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Japanese writing system basics

candyjapan.com

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#211

Post by gkya »

edwinyzh wrote: post #198
dhfromkorea wrote: post #187

Another 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.

Far many more symbols are required to represent a word with alphabetical systems. I used 65 symbols and 11 spaces to write this sentence whereas with ideograms I'd need about 13 symbols.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#212

Post by primitivesuave »

Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" - one who orders rules.

An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#213

Post by weinzierl »

fenomas wrote: post #209
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.

I feel dumb:-). That's it, thanks a lot.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#214

Post by etatoby »

dllu wrote: post #77
kevindeasis wrote: post #8

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

Here's a hilarious design for a keyboard with a key for most Japanese symbols: https://japan.googleblog.com/2010/04/google.html It's an April Fool's joke, obviously. For Japanese you can use romaji or some other phonetic system; for Chinese you can use pinyin or bopomofo.

LOL I like the toroidal shape in the first sketch!

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#216

Post by [deleted] »

akavi wrote: post #5
Joof wrote: post #3

Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.

Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work? Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).

[deleted]

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#218

Post by xiaoma »

primitivesuave wrote: post #212

Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person…

What traditional character using place are you speaking of? In Taiwan, programmer is 程式設計師 and in Hong Kong, it's 程式設計員. I had thought 程序 was basically a mainland-only variant.

Also, FWIW, I couldn't read a paper at 3k characters. It's more like 4-5k if the goal is reading rather than slogging through with a dictionary.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#219

Post by leafsleep »

geomark wrote: post #151
anqurvanillapy wrote: post #149

In 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.

Same in Thai. They ask กินข้าวหรือยัง ("Have you eaten yet?", or literally "Have you eaten rice yet?") as a greeting.

If you want literal, it's "eat rice already" - Thai does not have conjugation
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