Japanese writing system basics • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#131

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #114

fenomas wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Kind of. In my first semester of japanese we worked in hiragana+spaces. Having read English language papers on Japanese linguistics, I can also say that reading the Latin is easy too.

Sure, I didn't mean to suggest it can't be done in short spurts. But reading a novel that way would be hellish.

The larger point being, Japanese isn't locked into using a logographic system - it already has two phonetic syllabaries that people could start using exclusively if there was some advantage to doing so.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#132

Post by andolanra » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

siong1987 wrote: post #11

asimjalis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.

you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...

The link you provided has no information as to whether that's a correct etymology or not, only that 月食 yuèshí is made up of characters 月 yuè 'moon' and 食 shí 'eat'. There are numerous other explanations for why those two characters could be used: for example, perhaps 食 used to have a different meaning which dropped out of common usage, or maybe 月食 used to be written with different characters and people switched to the easier-to-write 食 from a more complicated character, or any of a number of other reasons.

I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#133

Post by bemmu » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

kevindeasis wrote: post #8

How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?

In Japanese primary school at the end of grade 6 students are expected to know 1,006 characters. At the end of high school you are expected to know total 2,136.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#134

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

Margh wrote: post #99

rett12 wrote: post #25

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

If you replace kanji with katakana and keep hiragana for particles and conjugation, you can call it a day. Easy to learn, no more trying to guess if it's on/kunyomi, immune to mispronunciation from using a foreign alphabet, the list goes on.

Speaking as someone who started as an adult and is now fluent, I think this would make Japanese much, much harder to learn.

Or rather, the 2-3 months would be ten times easier and everything after would be ten times harder.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#135

Post by paradite » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

This has the added advantaged of being recognized by both native Japaneses and Chinese speakers instantly, as long as we keep it to kanji.

I recognized what the author is doing from the start as a Chinese speaker.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#136

Post by bemmu » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

drwicked wrote: post #82

I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people do now?

Sometimes I wonder how popular something is, so I figured someone similarly chart-inclined might get a kick out of seeing it.

I'd like to see a similar counter for something that reaches the top page of Yahoo News in Japan or the top spot on a main page subreddit. Those stats must be crazy.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#137

Post by sampo » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

rett12 wrote: post #71

gizmo686 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in current use excluding inflections, and several technical and regional vocabularies.

Here is a website which questions you with some random sample of words from an English dictionary, mixed with randomly generated non-words. Then it estimates the percentage of English words you know.

http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start

I am a non-native speaker, and I have scored in the 77% to 89% range, when doing this test several times.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#138

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#139

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:07 AM UTC

sdrothrock wrote: post #89

donatj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

> The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time. I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and you select the one you want. In addition, hiragana input on…

Yep, and add in that with swipe gestures, the hiragana keyboard only needs ~10 keys, making it much less fidgety to hit the keys on mobile.

Typing Japanese on mobile phones is pretty fast and painless. Easier than English on a regular keyboard, though not quite as fast as English "swipe" style input (whatever the term for that is?).

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#140

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 4:08 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #121

sdrothrock wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chi…

> If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first

Also why did Korea and Vietnam abandon them entirely?