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Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

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Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#51

Post by Jach »

tjallingt wrote: post #8
cperciva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't read Japanese, can you explain what the four characters in question mean?

Not a Japanese reader so i can't fill you in on what exactly the characters mean but they are characters from the Japanese katakana script. Katakana are generally used for loanwords and each character represents a sound: ツ - tsu シ - shi ソ - so ン - n The reason these are difficult to learn is because the tiny differences in stroke angles (especially when handwritten) make it easy to confuse them.

All the kana are easy to learn if you use mnemonics, though I admit handwriting recognition might be harder. It took me a moment to recall some of the mnemonics themselves, eventually you just see them as they are... For tsu, I can think of Two sewing needles, for shi, I can think of "she has a funny face", for so it's one "so-ing" needle, for n it's a cyclops who can only say "nnnnnn". (https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/ and https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ have some great mnemonics to start out, I remember only altering a few.)

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#52

Post by glandium »

dastbe wrote: post #19
glandium wrote: post #15

Not even going into the "fun" of the Han unification, there are some weird things in Chinese/Japanese characters. For example, 右 (right) and 左 (left). You'd think the top-left part is the same, but it's not. In the case of 左, you write the horizontal stroke first, but in the case of 右, it's the second stroke. They also have a slightly different shape. Another example from the Jōyō kanjis, 臭 (stinking, odor) and 嗅 (sm…

not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion. and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!

So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#53

Post by danaliv »

jwfxpr wrote: post #38
hangonhn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.

This gets into slightly pedantic definitional arguments, but broadly speaking the assertion is true that all known earliest writing systems were logographic (where a character represents a word, not a sound), though it is also true that no 'pure' logographia has ever been known to exist (except for an artificially constructed language called Toki Pona[1] from c.2001 that's barely worth mentioning). In practice, all k…

& is simply a ligature of et, is it not?

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#54

Post by timr »

IgorPartola wrote: post #46
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition…

"And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going."

Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway.

Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns.

Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#55

Post by contingencies »

yeukhon wrote: post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Chinese has a lot of tricky ones.

荼 vs 茶

日 vs 曰

已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴

士 vs 土

水 vs 氺

人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几

干 vs 千 vs 于

天 vs 夫

... the list goes on.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#56

Post by anw »

tjallingt wrote: post #8
cperciva wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't read Japanese, can you explain what the four characters in question mean?

Not a Japanese reader so i can't fill you in on what exactly the characters mean but they are characters from the Japanese katakana script. Katakana are generally used for loanwords and each character represents a sound: ツ - tsu シ - shi ソ - so ン - n The reason these are difficult to learn is because the tiny differences in stroke angles (especially when handwritten) make it easy to confuse them.

In college, my Japanese teacher told us that a lot of foreigners get these characters wrong, but if you know the stroke order then it's easy to see the difference.

シ (shi) is written top to bottom. You can see that all the starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. Also, the last stroke curves from the bottom-left to the upper-right.

ツ (tsu) is written from left to right. You can see that all the starting points for the strokes line up horizontally at the top. Also, the last stroke curves from the upper-right down to the bottom-left.

ン (n) lke 'shi' is written top to bottom. The starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. It also uses the same direction for the longer, final stroke as 'shi'.

ソ (so) like 'tsu' is written left to right. The starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. It also uses the same direction for the longer, final stroke as 'tsu'.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#57

Post by grzm »

danaliv wrote: post #53
jwfxpr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets into slightly pedantic definitional arguments, but broadly speaking the assertion is true that all known earliest writing systems were logographic (where a character represents a word, not a sound), though it is also true that no 'pure' logographia has ever been known to exist (except for an artificially constructed language called Toki Pona[1] from c.2001 that's barely worth mentioning). In practice, all k…

& is simply a ligature of et, is it not?

Yup:

> The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#58

Post by wildmusings »

yeukhon wrote: post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#59

Post by azernik »

IgorPartola wrote: post #46
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition…

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese.

Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the Japanese heard them, and they often have different shades of meaning.

Chinese, on the other hand, uses only one writing system in any given body of text, uses the Latin alphabet with tone markings for phonetic spelling for learners, and is much less reliant on garbled loanwords.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#60

Post by jhedwards »

IgorPartola wrote: post #46
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition…

There are many things about Chinese which are very easy, in particular the grammar and the fact that many words are constructed by logical combinations of smaller semantic units. There's nothing easy about Japanese IMO, it has extremely complex grammar with standard and non-standard inflections, it uses a mix of two different alphabets and Chinese characters, and the Chinese characters often have multiple different readings. Chinese has a big learning curve because of the role of tones and context, but once you get over the hump it's a pretty simple language.
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