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Japanese explained to programmers

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91–100 of 416 posts

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#91
post #29

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

Almost - you would write it 私は「私が」牛乳を食べます, and obviously 私は doesn't serve a grammatical purpose, it only has an indicative function.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#92
post #29

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

Yes, thanks for the correction tor3!

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#93
post #42

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.

> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology. Do explain!

I learned English for school material (math, physics, etc). I then learned further while taking Computer Science at University.

I can watch full length videos on any topic from physics to philosophy to politics and understand nearly everything. But I have a hard time following casual conversations about small daily life things.

Further more, I can only think about programming and technology in English. If I have to talk about technology in Arabic (my native language) I basically have to think about it in English in my head then translate it to Arabic.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...")

> 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...")

All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used.

リンゴ is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in

林檎 is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in

So you can see that the kanji form is used relatively often in novels (which makes sense, as those often use higher level/more flower-y language).

(I also use modern news articles in my corpus and that's also included in the stats, although this isn't shown on the "used in" pages.)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#95
post #50

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 beca…

I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away.

Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#96

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

I'm not sure about that.. I just measured on screenshots of WeChat and WhatsApp, at least on my Android phone with no UI customization, the text height only differs by a few pixel. WeChat even have a denser user interface showing more chat channels on a single screen than WhatsApp.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#97
post #42

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.

Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#98
post #83
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT's response is full of BS. 青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいう お The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix. 青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.

I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea. Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.

What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together?

There's no technique per se. It's just the character size.

Example:

好 vs 女子

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#99

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…

And language "learning" via duolingo was tremendous disservice provided by technology. They basically took the worst method of learning (flashcards) and made it available in the 21st century as something "revolutionary".

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#100

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…

Phonetically it’s a pain, but grammatically it is very regular and logical if explained well.
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