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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#371

Post by Tor3 »

Tangurena2 wrote: post #318
outworlder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some teachers can do that to any subject, no matter how interesting. > The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. [0] There is a proper order for adjectives in English that native speakers follow, but cannot explain. > "It's an odd thi…

I, as a non-native English speaker, also immediately feel that "green great dragons can't exist". But how to explain that..

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#373

Post by Tor3 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #202
presentation wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.

I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.

Blame it on the Chinese - Japanese didn't have that many "counter words" until Chinese influence increased that by an order of magnitude or more.

As for why you need them, Wikipedia points out that because there's no concept of singular or plural (in general, excepting words like "私たち" for "we"), you may consider all Japanese nouns mass nouns. And with mass nouns in English you usually have to use something similar: ".. loaf of bread" ".. grain of salt". The "solution" is not the same in English as in Japanese (you still use "one, two, three.." in English), but still, you can't just remove it. For Japanese there are other ambiguities which are resolved by the counter system as well.

But yes, the counters.. that's one of the bigger stumbling blocks I ran into early on. Learned the numbers, yay! Then learned that I can't use the numbers when I want to say how many there are of something.. I limited myself to the few where I can, as in the counter for flat thin items like e.g. tickets. "にまいください"

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#374

Post by Tor3 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #332
hsn915 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, learn Hiragana and Katakana first. It doesn't take that long. Young people can do it in days or a week, I took about a month or so. But, unlike what I did, and many others do, I recommend learning Hiragana and Katakana at the same time. Most people learn Hiragana first and Katakana second, and will run into trouble with the latter, which also sometimes confuses the Hiragana they have already learned. Imagine learning the alphabet: Do you think it's better to first learn "ABCDEFGH.." and so on and then, after mastering that, start learning "abcdefgh.." Or wouldn't it be better to learn "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh.. " right from the start. I'm now a firm believer that the last method is better, and as you can think of Katakana as the cursive version of Hiragana (which is why it's used for loan words and also in literature for naming e.g. plant species, "Belladonna"), it makes sense to learn them at the same time. Faster, and avoids later confusion.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#375

Post by iopq »

wst_ wrote: post #369
iopq wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, so what is 大人気? if it's 大人気ない it's probably childish, but if it's not in that context, it's probably very popular You need to finish reading the whole SENTENCE to be able to pronounce it

Not sure I agree with that. It's not difficult to notice one has "nai", other don't. Also when you read it in actual sentence you can immediately notice that something is wrong when you choose the wrong reading. Subsequent words don't add up. I am not saying confusion doesn't occur. I'm just saying it's not as big as people are painting it.

It's not always the case it's followed by nai

大人気なくてもいい means it's okay to be childish

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#376

Post by monkeycantype »

iraldir wrote: post #171
monkeycantype wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given than English is not the author's first language, and he finds it chaotic, perhaps he actually meant, {despite} being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age

no no, see other replies. My wife jokes about this love between France and Japan so much that I tend to forget it's not common knowledge

oh I didn't it was france -> japan too, I know about the japan -> france fascination from the old japanese prints that feature the eifel tower, and hot air balloons, and of course the stories of japanese tourists being overwhelmed by paris

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#377

Post by ickoonite »

justusw wrote: post #368
ickoonite wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”. That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?

When you consider that alternatives like freee are still quite clunky in the browser, you don't have a lot of choice. I haven't tried Yayoi yet, but I don't expect much. Kaikeio doesn't support HiDPI / 150 % fractional scaling either, so it looks really weird on my machine. Recently the maker (Sorimachi) has announced that you can download their newest edition. Too late! They have already sent me the CD. Anyway, you…

> Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :)

Oh dear. I just skimmed that. The bit where it tells you to turn off the beta UTF-8 support made me particularly sad.

(A good part of the blame lies with Microsoft of course - why are these legacy locale and encoding settings still system-wide?)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#378

Post by ickoonite »

wst_ wrote: post #366
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…

Isn't it common in English, too? Just to mention "vague", "awe", "sigh". There are many others. I see those words and pronunciation is far from obvious to me.

This was the point I made at the top of this thread: that Japanese manages to combine the complexity of written Chinese with the inconsistency of English spelling. Does any other language expect quite so much of its users?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#379

Post by kibwen »

Tor3 wrote: post #358
kibwen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's interesting to consider that Japanese's relatively low number of discrete phonemes might result in a relatively high number of homophones, but if a preponderance of homophones is the problem, wouldn't listening to spoken Japanese be just as hard as reading hiragana?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#380

Post by Maken »

capableweb wrote: post #26
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…

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.

Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.
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