After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up for me on Facebook.
Japanese writing system basics
221–230 of 347 posts
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#222Finding it surprising no one has corrected the article in that you technically learned Chinese and by proxy Japanese. Chinese traditional characters + meanings largely carried over from Chinese as well.
I'm studying mandarin and i was enjoying it until I was told I just learned "Japanese".
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese). On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café). The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.
The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.
That's completely subjective, most characters are not symmetrical anyway, and when they are it's a mistake to draw them symmetrical.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views just from the current wave.
It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before it's finished. Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the comments or another article. I know I do. Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I remove…
FWIW I'm very likely to check out the second part, but completely unlikely to fill out the form that you provided. Not sure it's rational, but my guess is that others can feel the same.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#225Another 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…
A counterpoint: When a message is written with an alphabet, it's not as compact, but its meaning can be guessed at even if significant portions of the message are missing (known as lacunae). See, e.g., the TV game show Wheel of Fortune; another example is the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts that have deteriorated over time.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#226If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal? If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed? Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when…
>already terrible Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones. Japanese's appropriation of hanzi is largely a historical accident due to geographical circumstance, but most learned in the language most would agree it's far more efficient than simply using hiragana or katakana or even romaji; disambiguation by pict…
> Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones.
It is the opposite. A writing system that requires multiple years to learn is not "efficient".
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
It's hard to explain. In English, spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are all more or less interrelated, right? In Japanese, writing (kanji) correlates to pronunciation and to meaning, but pronunciation and meaning are mostly unrelated to each other. Kanji is what disambiguates them.
So, obviously learning 1000 kanji isn't easy. But doing that is what makes it possible to learn 100,000+ words whose pronunciations and meanings would be otherwise largely unrelated.
It's quite similar to the role that Latin/Greek roots play in English. When you see a word that includes "-graph-" you know it probably involves writing, and similarly when a student of Japanese sees a word with "間 (kan)" they know it involves an interval or space. Throw away the kanji, and your student now just sees "kan" - which means the word will probably involve an interval -- or a barrier, or emotion, or appearance, or a tube, or a building, a warship, a crown, an ending, China, a publication, a government ministry, or.. you get the idea.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#228Another 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…
> you only need to learn around 3000 symbols
This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write.
Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer, politician, etc).
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#229Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods". Languages are weird, man.
I wOUld agree with you if it weren't for the wOUnd I have where a bOUlder pOUnded me in the head, so I don't have the cOUrage.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You'd probably say something like "还没有", "没有" or "没吃" ("Not yet", "No" or "I haven't eaten"). Again, it's just a greeting, the answer doesn't matter much (unless it's your mom asking you in which case she'll make a big deal of it, but that's a pretty international behavior).