Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods".
Languages are weird, man.
Japanese writing system basics
191–200 of 347 posts
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
>• 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.
Yep. The analogy I use is, it's a bit like if someone walked up and asked you to draw the logo of this or that company. Even if you've seen the logo a million times, you might not be able to summon up a mental picture of it, or you might remember the rough shape but have no idea how many lines go where.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#193In 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.
That greeting got me a bit when I was just starting to learn to read Chinese (I never attempted to learn to speak it). Learning something so different to the languages I know really made me appreciate the similarities between Swedish and English, let's say, and how that made learning easier.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#194Sometimes 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.
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…
> the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that.
Fun fact, we do do that in English, at least for C and G. (G was introduced as a modified C to indicate the voicing).
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can't simply take a characater apart and glue meanings of the parts together - it's more complicated. Having "乞" part doesn't necessarily mean it has the meaning of begging - it's a "sound", rather than meaning, element, which "provides" the sound of "吃". And although I don't know the "喰" character, I can tell it didn't become Chinese 吃 and Japanese 食. 食 is more "ancient", where "吃" seems only used so widely in m…
Yeah the Japanese version of hànzì is much more ancient (Song or Tang dynasties, I think) and have changed comparatively little since then. Also, they simplified some characters in a very different way than how the Chinese did.
(I'm probably wrong but: if I remember correctly, Japanese has changed a lot, but the writing system hasn't so the sounds like part of the character isn't always correct or even close. It's a lot like Irish or English in that the language has changed much but the writing hasn't.)
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#196I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
If anyone is interested in this kind of etymology, academic Kenneth Henshall has written 'A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters' which contains the etymologies for the ~2000 general use Kanji. Over the millennia of evolution of the characters, some characters have multiple disputed etymologies which are still unresolved by the academics who study the history. For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of…
The method of "Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters" ( https://www.amazon.com/Tuttle-Learning-Chinese-Characters-Re... ) is working very well for me for memorization.
It uses mnemonics, but it only loosely follows real etymologys. It diverges to nonsensical, but memorable stories when this will make things easier to remember. It also has mnemonics to remember tone and pronunciation (for Mandarin Chinese only though).
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask: 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?' as opposed to 'what does "..." mean' A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..." compare this with seeing テリヤキ
> 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?' Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is. > A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..." A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri so…
> Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.
You're missing his point and English is a crappy example because it's spelling is an unmitigated disaster. For example, if you can read and vocalize the Greek alphabet, you can just ask someone what "νόστιμο φαγητό"* means because you can vocalize it. You only need basic knowledge of the alphabet there. Where as with Chinese/Japanese you need to have a good base of characters to be able to potentially vocalize an unknown character which requires much more work than learning a new alphabet.
(* νόστιμο φαγητό means delicious food)
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#198Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like wild fires or crimes like thefts or vandalism. It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems. Th…
Anybody care to explain why "costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems"? I know nothing about printing technology but I'm a Chinese.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#199In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí. As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.
Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a much older language than modern Mandarin) So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it is the correct verb. In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk" ("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh") Edit: "sikh"
Yes, 食 is a verb in Cantonese and Hakka! Both of them are more close to archaic Chinese than Mandarin.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn Japanese.
Very interested to know as well.
I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books, so someone please start writing them. :)