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Japanese writing system basics

candyjapan.com

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#201

Post by edwinyzh »

zorceta wrote: post #44
andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I 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?

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…

Both Cantonese and Hakka use "食" as verb since ancient times, no doubt about it.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#202

Post by minikomi »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #178
Grue3 wrote: post #177

入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.

Entering the mouth of the building?

I think the character does double service in that it has meanings which are very much mouth-related - 薄口 (thin-mouthed - like weak taste) 後口 (after-mouth - after taste); but it also has a ton of meanings which are like opening / spout / hole / crater.

http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/cgi-bin/wn-gridx.cgi?usrn...

It's not that a land's-mouth is a crater, more like, mouth and opening are more synonymous in feeling in Japanese.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#203

Post by weinzierl »

Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke?

Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help.

EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#204

Post by gkya »

weinzierl wrote: post #203

Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke? Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help. EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

No it goes to the page.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#205

Post by eriknstr »

hunvreus wrote: post #162
rosstex wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

How about if one hasn't eaten. Should one say so in reply to a stranger asking or would that be rude?

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#206

Post by edwinyzh »

Grue3 wrote: post #177

入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.

But 口 also means "loophole", so 入口 means "entrance" is perfectly logical - "The loophole that allows you to enter another building/strucutre".

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#207

Post by eriknstr »

gh02t wrote: post #15
kevindeasis wrote: post #8

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

A few thousand, with most adults knowing ~1000-2000, but you can get pretty far just knowing the 250 most common. The keyboards look about the same. The trick is there is also a phonetic alphabet that you can use to compose the ideographic characters. Basically Japanese input methods work kind of like autocompletion in an IDE. You spell the word you want using phonetic characters and a little popup lets you pick the…

So then typing Japanese on a keyboard still takes several key-presses for each word? How does writing speed compare between English and Japanese on a keyboard?

Furthermore, how was the placement of the characters decided? Are they more closely related to QWERTY (so that typewriters don't jam) or to Dvorak (so that the most frequently used letters are on the home row, and so that alteration between left and right hand is maximized), or unlike either? I use Dvorak and if I were to learn Japanese and type it on a keyboard, I'd want the typing experience to be similar to how it feels to type on Dvorak for English compared to QWERTY.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#208

Post by etatoby »

fenomas wrote: post #134
Margh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why?

What is the advantage of using a different symbol for each word, that offsets the huge disadvantages of having to learn and remember a different symbol for each word?

Especially considering that the spoken language already distinguishes between all possible words through pronunciation (and context in the case of homophones.)

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#209

Post by fenomas »

weinzierl wrote: post #203

Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke? Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help. EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

Make sure you're clicking on the article's title (口) and not on the article's domain, which comes right afterwards. Clicking on the domain takes you to a list of past submissions from the same site.

For a title like this one it's pretty confusing. I'm guessing you and I aren't the only ones to misclick.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#210

Post by weinzierl »

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…

> It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it.

> Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it.

As a second language learner of English I can attest that this is not just a problem of languages written in logographic systems:-)

>The only aspect in which logographic systems win is information density.

I vaguely remember a paper that claimed that information density is pretty much constant across languages and writing systems, but I couldn't find it as for now. There is another thread on HN [1] where people compared the size of "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in different languages. I think this misses the point because it doesn't account for intra-character information density. It'd be much more interesting to render the text into a bitmap and then compare compressed bitmap sizes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8236135

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