101–110 of 120 posts
I always like unique problems like this, I never considered ABC vs Kana, Kanji -- and Romaji.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. You either pick them up without intending to (enough to read anyway, if not write), or you don't get proficient. The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge vari…
> I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn? (Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I…
You're correct. Prior to the industrial era, most societies had very low literacy rates. But nearly everyone could speak, and many people who were illiterate could even excel at speech and language related tasks.
Among the worlds most grammatically complex languages are the Inuit languages of the far north areas. These languages were completely unwritten until very recently.
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…
The reason Kanji are used instead of Kana are due to the vast number of homophones from a language limited in the number of phonetic sounds it has. It is how you can tell はし「橋」 from はし「端」 from はし「箸」. Sure, context would almost always let you know which word is used but that requires some additional parsing. Other languages have more sounds, thus fewer homophones, and this becomes less of a problem to determine which witch is which. Or as just shown - "witch" and "which" can be spelled differently even when they sound the same, something less possible with kana. Japanese has an insane number of homophones and reading kana-only sentences quickly becomes a headache because of it.
I don't "read" sentences that contain kanji. I glance over the sentence and understand what it is saying. It's like watching someone act out a scene vs reading the scene's script. Although I am still learning Japanese, for sentences where I know all of the kanji, I can understand the Japanese much faster than the English translation (my native language).
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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…
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…
Well, to be fair, that's true for any language. Learning English by reading does not work: ask any Korean (or Japanese) who went through public English education in the 80s or before.
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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.
My point? Writing systems are flexible, and more so the more semantic notations you can integrate and propagate through society. You would never see 4月12日2019年 today, but hypothetically it wouldn’t matter if you did because it is inherently unambiguous so long as you understand the meaning of the Kanji involved.
Besides that, while you won’t see 4月12日2019年, you still might see 4月12日.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. You either pick them up without intending to (enough to read anyway, if not write), or you don't get proficient. The issue being that proficiency in Japanese means navigating endless homophones and kanji compounds, and kanji are what disambiguates that process. Japanese vocabulary has a huge vari…
> I'm not sure it's even possible to get proficient at spoken Japanese without learning kanji, past some intermediate point. Presumably the spoken Japanese language predates the writing system, no? Or if not, I would imagine that a couple hundred years ago, a significant portion of the population couldn't read Japanese but could speak it. How did they learn? (Of course, let me know if both my assumptions are false—I…
Its roots do, naturally, but the kanji compounds I mentioned don't. They're words made from kanji, not words that kanji were created to write down.
It's a hugely messy topic and I'm no expert, but the broad strokes are that Japanese derives from an "original" language (which had no writing system), which was greatly affected by multiple waves of Chinese influence over many centuries, and much of what seems complex in Japanese is the result. Anyway suffice to say that my comment was about Japanese today, not 1500 years ago before there was a writing system ;)
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 tal…
Simplicity of sorting is not one of those things.
• Consolidate letters with identical pronunciations into a single letter: A/E, E/I, C/S, C/K, C/Q, G/J, I/Y, K/Q, U/OO, V/W, X/KS
• Split letters with ambiguous/variable pronunciations into multiple letters with fixed pronunciation: A, C, E, G, I, O, S, U, X, Y
• Remove any "silent" letters from all words.
• Disambiguate homographs and homonyms+homographs (e.g. lie, fair.)
I'm sure I missed or left out many examples, but would any of these proposals fly, at all?
Do they not disregard all the subtle nuances and historical significance which only advanced learners might appreciate? Do you feel a little aghast at my naiveté for even suggesting this? What would be the response of native speakers to a foreigner campaigning for a more streamlined and consistent English?
† or more accurately: Tu quoque
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I'll just leave a piece of fun trivia as an example of the cool stuff that would be lost if kanji was abolished:
The "slang" for a female ninja is kunoichi: く ku, ノ no, 一 ichi (the first two characters being katakana)
and the kanji for woman is 女, made up of the following strokes: く, ノ, 一
It's something that I noticed on my own some time ago and it brought a smile to my face, like someone discovering an in-joke. There is a lot of arguably-clever wordplay like this in Japanese, and losing that would just make things bland for everyone, and for what? Just to make the language a little easier to stomach by Westerners?
What we should be campaigning for, is better resources and tools for learning and looking up kanji.
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…
So if you really wanted to 淳子 to read completely outside of how it's traditionally read, that's acceptable. So called DQN names in Japan are largely because of this leniency.