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Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

localizingjapan.com

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Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#51

Post by fenomas »

rococode wrote: post #45
bigger_cheese wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>According to the dictionary, the word 淳 can be read as jun, shun, atsui, atsu, atsushi, kiyo, kiyoshi, makoto, or sunao. And evidently this is not fully complete, since Akiko can also use that character. I think the "ko" suffix comes from the second Kanji character "子" which means child (I think, it has been over a decade since i studied Japanese but that particular Kanji character looks familiar to me). So I believ…

Oh yeah definitely! I never noticed the similarity with -son, that's really interesting. I was actually specifically referring to the "Aki" part of Akiko which isn't listed in the dictionary I'm using. Now that I think about it though, I've never seen that read as Akiko before (or Akiko written that way). I don't see it on any websites and Microsoft IME doesn't list that as a version of Akiko at all (~10 pages of sug…

It doesn't mean much for a particular kanji/reading to not appear in your IME - there are just too many combinations, and sometimes a given reading will only be common in certain areas or even families. Plus people sometimes just make up new ones :)

With that said, here's a site showing the "akiko" reading: https://name.sijisuru.com/Pname/pdetail?pname=%E6%B7%B3%E5%A...

(Searching by reading, the same site lists 291 different ways to write "akiko". Yipes.)

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#52

Post by level3 »

a1369209993 wrote: post #50
teraflop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the examples you mentioned are pronounced differently, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

n'a (んあ) and na (な) are pronounced the same (not 1:1) k-ee-y-oo and k-y-oo are distinct pronunciations that are both written as kiyu (きゅ) (also not 1:1, though this could be considered a accent maybe?) I wasn't trying to make a point, beyond "spelling a [any] word is not just the same thing as saying it".

You're confusing spelling (using the alphabet) with spelling (using hiragana/katakana). In Japanese, spelling IS the same as saying it.

きゆ and きゅ are pronounced differently because they're spelled differently (notice the size of the ゆ). Same goes for んあ and な.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#53

Post by wodenokoto »

hermitdev wrote: post #4

Am I missing something subtle in this Kanji example, or all 4 names actually written the same?: "There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko. This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji: 淳子 (Junko) 淳子 (Atsuko) 淳子 (Kiyoko) 淳子 (Akiko)" I'm not familiar with Japanese at all (and have never had to deal with localization beyond…

You are missing the subtle fact that they are written the same :)

For that situation, where you only have the name, you simply can’t tell with confidence the reading.

Japanese name law (at least last time it was paraphrased to me) allows you to attach any non-obscene reading to any non-obscene kanji configuration.

All business cards clearly show how to read the name printed on it.

Yes, this is odd.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#54

Post by SllX »

mikekchar wrote: post #34
Iv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in) To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 y…

And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the li…

I’ll back you up on this and add one additional point: even in the West where we have our Roman alphabet which largely works fine, and our Arabic numerals which also work fine, I’ve often thought adopting a limited number of kanji, literally less than 10, could add some important precision to our own writing. The rest of this post isn’t really for you specifically, but anyone reading through this comment thread with an open mind.

Date formats would really only require three:

- 年: year

- 月: month

- 日: day

We debate about both separators and order of presentation, but using three characters as suffixes would add some semantics where none really existed, and you might have to make some assumptions about which way the day goes and which way the month goes.

For those that don’t know, 3月 is March, 12月 is December, 31日 is the 31st day and 2019年 is the current year. So April 12th 2019 which might be presented as 2019.04.12, 4/12/2019 or 12/4/2019 would instead be written as 2019年4月12日 or 12日4月2019年 or even 4月12日2019年.

The beauty here is the ideographs provide enough semantic meaning on their own that the order of presentation stops mattering and they are perfectly fine date separators. They are always appended as suffixes to the numeric designator and they don’t add much to the cognitive burden for anyone learning how to read. We already mix Arabic numerals into just about every writing system, Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, et cetera, we have distinct punctuation marks in most writing systems, and we pretty much all know the difference between $12.34 and £12.34 and how 56¢ differs from 56%.

This is a small example, but I hope it provides some context to some who don’t know any kanji the power and precision that ideographs can provide at a glance.

One more thing, while I offered up these three specific ideographs specifically as date separators, they do provide standalone meanings as well.

年 is a counting word for years. It doesn’t have to be AD, and in Japanese or Chinese they do have their own calendars, but 2019年 is still unambiguously understood to be 2019 anno domini.

月 is a standalone word for the moon, which is functionally why it is used as a month counter. 日 is a standalone word for the Sun. This perfectly preserves the association between months to the moon cycle and days to the solar cycle, which I think is pretty cool, and it certainly does so a lot better than mere dots or slashes or dashes.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#55

Post by needle0 »

hermitdev wrote: post #4

Am I missing something subtle in this Kanji example, or all 4 names actually written the same?: "There are four Japanese women whose names you have to sort: Junko, Atsuko, Kiyoko, and Akiko. This does not seem difficult, until they each show you how they write their names in kanji: 淳子 (Junko) 淳子 (Atsuko) 淳子 (Kiyoko) 淳子 (Akiko)" I'm not familiar with Japanese at all (and have never had to deal with localization beyond…

Yes they are all written exactly the same, and the reason it seems so bizarre to you is because you're trying to think of everything in the framing of phonograms, where rule number one is sound and characters are inseparably bound. Since that was probably the only type of language you dealt with your entire life, that feels like the natural way of things, and anything that goes against that rule feels wrong.

