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Japanese explained to programmers

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11–20 of 416 posts

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#11
post #3

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only…

> With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".

Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#12
post #3

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only…

> With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".

Incomprehensible to me. Learning the grammar of a language is the most fun part, in my opinion! Vocab is hard work, but learning ways to form a sentence? Magical.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#13
As for explaining Japanese to programmers.. When I try to explain basic Japanese grammar to people in general, they always respond "Sounds complicated". But if I explain basic Japanese grammar to long-time programmers they simply reply "Sounds logical."

(Edit: Added 'basic' - I don't go around trying to explain Japanese grammar in full..)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#14

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only…

I tried learning it with Duolingo and was disappointed to see it was just trying to teach me characters via rote-memorization... gave up after a 10-day streak

Duolingo doesn't manage to show you the structure of the language. I wasted a very long time with Duolingo. It's much better to use the time on just about anything else if you want to learn Japanese.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#15

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#16
post #9

Just a nitpick but the particle “ha”/“は” is not really used to set the subject but the topic or context. The topic or context can often be the subject but it’s an important subtlety. The particle to set the subject is “ga”/“が”.

A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#17

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

Given than English is not the author's first language, and he finds it chaotic, perhaps he actually meant, {despite} being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#18

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only…

For the spoken language I whole heartedly agree, but as far as reading is concerned, immersion is super hard. Most resource won't have furigana and even with the one that do, it's "down one ear and out the other", I don't particularly learn to read Kanjis this way. Once you've got a base of say the 500 most used kanji, and you're able to recognise patterns (components, composition) of kanjis then it's a different story.

I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.

As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#19

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

sorry it's almost a meme at this point that France has a thing for Japan and vice versa. The 90s in particular were ripe with animes on the main French channel, lots of collaboration between France and Japan. We got Japanese movies in the cinema much prior the rest of the world and even today you can find gigantic sections for mangas and anime in bookshops, cinemas...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#20

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.

Not just France, I think the majority of Europe is like that. Here in the Balkans, local dubs of anime (Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ...) were 90% of what we watched on TV as kids.
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