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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#331

Post by hsn915 »

Agingcoder wrote: post #186
Ghoyome wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, compl…

Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it.

I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading).

Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#332

Post by moomoo11 »

hsn915 wrote: post #325
moomoo11 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Learn the hiragana and Katakana on your own, then use JapanesePod101.com material. This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years. But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner. The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange me…

thansk so much

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#333

Post by midoridensha »

bsder wrote: post #278
ickoonite wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not uncommon for the children of Japanese people living in the West, particularly when they have married non-Japanese. They pick up the spoken language via osmosis but the written language…not so much. It is, as I said, very hard and cannot be mastered without extensive study. Many of these hafu , as the Japanese refer to them, nonetheless enjoy successful careers in Japan, presumably usually in environments…

> Its particle-based system for annotating subjects and objects mean their position is unimportant; the only real requirement is that the verb comes at the end. Particles are one of the most maddening things about Japanese. Order in sentence may be unimportant but it may not be clear which particle you are supposed to choose. Even native speakers regularly screw up particles and particle use has high regional distinc…

>Order in sentence may be unimportant but it may not be clear which particle you are supposed to choose. Even native speakers regularly screw up particles and particle use has high regional distinctiveness.

Native English speakers use the wrong prepositions all the time.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#334

Post by porknubbins »

Zababa wrote: post #327
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…

> 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 Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.

I’m not sure how to measure complexity but after a long time with both languages I have found Japanese has a lot of gaps where there is no word matching an English word and fewer in the other direction. I thought I was bad at Japanese but then I heard things like “get suru” or “stay shita”.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#335

Post by midoridensha »

kijin wrote: post #189
Izkata wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

If I'm at work, I usually prefer to say "morning" without the "good": if it were a good morning, I wouldn't be at work...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#336

Post by matgessel »

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?

It's difficult to skim the stream of symbols and instantly recognize concepts. Think of a word finding box puzzle in English (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=word+finding+puzzle&iax=images&ia=...). It helps if you add spaces and periods, but I still think kanji make it easier to quickly pick out concepts.

In this video, Yuta compares different ways of writing the same sentence and discusses efforts to eliminate Kanji: "Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji?" • https://youtu.be/O27TgLW6pCU?t=220

Another analogy: I find the flat enunciation of "voice to text" on my phone a bit difficult to follow. I can understand if I pay attention, but I can't passively listen and multitask like I can with human read text (@see - The Guardian's "The Long Read" podcast).

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#337

Post by mcqueenjordan »

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…

In my experience, most Japanese people are much less judgmental about these things than this seems to imply (and less so than Westerners in general). Of course, there's always a time and place for "liking what you like", but this seems a bit otakuphobia-esque.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#338

Post by barking_biscuit »

ickoonite wrote: post #274
barking_biscuit wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any examples of the top of my head, but I have definitely seen this many times. One form it comes in is writing the meaning in kanji but then using an English word in Katakana as the Furigana for it. One example I can remember in that form, though it's not song lyrics, is "とある科学の超電磁砲" where 超電磁砲 has the Furigana レールガン (rail gun). Another form it takes is doing the same thing but using a different Jap…

Yes, this is quite common in subtitles. I seem to remember that in GoldenEye, Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ。 (I will try to dig out a relevant song lyric.)

>Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ

That's hilarious.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#339

Post by barking_biscuit »

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.

While I can sometimes guess the meaning of a novel word based on context of the sentence and the meaning of Kanji alone, the vast majority of the time I can't. So... I disagree.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#340

Post by agalunar »

stoppingin wrote: post #259
agalunar wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch : She must have had been being watched. = It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).

That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched" , alternatively "She had been watched" .

Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like:

  Two detectives are watching security film.

    DETECTIVE 1
  And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but –

  Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen.

    DETECTIVE 1
  – from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why?

    DETECTIVE 2
  She must've been being watched.
I do agree that form "must have had been being —ed" (with "had" in there as well) is an especially rare form, but in context, native English speakers understand what it means!

I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.

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