191–200 of 416 posts
However, in my opinion, an article purporting to inform about Japanese in a programmatic way really should avoid using “hiraganas,” “kanjis” and “katakanas” as pluralization of thise terms.
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…
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.
This list is also changes on a regular basis. The following news article details updates to pronunciation guidance promulgated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education at the end of 2022: https://www.ftvnews.com.tw/news/detail/2022326L08M1
It is my understanding that these new guidelines result in mandated changes to educational curricula as well as standardised testing; they are not wholly advisory. It is also my understanding that these changes can be mildly controversial, because even when the changes are made for the sake of simplification, they lead to discrepancies between the educational standard and common spoken language.
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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.
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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'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger. Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.
I have lived in Ireland for more than a year and I haven't heard anyone arguing in a really expressive way although I've seen a couple actual fights starting a couple times. I don't know, anger in English always feels like diet coke to me.
We have this in English too except remarkably little of it actually comes out. Pluralization and possession being marked with -(e)s and -'s suffixes, and "subject-verb agreement" (one wouldn't say "the birds eats the food" but rather "the birds eat the food") are examples of morphology in action in English.
Several folks think that the capacity for language in general is common to all humans, and that we have some proto-language hidden away deep in our brains, inaccessible, where our conception of the world bubbles up through layers of our brain/consciousness, until thoughts-as-words eventually fall out of our mouths or onto paper, and then the reverse process happens as well.
(Incidentally I think the particle は marks the "topic" of the sentence, not the subject. The subject of the verb is marked with が, and Japanese speakers elide/omit a lot of parts of sentences, so there's tons of sentences where there is no explicit subject but there is a topic. Please correct me here, this is all from faint memory.)
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> 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 t…
When you’re at the cutting edge of research, it’s inevitable that you are going to have to come up with new words/language to describe new concepts, and so that process has been happening in English for decades.
It’s a fairly common phenomenon that languages assimilate words from other languages as new concepts are introduced by people who use that other language.
So I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that English has some sort of superior utility for expressing scientific/programming concepts, at least not innately. It’s just that it’s more fleshed out after being used so heavily for such over a long time.
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Spanish isn't particularly rich in sounds but other languages use combination of vowels or accents. French or Portuguese have much more than 5 sounds and the same vowels.
Portuguese has more vowels than Spanish. And Latin itself had 7 I think.
Portuguese has the same basic characters except for ç, in the case of vowels it's resolved with combinations of letters or by adding accents. For instance e and é have different sounds and ou isn't the same sound as o followed by u.
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…
did you misspell "ha" instead of "wa"¿
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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…
> [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga 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 said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.