Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Japanese writing system basics

candyjapan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 347 posts

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#331

Post by force_reboot »

gayprogrammer wrote: post #309
force_reboot wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression…

put the pedal to the metal (idiomatic) To exert maximum effort. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#En...

Yes, that is an equivalent phrase, but much less commonly used than 加油 and "gi' det gas".

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#332

Post by rangibaby »

0xfaded wrote: post #95
zorceta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I have lived in Japan since I was a teenager and I had a much better time reading in China (was there for a few weeks as a tourist) than speaking.

It was quite funny because staff at restaurants thought I was some kind of weirdo who could point at exactly what he wanted on the menu but couldn't answer basic questions.

They appear to have simplified them predictably in a way that is not impossible to understand if you have a senior HS-level of kanji knowledge.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#333

Post by rangibaby »

prewett wrote: post #320
FabHK wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent. (As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maint…

Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.

for those who don't know, this is called 略字 (ryakuji) eg 門 > 门

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#334

Post by dhfromkorea »

dctoedt wrote: post #299
dhfromkorea wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Spatial dispersal of the glyphs means that fewer glyphs would be taken out by any given insect-gnawed hole, UV-radiation fading, hurled paint glob, etc., and thus less of the overall message would be lost to that single incident of damage. 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-…

Oh, now I see. Thank you for explaining your point succinctly.

Though I do not have data to back up my argument, I still reckon the Chinese glyphs/scriptures would have had a better chance of survival.

While I think your point is valid, its disadvantages outweigh the advantage, at least since paper/papyrus was invented.

Being spread out to double in length (double being an arbitrary multiplier) would still be inferior to being dispersed to two physical locations (redundancy). I think this is where don't put all your eggs in one basket holds true.

Plus, important docs must have been actively maintained by hired librarians(?). With human maintenance involved, less in volume could have been an advantage for it is easier to move around and maintain the docs. Ofc, when left out in the wild, it is a different story.

Personally I do not like Chinese character system as it has so high a barrier to entry for learners. I love alphabets, Korean Hangeul, or Japanese Hira/Katakana for this matter. Have you tried learning any of those? :-)

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#335

Post by gurkendoktor »

ced wrote: post #246
_kdhr wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's nice, but I think most languages do this. It's not particular to Chinese. The word "comp…

Right, but when learning English as a second language, they don't teach you "com" and "putare", because the roots are too far away and too diverse (Latin, Germanic) whereas in Chinese, it's often immediately obvious. Well, more often than in other languages. Most of it is still random-looking.

Well, that's the cool thing about Chinese - it's the Latin/Greek of East Asia :) It's to Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese what Latin/Germanic are to English, so there are less indirections.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#336

Post by gurkendoktor »

gbog wrote: post #223
prewett wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Characters are mostly displayed on screen nowadays, and most fonts are indeed symmetrical. I don't find Simplified Chinese handwriting ugly at all, but it looks odd on-screen.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#337

Post by gurkendoktor »

matthewrudy wrote: post #127
ggreer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've never heard this term "Character Amnesia" but its an analogue to my situation. I can read and write (via pinyin) a large number of characters, but cannot recollect their shape in abstraction. I think that's just because as a foreigner learning chinese in the modern world I've never had to learn this skill. The difference between Recollection and Recognition.

Same here - and strangely enough, it's rarely a problem. Faking characters by using the correct radical and a random homophone base character works okay in a pinch.

But because I never write characters by hand, I have a really hard time reading handwritten notes, and that is a problem.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#338

Post by gurkendoktor »

prewett wrote: post #141
Zarel wrote: post #107

Earlier 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.

To add some anecdata from native speakers (not me), I've noticed many simplifications like 机車 in "Traditional" Taiwanese handwriting, but I've never seen 机车.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#339

Post by giancarlostoro »

azernik wrote: post #39
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.

This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the sounds. Similar to the origins of the Jap…

I'm not following you too much, I'm not saying it is like Hebrew modern or paleo. I'm saying it's like Ancient Pictographic Hebrew[0]. Each character has a meaning, and they're simpler than the second character shown in the article to register (though in their defense that character is likely made up of variations of a couple of other characters). Also, the Hebrew didn't have vowels up until the Masoretes who added to the Hebrew Scriptures by adding vowels to them, but that's another topic not related to this topic.

[0]: http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#340

Post by x3al »

anatoly wrote: post #315
x3al wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are way too much homophones and you don't always have the luxury of the context. Learning a symbol for each root (not word!) is not that bad, English spelling is almost as bad, actually. Spoken language is quite limited compared to written Japanese.

Do Japanese audiobooks exist? Assuming yes, do their users have significant problems understanding the written text when pronounced in an audiobook? Are there well-known conventions or shortcuts or explanations that audiobook readers insert into their speech to signal the correct meaning of the word? Do Japanese audiobooks provide evidence for or against the idea that doing away with kanji in writing would not harm u…

Fiction audiobooks do exists (although not nearly as common as in English-speaking countries), but audiobooks can't possibly work with non-fiction and especially technical texts unless you are going to use English words for literally every single term. I mean, Japanese has only about 100 moraes and way too much words are just 2-3 moraes long.
Post reply on HN