Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.
Spoken language doesn't have kanji and people can communicate just fine.
Spoken language has accent.
Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
121–130 of 153 posts
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
The Japanese grammar is way more consistent (almost without exceptions) then all western languages. And in Chinese you get multiple pronunciations for the same character all the time!
Yeah except for counters.
Those god forsaken counters.
You can't just say five pencils. You have to say
5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil
Go hon enpitsu
The pattern for which is
Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc.
They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count apples. Or demigods the same way they count flat objects.
Small round objects and military brigades would obviously be counted the same way though. Obviously.
There's also a unique counter specifically for armed naval vessels and slices of fish on top of balls of rice.
And one just for straw mats.
And one for graves, CPUs, wreaths, and dams.
And while small animals and arthropods have one counter, and large animals have another counter, you count butterflies using the counter for large animals.
Oh and the first 10, 14th, 20th and 24th days of the month essentially have unique names.
I knew a native Japanese guy who spent 4 years mostly away from Japan, and he started to have trouble remembering the days of the month.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Japanese grammar is way more consistent (almost without exceptions) then all western languages. And in Chinese you get multiple pronunciations for the same character all the time!
Yeah except for counters. Those god forsaken counters. You can't just say five pencils. You have to say 5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil Go hon enpitsu The pattern for which is Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc. They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count ap…
Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker.
At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more readily snap into place. More useful than memorizing generic masc./feminine/neuter for most Indo-European languages.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#124I'm often surprised these kinds of issues aren't fixed quicker. There are so many issues in browsers related to non Roman based letters (assuming that's the correct term for it) on the one hand I get that most browser (and OS?) dev happens in the West by people unaffected by these issues. One the other hand with > 1 billion people using non Roman based languages I'd expect this kind of stuff to be more of a priority.…
I am developing a program using a webbrowser control, for my own use, to aid in learning the Jouyou Kanji and their readings. I need some text controls to be exclusively latin, hiragana, or katakana.
The state of IME support in Windows is very poor.
WPF (legacy software?)does not support this at all with reported bugs going back five years.
Winforms does, but doesn't meet my requirements.
Html does define the inputmode attribute, but this only works as a hint to smart phone on-screen keyboards. The inputmode attribute is totaly ignored by desktop browsers.
The Microsoft IME does not appear to have any API which can determine the current state or switch between modes. However, there is currently a Html5 working group on an API for IME control.
In this day and age of multinational software, this is truly pathetic.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah except for counters. Those god forsaken counters. You can't just say five pencils. You have to say 5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil Go hon enpitsu The pattern for which is Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc. They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count ap…
Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker. At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more read…
Oh that's cool- so if they are talking about CERN and say "one particle accelerator" the counter might help you figure that out?
(Assuming it isn't just like.. "parutikkuru akuseroreta" or something)
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random…
> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni. Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield…
You call it a misconception and then post an example that's extremely easy to understand? I'm confused.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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…
I l 1 O 0 We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same. Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on. In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise. I think that this pa…
I and l looking exactly the same in some fonts is a different problem, really. You're not being asked to pick out a two pixel difference in slope (seriously, two pixels using pretty standard resolution). You use grammatical rules to tell the difference, which is annoying but not visually difficult. And numbers aren't getting freely mixed with letters in text.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.
Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.
I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.
Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
#130Chinese 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…
What? How is choosing a character variant "hip"? I know in some case Taiwanese people are influenced by the default Microsoft font MingLiU, which has some Japanese variants.
Giving your text some flavor from a 'cool' language can absolutely be hip.