Very interesting. How does regex/pattern matching work with Kanji? Or does it?
Japanese explained to programmers
31–40 of 416 posts
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#32Should have used Ruby :p
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#33> The japanese standard library offers a bunch of chainable functions to add meaning to your primitive types. English and French work in the same way . However roles are usually determined by word order. But in essence it's the same thing as obj.do_stuff(), 'obj' is the thing that do_stuff.
English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO.
I've never really thought of programming languages in passive voice before, but it explains why I've increasingly written and spoken in passive voice structure even though I know it's "wrong" to do so.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#34I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way…
> copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.
or language models
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#35"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?
Others answered about France but everybody born in Italy in the late 60s was exposed to anime before becoming a teen. I remember that the first one was Grendizer (Goldrake in Italy), followed by Mazinger Z (yes, reverse order), Gundam, Lupin III, Future Boy Conan and a zilion of others.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#36I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way…
Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it.
English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#37As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in
> an introduction to how different language can be has different as
It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second language, one would learn that H's at word beginnings need to be pronounced in English. And then the brain sneaks them in with English words that didn't have any to begin with, like hangry, or habout. I find the whole topic of overcompensation super fascinating [1]. Another good one is German ESL speakers subconsciously overcompenthating by changing s into th.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#38Honestly 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".
It can work for some people? You aren’t so much not learning grammar as you are inferring the grammar via practice instead of up front studying the rules. Like the difference between training a neural network to compile code vs writing a parser.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#39TIL Japanese kanjis are like German words, composed to make a new meaning. Quite insightful. Is this also the case for chinese usage of Kanji? I vaguely remember that Japanese language differs from Chinese language because of using sybils or something?
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#40I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way…
It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers.
Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hiragana alongside Kanji (which are common).