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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)

#61

Post by Iv »

SllX wrote: post #54
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’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…

Arguably, emojis are going in that direction.

And, seriously, the rest of the world considers it totally illogical to use MM-DD-YYYY. In almost any country, MM are the middle digits. 4月12日2019年 is a format I have never seen used.

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

#62

Post by fenomas »

mopreme wrote: post #37

Blog author here. Surprised to see one of my old posts on the front page while browsing Hacker News. It's interesting to reflect on what has improved since I wrote it, and what has not. Both Android and iOS, for instance, provide mechanisms to get this right, if you know to use them and expose them for those locales (and only those locales). For example, both have a Contact object that contain corresponding phonetic-…

Cool work! But my experience with Google Translate is that nowadays it seems to be wholly focused on machine-learning translations of full sentences, so for single words the results can be almost entirely random. E.g. you type in the characters for the Japanese word for "raisin", and depending on which parts you change to kanji the results can be starfish, dried fish, dried persimmons, etc.

On the topic of sorting, I've always found it interesting that Japanese input forms with a pulldown menu for prefecture almost always list them in north to south order, rather than AIUEO or charcode or anything else. I think I read somewhere that this stems from some kind of official government encoding that was baked into Shift-JIS, or something along those lines.

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

#63

Post by seanlinmt »

Interesting. I didn’t know this was a problem. Kanji uses chinese characters. If sorting has been solved for chinese character, I’m assuming that the existence of Chinese dictionaries mean that sorting is no longer an issue, then why can’t the same method be used for kanji characters?

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

#64

Post by ehaliewicz2 »

Iv wrote: post #32
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…

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…

Kanji are not obfuscation, they are useful mostly because Japanese has many homonyms. Without them, text is far more obfuscated! I'm sure you've read kana only text before.

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

#66

Post by pif »

needle0 wrote: post #55
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…

It's not a matter of who has it bigger!

The basic question the OP asked, and you did not answer, is: if those names are written the same, how do you know which woman we are talking about?

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

#67

Post by LeoDT »

trw999 wrote: post #3

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Corner_Method You can sort Chinese characters (including Kanji but i'm not sure they use the Four Corners Method) by the Four Corners method. Why would you need to sort kanji phonetically in the first place? Do Japanese users actually expect names to be sorted phonetically? English speakers don't expect names to be sorted by IPA so consistency of the sorting scheme should be all t…

East-Asians usually put the last name before the first name, and most Japanese last name pronounced different, so there is no problem to them phonetically.

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

#68

Post by needle0 »

pif wrote: post #66
needle0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a matter of who has it bigger! The basic question the OP asked, and you did not answer, is: if those names are written the same, how do you know which woman we are talking about?

If there are people present in the same space with identically-appearing names, they are merely given secondary characteristics (be it family names, explicit pronunciations via yomigana, or some other property) to differentiate. How is that any different from if there are people present in western-language space with identical first names?

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

#69

Post by needle0 »

As a Japanese native, it pains me a lot when the westerners come upon linguistic differences like this and start calling them things like "overly odd" or "inferior" as they seem to be doing in the comments here. I can't help but smell a whiff of anglophonic condescension - I had thought political correctness have swept over the west over the last few years, but perhaps they only selectively apply to those who can talk back to you?

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

#70

Post by james_s_tayler »

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 learned just over 17,000 words and for that needed to know somewhere north of 3000 kanji. ~2200 is just the joyou list but once you get into novels and the like you can expect to encounter i'd say around 3500 would be close to maxing it out with the last 0.01% being another couple of thousand, but that's getting in to really obscure shit that only a smattering of the general population know.

I learned kanji first before speaking. Learned to read and listen for about a year before venturing out to conversation clubs and the like. Without a shadow of a doubt reading massively, massively, massively boosted my ability in all other areas. Fastest way to learn new vocabulary.

But I gotta be honest - I used to love kanji and found joy in it. These days I think Korean really got it right with their writing system. That shit is super logical. Kanji is a giant, beautiful pain in the ass.

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