Japanese explained to programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#61

Post by throwaway2037 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

kouteiheika wrote: post #41

iraldir wrote: post #18

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

This is a very nice website! Thank you to share.

Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#62

Post by blahgeek » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:11 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #43

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.

Yes. If you compare the dialog UIs between WeChat (the most popular IM in China) and telegram, it’s clear that WeChat’s font size is bigger

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#63

Post by ezequiel-garzon » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

ickoonite wrote: post #36

capableweb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?

Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#64

Post by chris_st » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

vvilliamperez wrote: post #23

request.setURL("serverurl").send() This style of sentence structure was one of the strangest things to get comfortable with. You have to think a bit differently. The function chaining makes sense here and I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. Anyone interested in the language should definitely check out the Genki series. It's written well enough you could fully teach yourself. https://genki3.j…

> I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development.

The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#65

Post by 999900000999 » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

By far the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. In addition to pissing my Korean girlfriend off, it was so difficult I dropped the class after 2 weeks or so.

Chinese is much much easier by an order of magnitude. Particularly if your focusing on speech and grammar vs writing. Not that Japanese writing is any easier.

Hindsight is 20/20. Shoulda took Spanish...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#66

Post by stefncb » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

PurpleRamen wrote: post #39

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?

Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#67

Post by shiomiru » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

louhike wrote: post #29

shiomiru wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?

That may seem strange but that would be 「私が」私は牛乳を食べます

That's interesting. It indeed seems unnatural because I've never heard anybody say it like that - my impression is that you generally can't just use both particles with the same subject for the same sentence (or at least not like this.) But maybe that's just because of my inexperience. Do you have a real-life example of this pattern being used?

(It's also strange because I typoed 牛肉 in my earlier comment, and milk is difficult to eat. Sorry for the confusion.)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#68

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

qwezxcrty wrote: post #56

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…

Interesting, 生 have only one pronunciation in Chinese (native speaker, ref: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F ). Didn't know it's so different in Japanese.

There is a long list of exceptions for Chinese: https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-t...

Kanji will have at least two pronunciations (one called a Chinese pronunciation that often sounds little like modern mandarin, like 电 being Dian in Chinese and Den in Japanese).

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#69

Post by ickoonite » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

detrites wrote: post #40

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 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 Hir…

> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along

I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin.

Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not warm) but it is nowhere near as complex as European languages.

But. You can’t just dismiss kanji. They are the essence of the language and, counterintutively, are what make it easy to read in long form. A stream of hiragana is almost illegible; you need the kanji to be able to pick nouns and verbs out. And outside of very limited contexts, furigana (phonetic transcriptions of kanji) are rare, so you need to a reasonable command of kanji to get by.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#70

Post by aeonik » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel.

Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now.

You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out):

In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば).

Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいうお).

The middle character in "青い魚 (あおいうお)" is い, which is a form of the auxiliary verb "to be". In this case, it indicates that the noun "fish" (魚) is in a state of being "blue" (青い).

By using the auxiliary verb "to be", the phrase "blue fish" (青い魚) can refer to any fish that is blue, as opposed to a specific type of fish like mackerel (鯖). This helps to avoid confusion and allows for a clear distinction between different types of fish.