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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#301

Post by fomine3 »

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…

I don't think written complexity of Chinese linked to "least logical". Since kanji is composed by parts, isn't it logical? (though it's complex)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#302

Post by presentation »

godot wrote: post #271
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.

Isn't the context thing true for anyone learning a second language? I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context. As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin…

I find Chinese much harder for context because the lack of things like conjugations, genders, plurals, tenses, etc plus every word basically being 1-2 syllables means that there’s a lot more meaning packed in fewer sounds. In English and often in Japanese too, if you hear those auxiliary grammatical markers you can kind of piece together the parts you missed. To be fair people then compensate by slurring their speech more than your typical Chinese speaker would so maybe it balances out.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#303

Post by corroclaro »

vvilliamperez wrote: post #81
chris_st wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.

Yeah that's the link what I was referring to, I forgot to add context. What I meant was if Matz "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple" was due in part to the way the language is spoken.

Possibly inspired by message parsing objects in Smalltalk, no?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#304

Post by camdez »

Laaas wrote: post #287
barking_biscuit wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are seve…

For such cases I find that the pronunciation _doesn't matter_. The meaning still comes across.

I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background.

Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation.

Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning.

It's all tradeoffs.

These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese.

Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me.

But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#305

Post by ickoonite »

corroclaro wrote: post #298
ickoonite wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lite…

Thank you. This was the counter-citation I could not be bothered to produce.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#306

Post by karaokeyoga »

antiterra wrote: post #191

I recognize that one can’t expect English speakers to consistently pluralize foreign words in ways that match the origin language, and that it is not objectively incorrect when people just add an s. 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.

Maybe a refactor is in order.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#307

Post by de_nied »

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…

>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.

This is pretty cool

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#308

Post by Dylan16807 »

Laaas wrote: post #294
pezezin wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure but now you're going to transpose strokes, I bet.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#309

Post by ickoonite »

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…

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher

[citation needed]

It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#310

Post by chaorace »

johnwalkr wrote: post #182
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 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 impressi…

I know it's a joke, but I can't help but feel endearment for the (obviously not real) guy every time I see this. Who wouldn't want to trade stories with an eccentric foreigner in a silly hat while eating barbeque and watching fireworks?
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