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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)

#61

Post by baddox »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35
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…

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

That’s also true of common characters used in English depending on font and other things. Context generally makes things pretty clear, which I would guess is also the case with these glyphs in other languages.

Capital I, lowercase l, numeral 1

Numeral 0 and uppercase O

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

#62

Post by poizan42 »

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…

> > 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

The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference whether the diagonal dash touches the part to the left? Seems very hard to notice.

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

#63

Post by hudibras »

timr wrote: post #54
IgorPartola wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think.

That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class...

The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...

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

#64

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

jasonjei wrote: post #14

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwa…

> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet.

If I could be very pedantic for a moment...

Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

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

#65

Post by kunimu »

contingencies wrote: post #55
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.

I've been learning Japanese for a relatively short time, so perhaps that's why the 巳 vs 巴 onwards in your list aren't tricky at all to me.

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

#66

Post by yuhong »

poizan42 wrote: post #62
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…

> > 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 The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference…

And probably why no one cares, especially when Unicode was limited to 16-bit.

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

#67

Post by hudibras »

mjevans wrote: post #48

Is the 'unspecified' rendering supposed to be the same as the 'popular' rendering (on the right); or is it supposed to be the one in the middle? For me seemingly every example's left most and right most column (for the sets of 3) looked identical, while the middle form was different.

I tried a couple browsers, and I'm seeing the left and middle kanjis as being the same, with the right one different.

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

#68

Post by ksec »

emodendroket wrote: post #28
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…

My biggest frustration with Han unification is that on my phone Japanese text appears with Chinese variants and there's no way to correct this without rooting the phone or setting the system language to Japanese (both kind of a lot of work to get something working that should just work out of the box). People say "well, what's the big deal? You can read it anyway," but think about how you'd feel if English text rando…

My exact same feeling. Even if the Han Character, as in the Han unification are the same, the glyph matters a lot in context.

It a little like replacing every french word / character à with just a. And à is only accessible with variant fonts which is not supported by most OS, and if you have your system locale as French every English word would have à instead of a.

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

#70

Post by timr »

hudibras wrote: post #63
timr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think. That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class... The book I used for…

There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them.

(Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)

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