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I love this better.
Japanese writing system basics
161–170 of 347 posts
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#162In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在 (zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'. It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗? (Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.
How do you respond? "Yes"?
Depends on the question.
If the question "你好吗" ("How are you?" although literally translates to "Are you good?"), you can answer with "好" ("Good"). If you're asked "你是老外吗" ("You're a foreigner?") you can answer "是的" ("I am").
So it usually depends on the verb that was used in the question. Although you often can say "对", which is with “是的" the closest Chinese have to "Yes".
In this specific case, you would likely just answer "吃了" ("I ate") or "吃了，你呢？" ("I hate, what about you?").
Keep in mind that this is more or less the equivalent to"How are you doing?" or "What's up?" in the US; it's a greeting and people aren't necessary expecting an actual answer.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#163Everything old is new again. I have no , but I must ... Edit: Nevermind, HN swallowed the Emojis.
Actually, without the emojis, it's even more intriguing!
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#164囧
I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#165囧
I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#166Earlier 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…
> 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-nativ…
I'm curious: did you only answer yes to the words whose meanings you knew, or to anything that you knew was indeed a word? There were some that were pretty obviously words, but I wasn't certain the exact meaning (although I could guess), so I answered no. Ended up with 77% (as a native speaker). Apparently average for native speakers is 67%, so 77-89 as a non-native speaker sounds really good.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#167囧
For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?
Jiong is the craziest character that you'll never use, then there is 晕 (sun on top of car, haze, smog, but also means feint).
I just moved from Beijing to LA this week to work for a YCR funded/managed research lab. My time in China has finally come to an end!
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#168@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?
It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.
Curiously, a stereotypical infant directed speech instance that seems distinctly "oral" [0] is the union of those three options: "coo-chee, goo-chee, [k|g]oo".
[0] Perhaps only idiosyncratically.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#169Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis? They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them, nonetheless. ️
That's why you see services with lots of pictographic functions eclipse pure test-based ones in Asia, because they are very used to that kind of symbolic communication. And why complex emoji using text characters in creative ways were developed in Asia in the first place.
For example, Twitter never really took off in southeast Asia, but Line is incredibly popular. Why? Stickers. Line offers endless little pictures you can use with your messages, while Twitter doesn't.
Now stickers (and emoji) are taking off a lot more in the West, because they are super compact and effective communication symbols. I think we'll see more and more of it.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of homophones between Chinese loanwords in Japanese. A writing system like Romaji that only records the phonetic information would be no more useful than just hiragana (which might then arguably more useful as it aligns with the syllables?)
It would also be no more or less useful than just speaking. Do Japanese people carry around flash cards with kanji on them to disambiguate their speech?
It's actually not uncommon when speaking to have to either draw a kanji in the air, or refer to the symbol you mean by cross-referencing another word that uses it to disambiguate.