Japanese writing system basics • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#101

Post by kazinator » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:53 AM UTC

PeCaN wrote: post #58

robzyb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. And I'm an Australian in Japan learning Japanese. (I was expecting it to be a rant about insufficient unicode usage.)

Doesn't help that at least for me it gets rendered differently in the title on HN and the actual article. That said, I expected something Japanese related, given that it's Candy Japan, but you'd think common fonts would have different looking characters for “no glyph” and the kanji for mouth.

Another problem is that if the character appears in isolation, it's hard to tell whether you are looking at 口　(mouth) or 囗 (the "box radical" kanji, or "kunigamae").

Ha, for me, they look quite different in the font used for editing, but not so much in the rendered comment other than a small difference in size.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#102

Post by chewxy » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:56 AM UTC

zorceta wrote: post #66

chewxy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual eli…

Didn't know that ghost part.. Fun to know :) I'm just suggesting from modern Chinese's perspective, because, after all, we are modern people. 文言文 (uh I don't know its English translation) is fun to read and learn, but it's like Latin since basically nobody writes it anymore.

Probably some stupid made up shit to scare kids into using "proper" chinese (for certain definitions of proper as defined by political agendas).

I do find 文言文 to be quite elegant and terse though.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#103

Post by Margh » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

sdrothrock wrote: post #84

madeofpalk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"

The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the…

A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask:

'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'

as opposed to 'what does "..." mean'

A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."

compare this with seeing テリヤキ

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#104

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:01 AM UTC

et-al wrote: post #47

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21

囧

For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?

Totally thought that was supposed to be a 3.5" floppy disk.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#105

Post by zorceta » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:03 AM UTC

0xfaded wrote: post #95

zorceta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…

Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost. I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortu…

You can't simply take a characater apart and glue meanings of the parts together - it's more complicated. Having "乞" part doesn't necessarily mean it has the meaning of begging - it's a "sound", rather than meaning, element, which "provides" the sound of "吃".

And although I don't know the "喰" character, I can tell it didn't become Chinese 吃 and Japanese 食. 食 is more "ancient", where "吃" seems only used so widely in modern time.

Simplification of Chinese characters indeed started many arguments, but the "tranditional" Chinese used in Taiwan has also developed some "simplified" characters.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#106

Post by zorceta » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:06 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #56

zorceta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…

When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual eli…

So a native Chinese might have less knowledge in his language :) thanks for the added part.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#107

Post by Zarel » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:10 AM UTC

0xfaded wrote: post #95

zorceta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…

Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost. I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortu…

Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).

On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).

The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#108

Post by comboy » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:12 AM UTC

drwicked wrote: post #82

I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people do now?

After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered "number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing CGI for that was not that easy).

Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;)

It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account e-mail so that you can add them.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#109

Post by sdrothrock » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:12 AM UTC

Margh wrote: post #103

sdrothrock wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1. For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the…

A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask: 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?' as opposed to 'what does "..." mean' A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..." compare this with seeing テリヤキ

> 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'

Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.

> A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."

A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri something ki." Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean you can't describe it. Children are also very likely to just sketch out a picture of what they remember, even if it's incorrect, and you can usually figure that out.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#110

Post by ggreer » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

rett12 wrote: post #71

gizmo686 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that so…

Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people. Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in curren…

Logographic systems have some major disadvantages:

• It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix).

• Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kanji have multiple pronunciations.

• Looking up words is harder, as there are no "letters" to sort by. Sorting can be done by stroke count, by radical (four corners or SKIP), or by phonetic spelling (in pinyin or hiragana). Modern technology has made this easier, and some phone apps (like Pleco) can even OCR hanzi. Still, it's far less convenient than phonetic languages.

The only aspect in which logographic systems win is information density. You can fit more words on a single page. This is obvious if you've ever seen Chinese or Japanese copies of works that were originally written in English. The Harry Potter books are crazy thin. Also, Chinese and Japanese tweets can express a paragraph of information.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia