I wonder if there is any "natural" language which has the precision of programming language, Perhaps there are efforts to create one?
I believe a language like that could be truly globalised without any cultural aspects
Japanese explained to programmers
241–250 of 416 posts
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the m…
That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.
As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity).
So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is communicating with you is ignoring that because their personal dialect doesn't have those pauses and you kinda just have to deal with that when it happens.
Every other rule-set I've heard has to be accompanied by so many exceptions, and has so many competing schools that disagree, that they're just dogma, not description. And they're extremely hard to remember. So they're more about socially signaling that you're part of the well-educated upper-crust than they are about communication.
And yes, I'm an Oxford Comma user. It reduces ambiguity.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#243Honestly 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.
Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
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…
My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#245By 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.
Chinese has easier character pronunciations? I find it hard to believe that. The tones are what makes Chinese the hardest language to learn.
Most people who learn Chinese will never be able to sound Chinese. To Chinese people they will look like some fool who has learning deficits (I know this is not true, but the lack of empathy in mono-cultural nations is quite high). I don't think there's any language in the top 20 most popular that punishes you as hard for incorrect pronunciation. While in English having an accent is quite common and charming, in Chinese bad pronunciation will make things incomprehensible.
For Japanese on the other hand I have multiple friends who after a couple years are indistinguishable from natives. The pronunciation system in Japanese is super easy in my opinion. It's almost a subset of the English language.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#246For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example).
Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I see that Japanese culture is based on much more ancient and broad Chinese culture. I also see a pick up in interests to learn Mandarin among my friends/coworkers.
I watched a few Chinese movies and I have to say they bring a breath of fresh air. I think whenever we want it or not we will see more Chinese media in the future, simply because they are different from what a typical person is used too. That makes them more interesting at least in the beginning.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing. But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right o…
> In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written.
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".
Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.
Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows.
It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto).
Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
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…
English writing can have unpredictable spelling mostly due to imported foreign words (looking at you French!) or inclusion of Old English.
imo that's better than having a whole other system like Katakana to import foreign words.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#250For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example). Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I se…
> For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?).
It's popular among all types, very much so in the states and France due to anime.
But they export A LOT of culture. and they are very good at streamlining that export. Fashion, video games, anime, food, etc.
It's really no surprise it's popular. If you end up consuming the culture (as many of us did as kids) you will be attracted to the origins of it as it contains many elements of the culture you consumed.
But yes, there's a lot of cross over between "nerds" or "otaku" and Japanese culture exports.
I assume because they didn't fit into their home culture fully, so they found escape in another foreign one that was adapted for them, and thus found a community to share common interests with, which reinforces that "obsession".
tldr: you can nerd/otaku out on anything, but Japan makes some good stuff to nerd out on, so you get hardcore fans.