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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#291

Post by kibwen »

ickoonite wrote: post #69
detrites wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers. Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hir…

> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin. Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not…

Can you explain why a stream of hiragana would be unreadable? It's a phonetic alphabet, right? Shouldn't it be just as readable as the phonetic alphabet for any other language?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#292

Post by throwaway675309 »

999900000999 wrote: post #65

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...

This has not been my experience at all. The tonal aspect of Chinese adds an extra layer of nuanced complexity to pronouncing the words that Japanese simply doesn't have. Further, Japanese has the ability to write things phonetically using hiragana/katakana which Chinese pretty much completely lacks. Not to mention that with Chinese you also have simplified and traditional from a writing perspective.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#293

Post by culi »

ickoonite wrote: post #24

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…

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English".

The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters.

Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#294

Post by Laaas »

pezezin wrote: post #281
Laaas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English. The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially beca…

> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole k…

Character amnesia isn't a problem because we have IMEs, but they're also a problem _because_ of IMEs. In the pre-digital world, character amnesia was likely a rarer thing.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#295

Post by ickoonite »

kibwen wrote: post #291
ickoonite wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin. Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not…

Can you explain why a stream of hiragana would be unreadable? It's a phonetic alphabet, right? Shouldn't it be just as readable as the phonetic alphabet for any other language?

becauseitsbasicallylikewritinglikethissoquitehardtoparse

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#296

Post by [deleted] »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #245
presentation wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2…

[deleted]

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#297

Post by ickoonite »

rjh29 wrote: post #184
Anon1096 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outside of Chinese (where it is standard), I’ve not seen 苹果 before, but the Japanese input on iOS suggests it after a bit of scrolling. It’s in the dictionary on there as well, where the pronunciation is given as ひょうか or へいか, which is fairly logical.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#298

Post by corroclaro »

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…

"Chinese" has just as much grammar as any other language! Please, let us not confuse the fact that Standard Mandarin does not use as much morphological change to signal different tense-aspect-mood changes in verbs but instead uses syntactically ordered particles with no grammar. A grammar covers morphosyntax!

A language without its written form is a language. The written form is an artifact of modern society and literacy.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#299

Post by glomgril »

culi wrote: post #293
ickoonite wrote: post #24

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…

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English". The thing is though, human…

linguistics FTW!

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#300

Post by presentation »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #245
presentation wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 2…

Because each kanji can have 2-unbounded numbers of pronunciations whereas Chinese is mostly 1:1. That said yes, producing the sounds are easier. Also you might think they’re indistinguishable from natives but 99.9% of foreigners can’t get the pitch accent right and sound like foreigners forever
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