51–60 of 416 posts
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.
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…
The article uses code to illustrate how this might be different thinking in Japanese with a URL request:
> request.setURL("serverurl").send()"
I think there is formality/ceremony here like "I have a request, it is for this URL, and I want to send" vs. the other style in the article: send().request.setURL("serverurl") is more forceful as in "I'm sending you a request for this URL" there is no politeness of the exchange.
I almost had a business trip to Japan some years back and people were discussing the formal and polite ceremonial business card exchange process with certain sequences of presenting, bowing, etc. I think learning about the cultural norms might be a key here with learning the language and the reasons why things are structured differently.
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…
You can either select specific text and ask to "decorate" (kanjis with furigana). Or you can click the extension icon (top right in your browser) and it will decorate the entire page. Mouse over kanjis will show furigana. It was a game changer for me.
As 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 lang…
TIL 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?
You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first.
Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store
In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.
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…
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".
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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.
Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?
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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 unpredictabl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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