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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#141

Post by ickoonite »

TheDong wrote: post #47
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 th…

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

They do indeed, but in a context of everyday immersion, so it’s not rote learning to the exclusion of all else.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#142

Post by raverbashing »

tmtvl wrote: post #126
kibwen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that programming is expressed as OVS. Function calls are VSO, e.g. `push(array, element)`. Method calls are SVO, `array.push(element)`. I speculate that this is why method-style dot-notation has become so dominant over the past few decades, because of its natural familiarity to English speakers as compared to the functional VSO style.

Programming doesn't have a definite order, it depends on language. Some examples: movq %rax, %rbx add rbx, rax (cons a b) a := b; b 1 a + !

It's not a "programming style" in this case, assembly is the only "computer language" that doesn't fit the Chomsky hierarchy paradigm, because it is too simple

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#143

Post by iraldir »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44
iraldir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah very much so, maybe even more. As noted, the main lense that people use to discover Japan is animes, which is obviously pretty far from what real Japan is like. Especially the work culture in traditional companies is a massive shock for a lot of French expats.

Personally I still find a whole lot to love in Japan, which could be an entire post by itself.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#144

Post by dayvid »

cableshaft wrote: post #125
dayvid wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers are really attracted to Japanese. It's the language with the most over-engineered tools for learning.

Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college. I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Micr…

I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe.

I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity).

Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#145

Post by Tor3 »

ickoonite wrote: post #131
Tor3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are now talking about the written Japanese language, with all the (real) problems with Kanji, an imported writing system. True enough, but that has little to do with the Japanese language . If you look at verbs, and ignore the rubbish written in most textbooks about "conjugations" (which for the most part aren't conjugations), you'll find one of the most logical and consistent systems on the planet. There are onl…

But what is a language without its written form? I mean, fine, if we are going to contrive a comparison where we are only comparing spoken forms, well…English is still going to come out on top, because - exactly as you explained in your edit - its grammar is simple enough that almost anyone can have a go at it. Stick some words together and you’re probably 80% of the way there. That’s not going to be true of any infl…

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble).

As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the same, most of the time.. which is arguably very useful for trying to communicate with someone.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#146

Post by actionfromafar »

brozaman wrote: post #123
davidmurdoch wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s

I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say…

I think you have to go to English vernacular, "as she is spoke" to express especially anger. An angry Dubliner or someone from the midlands for example :-)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#147

Post by crosser »

That was fascinating reading, thank you!

I take an issue though with this assertion:

> The order [...] is quite different to english but very similar to functional programming.

The most widely accepted (imo) order of function composition is right to left:

  send(makeUrl("http://..."))
just like in English "blue fish": transformation stands to the left to the object that is being transformed (*). Whereas "transformation follows the object" is an OO tradition, as shown in your examples. "Take object, apply transformation (method) yielding another object, apply transformation to that new object, etc."

(*) In quintessentially functional Haskell, you can compose functions both ways, but right-to-left is more traditional:

  {-
   - Find numeric value of the first figure of the decimal representation
   - of a number:
   - 1. convert it to a string of decimal characters (show)
   - 2. take the first character of the string (head)
   - 3. convert the character to a string containing one charcter (:[])
   - 4. convert the string of one decimal character into an integer (read :: Int)
   -}
  
  main = do
    let
      firstfigure1 :: Int
      firstfigure1 = read . (:[]) . head . show $ 413
    print firstfigure1
  
    {-
     - Reverse the order of composition. Define "right-pointing" versions for
     - (.) and ($)
     -}
  
    let
      (.>) = flip (.)  -- it will become infixl 9 by default
      ($>) = flip ($)
      infixr 0 $>      -- We need value lower than the above. Use the same as $
  
      firstfigure2 :: Int
      firstfigure2 = 413 $> show .> head .> (:[]) .> read :: Int
    print firstfigure2

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#148

Post by ickoonite »

atsuzaki wrote: post #140
ickoonite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure. I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

> I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

This is the correct approach.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#150

Post by SkyBelow »

hsn915 wrote: 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.

At a simple level, the use of particles feels somewhat programming-ish. As one's knowledge expands, the exceptions and idiosyncrasies end up destroying that picture, but I get where it comes from.

I would assume it is similar to introducing a programmer to sentence diagramming in English. You start to see patterns and those patterns start feeling like a more formal system. Yet it always ends up crashing down and being too illogical to keep building upon.

One aspect that is likely at play is that learning a new language tends to be more formalized than one's understanding of their native language (outside of a sentence diagramming class or similar). When you learn a specific piece of grammar in a new language, you want to understand it formally. That means finding equivalent examples in a native language if they exist, or otherwise formally explaining the distinction between what grammar exists in a native language and the new grammar structure. I think this sort of pattern goes away when one approached fluency (unless they specialize in studying grammar itself in both their native and new language). The eventual goal is for grammar in the new language to feel as natural and yet illogical as grammar in the native language.

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