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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#181

Post by janeerie »

teddyh wrote: post #128

“ The bottom line is that Politeness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don't even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up. ” — So You Want To Learn Japanese http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm

This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. I used to work for a Japanese company and was surrounded by anime fans who had fantasies of learning the language. I was perfectly happy to work with our translators.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#182

Post by johnwalkr »

iraldir wrote: post #19
Cruncharoo wrote: post #10

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

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 did my PhD in Japan, in a lab focusing on robotics for lunar exploration, among other things. Every semester there was a revolving door of interns and exchange students from France[1], and a good percentage of them came not for the very interesting subject matter, but for their interest in manga and anime. It was always cringy when they introduced themselves as an anime cosplay enthusiast with the mistaken impression that this a normal hobby for adults in Japan.

Now I live in Europe and joke that you don't see a bunch of Japanese weirdos walking around Brussels dressed up as Tintin.

[1] In the ten years I was there, the number from France was pretty constant, but there was an upward trend in this type of person coming from Scandinavian countries and the US. There is an excellent meme on this matter: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/481/981/034...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#183

Post by gomibako »

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.

I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#184

Post by rjh29 »

Anon1096 wrote: post #173
throwaway2037 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...")

Honestly just saw 苹果 a couple days ago so even that spelling can't be called that rare. It really depends on what you're consuming, if you're just reading daily SoL content I doubt you'd ever see it but I do think 林檎 is pretty common.

I have not seen 苹果 before, where did you see it? It looks Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedia calls it "簡体字中国語表記". I don't think most native speakers can read it!

林檎 for sure is common.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#185

Post by sosborn »

dayvid wrote: post #144
cableshaft wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there.

Live in Japan close to 10 years. Went there speaking basically nothing, left speaking fluently.

In my experience, bars are 100% the best way to learn. If bars aren't your thing, social situations are good, but a little bit of booze has a great way of making you not care about making mistakes.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#186

Post by Agingcoder »

Ghoyome wrote: post #160
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.

My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.

No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots.

I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written.

Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#187

Post by Anon1096 »

b4je7d7wb wrote: post #154
hsn915 wrote: 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.

It's so weird. I know Japanese and I know chatGPT mostly confidently wrong. But still I wanted to believe it and give it the benefit of the doubt. I was wondering if fish had another pronounciation in addition to sakana.

うお is indeed a valid reading of 魚, just not in 青い魚. But 飛び魚 (flying fish) for example is とびうお. btw, the bit chatgpt spit out about い in 青い meaning to be is just totally wrong

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#188

Post by rjh29 »

Anon1096 wrote: post #169
rjh29 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like all the complexity went into kanji. Pronounciation of -kana- is mostly regular. Grammar - 2-3 main verb types with a VERY small conjugation table to learn, no plurals, no genders. You can take a mostly complete sentence and whack it on top of a noun to make it describe the noun, or add stuff to the end to qualify its meaning, in a much more simple way than English. I hate grammar and I found that part of th…

You start having problems when you learn about registers and how there's basically a second (or third!) set of words depending on who you're talking to.

It's great fun looking up the keigo versions of words though. Even native speakers have a hard time with it.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#189

Post by kijin »

Izkata wrote: post #101
Nihilartikel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Likewise konbanwa is the same thing with "tonight" / "this evening"

English speakers also often drop the "good" in "good morning" and "good night", reducing the phrase to a single noun that refers roughly to the current time.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#190

Post by laurieg »

Here's my take on explaining Japanese as a programming language.

Verbs are functions. In English, arguments are positional.

SUBJECT verb OBJECT.

I eat pizza.

But in Japanese they are named arguments with small helper words called particles. The subject uses 'wa' and the object used 'wo'. The convention is postfix in contrast to English's prefix notation.

Watashi-wa pizza-wo taberu.

With other verbs English uses named arguments too:

I go to the bank by car.

Japanese uses "e" and "de" for the arguments to this verb. Car is kuruma so "by car" becomes "kuruma-de".

Watashi-wa kuruma-de ginko-e iku

Obviously this is a massive simplification but I always found thinking about verbs as functions and the other words as named arguments to be very easy to understand.

(Edited for clarity)

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