote: post #84
madeofpalk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"

The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the…

If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters?

> people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.

Well, people don't. 20 strokes is an unusually high stroke count, and people don't remember thousands of those. Simplified chinese characters were created because traditional characters were too complex and cumbersome for people to remember.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#122

Post by wch4999 »

Well, reading the first part I just realized this is japanese/chinese! In Chinese all characters are like 口 or 食. Sometimes we can also break the character down to several parts to understand its meaning.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#123

Post by yongjik »

rett12 wrote: post #48
laretluval wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has just as many homophones and used to be written with characters like Japanese. Now they are doing just fine with their phonetic writing system.

Korean didn't work at all under the imported Chinese system. Japanese also had problems but they solved inventing the Hiragana, a syllabary system. Both languages chose different systems and both languages work fine. Also Korean avoids many homophones thanks to it's 10 vowels. Japanese has 5.

In addition, Korean spelling is heavily morphophonemic, which is a fancy way of saying that words are written based on its "base form" even when the actual sound is different due to interaction with grammatical suffixes.

A bit like English "packed" being written with "-ed" even if it sounds identical to "pact". Helps disambiguation.

(Actually, come to think of it, it's rather analogous to the Japanese way of maintaining the same Kanji while the suffix changes.)

Koreans did have an old writing system[1] made of Chinese characters, where some were used for meaning and others were used to denote Korean suffixes with a similar sound (kinda like how Hiragana started out, I guess). But it eventually died out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idu_script

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#124

Post by [deleted] »

dghughes wrote: post #115

I just discovered NativLang on YouTube so this really is in my zone of interest today. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#125

Post by chewxy »

ttflee wrote: post #118
chewxy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), 吃 is equivalent to 喫, which means `to eat`. Its another meaning was `stuttering`. The ghosts part was not supported. http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQUYAZMEUYILAZKO.sht... http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQRNKOCQUYUYAB.shtml

Agreed. The ghosts bit is apocryphal. Not difficult to see where it comes from though. Mouth + Qi = spiritual nonsense.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#126

Post by ggreer »

andrioni wrote: post #119
ggreer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>• 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. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kan…

I've had Chinese colleagues who, when asked to write a word they'd just used in a sentence, were simply unable to. At first I thought they were playing a joke on me. But nope, they'd just forgotten the appropriate hanzi, and they couldn't even hazard a guess. It's a totally different failure mode than imperfectly-phonetic languages like English.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#127

Post by matthewrudy »

ggreer wrote: post #110
rett12 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've never heard this term "Character Amnesia" but its an analogue to my situation.

I can read and write (via pinyin) a large number of characters, but cannot recollect their shape in abstraction.

I think that's just because as a foreigner learning chinese in the modern world I've never had to learn this skill.

The difference between Recollection and Recognition.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#128

Post by mistercow »

pcr0 wrote: post #76
dingo_bat wrote: post #24

Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.

Japan isn't famous for candies per se but they do have a lot of very interesting/sometimes bizarre treats that you won't find anywhere else in the world. E.g. Yuzu KitKat, chilli KitKat, caramel lamb, chocolate squid, coffee bubblegum, caramel chips, cake soda, DIY candy, etc.

I'd say rather that Japan is famous for its candies for different reasons than Switzerland is for its chocolate. It's not that Japanese candy is of outstanding quality (although it is often quite good), but that they use candy as a vehicle for such a wide variety of novelty products.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#129

Post by HaloZero »

bemmu wrote: post #112
Sniffnoy wrote: post #78

Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

That certainly looks more complete. I was mostly wanting to see if I can pull the reader into learning Japanese without realizing that they were doing so.

Your domain was a bit of a hint. ^_^

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#130

Post by mistercow »

cynix wrote: post #81
badminton1 wrote: post #27

The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical. Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.

Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too. The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

> The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

Except that usually, almost nothing about the arrangement of strokes can be inferred from the sound or meaning of the word, and vice versa.

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