Japanese and other Asian languages operate under the concept of ideograms, where sound and characters are NOT 1:1 mapped. As unbelievable as it may be, not much problems occur in everyday life when everyone involved is aware of those rules and operates under that assumption.

The writing system you were born to is not the only valid way to do things, much like Imperial is not the only measurement system, Christianity is not the only religion, vi/Emacs are not the only text editors, etc, etc.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#56

Post by fenomas »

a1369209993 wrote: post #50
teraflop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the examples you mentioned are pronounced differently, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

n'a (んあ) and na (な) are pronounced the same (not 1:1) k-ee-y-oo and k-y-oo are distinct pronunciations that are both written as kiyu (きゅ) (also not 1:1, though this could be considered a accent maybe?) I wasn't trying to make a point, beyond "spelling a [any] word is not just the same thing as saying it".

I'm afraid I don't follow either. I meant that in Japanese spelling a word is just saying it, not anything about how words are romanized, etc.

That is, you say the word たに by saying た and then に, and you say the word たんい by saying たん and then い. Equivalently if you were to "spell" the word きゅう you'd say きゅ and then う -- you wouldn't say き・ゆ・う because that would be a different word.

(Incidentally na and n'a are not pronounced the same, as the previous example hopefully illustrates.)

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#57

Post by wodenokoto »

mikekchar wrote: post #34
Iv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in) To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 y…

And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the li…

I completely disagree. Learning Korean vocabulary is so much easier than Japanese.

With somewhat phonetic spellings you can link vocabulary you read to vocabulary you hear.

In Korean (just like English) you can much more easily misspell a word and be understood. In Japanese you often times cannot even “give it a go”, unless you are aided by a IME, which is essentially phonetic.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#58

Post by yorwba »

a1369209993 wrote: post #50
teraflop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the examples you mentioned are pronounced differently, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

n'a (んあ) and na (な) are pronounced the same (not 1:1) k-ee-y-oo and k-y-oo are distinct pronunciations that are both written as kiyu (きゅ) (also not 1:1, though this could be considered a accent maybe?) I wasn't trying to make a point, beyond "spelling a [any] word is not just the same thing as saying it".

I'm not aware of any words beginning with ん, it's usually placed between two other morae. If the following mora begins with a stop, it acts as a nasalization of that stop, similar to English n in "blank" vs. "bland". Otherwise, such as for んあ, it nasalizes the preceding vowel. E.g. the name 闇亞 (あんあ) is pronounced [ãa], whereas あな would be pronounced [ana].

I'm also not sure what you mean by kiyu and kyu, since きゆ and きゅ are clearly orthographically distinct.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#59

Post by Iv »

mikekchar wrote: post #34
Iv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems odd because it is. I live in Japan, tried to learn Japanese like I did learn English and German: through reading, as the true asocial geek I am. Well, that's not possible unless you know about 1000 kanjis, unless you stick with kids book or some mangas (which, actually, I am not that interested in) To learn Japanese you need to learn to speak it first. I stopped caring about kanjis wen I realized that a 15 y…

And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the li…

You know, I started by loving kanjis too. I like the way they combine, the stories they tell. And I can imagine that when becoming proficient with them, they form a nice cozy system.

But face it: you say I have years to learn them. I could learn 3 languages with the effort wasted to learn kanjis (which are half a language because then you also need to learn the pronunciation of words). No, I'll perfect my English instead and learn spoken Japanese, as it is almost a separate language.

In terms of communication, evolution, ease to learn and use, kanjis are an inferior system. It took me a long time to accept saying that, because I am of course biased as a lazy gaijin, but really, seeing how easy Korean feels compared to Japanese was the nail that convinced me that there is a fundamental truth in that.

Interestingly, hangul (the Korean alphabet) was adopted to replace chinese characters and was opposed on the ground that it made the written language to easy to learn. Hah.

Re: Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem (2011)

#60

Post by Iv »

echelon wrote: post #38
mikekchar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a counter example, I like kanji and learned Japanese by reading (though I also like manga, so perhaps it was helpful). I find kanji very helpful in learning vocabulary. In fact, I actually measured how fast I could learn vocabulary containing kanji I didn't know by learning the kanji first, versus learning the vocabulary phonetically. It was about the same. However, as there are only about 2200 kanji in the li…

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Kanji has aided in my study of the Japanese language in ways I couldn't fathom before trying to do so. I made it to N5-level proficiency [1] after a few semesters of study and only begrudgingly studied Kanji because it was required by the text. I hated it and really only wanted to speak and understand spoken Japanese. Then I discovered Wanikani [2], a spaced repetition service that fo…

Of course kanji helps. Like Latin helps with many European language. If you learn Latin before learning French it will feel extremely logical.

Making it a pre-requisite to write a single sentence in French, however, seems like a waste of time and goodwill.

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