291–300 of 347 posts
Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods". Languages are weird, man.
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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…
> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler…
Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on the weekend.
After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up for me on Facebook.
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> 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,…
>It's a hugely inefficient way to write. Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser: "I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, a…
Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods". Languages are weird, man.
Whoa! I know that one -- it is "Shinagawa". I know this because my hotel was at that train station in Tokyo on a trip in the early 90's, long before signage in English was common in Japan..
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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.
That may be true. And perhaps the same argument could be made for Chinese characters? Could you elaborate on why the alphabetic system is intrinsically more efficient than Chinese characters in terms of recovering messages from partial loss of texts?
It's the same principle as how soldiers are trained to spread out when in battle: If they bunch up, it increases the risk that a single mortar shell (or artillery round or machine-gun burst) could take out a lot of troops.
How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?
(In Japanese, the topic of the original article, the situation is somewhat better, as mostly only a fairly well defined subset of about 2000 characters is used, next to (two) syllabaries and the Latin alphabet).
Knowing only 250 or even 1000 characters is quite unsatisfying, though. When you read a newspaper, it'll read like this: "At the meeting yesterday, president said that it is of great importance to the , otherwise surely the will down. suggested a possible solution, though, by bringing the whole country together to for the future and implement a better ."
Sure, you understand 90%, but that's not really cutting it.