101–110 of 416 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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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).
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.
Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advan…
Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.
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.
I hate grammar and I found that part of the language to be extremely simple.
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...
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?
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…
Things are just way harder than they need to be in a lot of instances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's implicit, depending on context. Quite often it's "myself" when omitted and without any context. If you'd like to stick to programming examples, it would be default value. Even if not specified, it's always there. Typically you use が when expressing some new information but follow up conversation uses は. There are few other rules, too. The は vs が is a subject of never ending confusion among Japanese students.
Indeed, my interpretation is also that the subject can be expressed by any of は, が, or the context. I am having trouble understanding the "implicit が" analysis because it seems to me that in many cases adding a が would make the sentence nonsensical (like in the example.) So it just feels like retrofitting が into a role that it really doesn't have. Then again, I'm not an expert, so I may very well be wrong about this.
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...
I’ve learned both and found Chinese harder just because if you lose context then it’s hard to understand anything else being spoken. Japanese has more semantic repetition in the sentence structures. Both are equally logical grammatically though, and Chinese does have a much easier time learning character pronunciations.
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.
Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advan…