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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#351

Post by iopq »

Laaas wrote: post #50
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 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…

This is just not true

let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in

日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat

so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona)

even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#352

Post by Tor3 »

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…

True enough, in many ways Japanese looks like a spoken-only language where the parties communicating are always visible to each other and share the context. They did get their writing system pretty late, though not that much later than many other languages which aren't as context-based. Then you have languages like Latin, which is so precise that there's little or no implied context needed (from the little I know of Latin, anyway).

You just have to try Google Translate on Japanese and it messes up all the time, it doesn't understand if it's about a male of female subject, one person or several, and lots of other issues. You can't have machine translation of Japanese until you get true AI - an intelligence that can understand context.[0]

Though I don't entirely agree about particles. Sure there are many - I have a little booklet with some 70 of them[1]- but in practice there are vastly fewer in use and the important 6-7 ones are used all the time and aren't (in principle, at least) particularly tricky (though some are often left out in speech). I find them elegant, in many ways. And yes, regional differences.. my wife (Japanese) uses different patterns from "standard" Japanese, but then again my native language has an uncountable number of dialects, often with grammatical differences too, so to me most other languages' variations seem minor..

(I'll add that I'm not fluent in Japanese yet and therefore stumbles on particle use sometimes - in theory I know how, but in practice I'm not good enough. I never imagined it could take so long learning a language, one that I actually like and enjoy listening to. It's very true, as someone said, that "you can know a lot about Japanese but that is not the same as knowing Japanese")

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J4id5jnEo8 [1] https://www.amazon.com/All-About-Particles-Handbook-Japanese...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#353

Post by iopq »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #313
Tor3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble). As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the…

As for learning a language, there are 4 "skills" involved: speaking, listening, reading and writing. We group them all into one clump - which I think is a mistake. It is common to have different proficiency levels in each "skill". I've also forgotten a number of languages over the decades and I find that I lose reading/writing skill the fastest with languages that use other than Roman letters (such as Farsi, Arabic &…

I find my Korean writing/reading skill did not diminish over time when I didn't practice it, but my vocabulary was largely forgotten

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#354

Post by iopq »

g9yuayon wrote: post #244
ickoonite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

The Spanish sentence is exactly like the English sentence "Programming is pleasing to me", it's the same grammar and it exists

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#355

Post by iopq »

ickoonite wrote: post #114
qwezxcrty wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of it comes from importing words from different parts of China or at different times in history. From my (very) limited experience, Japanese pronunciations of kanji are much closer to Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.

It's worse than you think. The oldest readings came from KOREA where they used rhyme dictionaries to create a full system of Sino-Korean pronunciations without regards to the actual sounds.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#356

Post by iopq »

Nihilartikel wrote: post #48
kijin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another nitpick: "は" is pronounced as "wa" not "ha" when it is used as the topic marker, as in the well-known greeting "Konnichiwa".

I've always been amused that a literal translation of Konnichiwa could be something like: So, about today... Kono(this) nichi(day) wa(is the topic)

it's short for

今日はご機嫌いかがですか？

if you're a rich girl at a private school you can just say ご機嫌よう

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#357

Post by ickoonite »

iopq wrote: post #351
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…

This is just not true let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in 日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) fro…

Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto).

Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡

One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#358

Post by Tor3 »

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?

I can read only a limited number of kanji (or rather, words written with kanji), but even that makes reading much easier. Books for small children are written in Hiragana, with spaces, and in theory that should be as easy to read as English.. after all, it's easy to learn Hiragana, anyone can do that in a short time, and with practice you can learn to read it fast. But it's still tricky to read all-Hiragana sentences, even with spaces. Not sure I can explain why, more than the usual (and true) argument about the particularly large number of homonyms in Japanese. It's more than that. It's just much faster and easier to read 私 than わたし

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#359

Post by djhn »

de_nied wrote: post #307
culi wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general.

For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word").

In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#360

Post by IIAOPSW »

ickoonite wrote: post #349
hinkley wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅

In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

Calling it 'egregious' is editorializing. It stuck
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