Japanese explained to programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#41

Post by kouteiheika » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

iraldir wrote: post #18

traceroute66 wrote: post #2

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 sto…

> However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.

FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji.

Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#42

Post by hsn915 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material.

I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan.

But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#43

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

Maybe a little off-topic, but do you in general need to account for larger fonts when designing software to work with kanji og traditional Chinese? It could just be my untrained eyes, but I find it hard to see the details in many of the glyphs.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#44

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

iraldir wrote: post #19

Cruncharoo wrote: post #10

"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...

I wonder if the French experience Tokyo syndrome like the Japanese experience Paris syndrome?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#45

Post by louhike » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

Cruncharoo wrote: post #10

"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?

Just to put a number on the « France love Japan », France is the second market in the world for manga after Japan. Despite being a country producing a lot « bandes dessinées » / comics.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#46

Post by ickoonite » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #34

ickoonite wrote: post #24

I 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

Sure, but it’s a messy model that tells you that 生 is pronounced nama or sometimes ki, 生きる ikiru, 生じる shōjiru, 学生 gakusei, 生む umu…

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#47

Post by TheDong » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

traceroute66 wrote: post #2

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…

> really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji

> its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop

First, let me say that you may be responding to a strawman. There's few-to-zero people who will recommend memorizing kanji to the exclusion of learning grammar and other aspects.

Realistically, people who promote rote-memorization of kanji are also suggesting to learn grammar, attempt to think in the language (not translate in their head), and suggesting immersing/talking/etc as much as possible too.

So, let me ask you, what do you suggest people do instead of rote-memorization of the readings of kanji? How do you suggest someone become able to read a sentence in japanese, guess the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, if they have not memorized how to pronounce the relevant kanji?

Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#48

Post by Nihilartikel » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

kijin wrote: post #22

louhike wrote: 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”.

Just another nitpick: "は" is pronounced as "wa" not "ha" when it is used as the topic marker, as in the well-known greeting "Konnichiwa".

I've always been amused that a literal translation of Konnichiwa could be something like: So, about today...

Kono(this) nichi(day) wa(is the topic)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#49

Post by xvilka » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

frogulis wrote: post #12

david04 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agree, learning vocabulary or characters is the most boring part of any language.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#50

Post by Laaas » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

ickoonite wrote: post #24

I 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's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English.

The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.

Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man?

The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words.

Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English.

I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.