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Japanese writing system basics

candyjapan.com

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#341

Post by a_bonobo »

edwinyzh wrote: post #206
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".

Fun coincidence:

A vomitorium (any modern person associates that with vomiting, i.e., stuff coming out of your mouth) was the name for entrances in Roman amphitheatres.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#342

Post by wccrawford »

cynix wrote: post #81
badminton1 wrote: post #27

The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical. Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.

Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too. The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

No, you also have to learn the sounds of the words so that you can speak them, and then most of the characters have multiple sounds used in different places, and they place multiple characters together for a lot of words.

It's a lot more complex than just using letters, which is something they can also do.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#343

Post by yaowenjiaozi »

vacri wrote: post #121
sdrothrock wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the…

If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters? > people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless. Well, people don't. 20 strokes is an unusually high stroke count, and people don't remember thousands of those. Simplified chi…

> learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters?

Is that what they use hanyu pinyin for these days? I've always thought of pinyin as a pronunciation guide for Mandarin, similar to furigana in Japanese.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#344

Post by OOPMan »

"The English alphabet has only 26 letters, which most kids can master with little difficulty. But we are adults now, why limit ourselves to the 26?"

Less is more. Why waste time learning 2k pictograms (Just for the standard stuff, there's over 50k in total) when you can achieve the same thing with less?

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#345

Post by whiteandnerdy »

biot wrote: post #200
foota wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interested to know as well.

I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books, so someone please start writing them. :)

Maybe you're thinking of https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-langua...? That's all I could find by googling around.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#346

Post by FabHK »

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.

Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#347

Post by matthewrudy »

binaryabyss wrote: post #239
matthewrudy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a much older language than modern Mandarin) So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it is the correct verb. In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk" ("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh") Edit: "sikh"

Not to mention that Mandarin would use 嘴（里）rather than 口 The pronunciations of kanji correlate to different Chinese eras and areas. The usage and choice of characters are influenced by Classical Chinese, which was the literary language in Japan until, uhm, recently-ish. There is a very good recent YouTube video that explains the usage of Chinese characters in Japanese and which I recommend to anyone interested in the…

I've never learned Japanese, nor spent much time there.

From my brother who studied Japanese for a while, the Kanji was a real blocker for him. So I did wonder what it'd be like, given I already know a good amount of Chinese characters.

I guess this video answers that question:

Even more confusing.

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