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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#101

Post by Morgawr »

Clewza313 wrote: post #90
fenomas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting this very misleadingly. Kanken 2 is basically comparable to something like an SAT; it covers what people are expected to have mastered by the end of high school (reading and writing, incidentally). As such it's odd to say it "requires 12 years of schooling" as if that proved something about the language. Kanken levels beyond 2 are a different matter; they cover words that aren't in common use, and a…

Most kids learn to read & write the alphabet in grade 1, although mastering the idiosyncrasies of English spelling takes a bit longer. By comparison, Japanese kids are still grinding their way through the jōyō kanji all the way to grade 12. So, yes, I think this tells you a lot about the complexity of the writing system.

Japanese kids learn to write hiragana and katakana at similar age which is comparable to the Latin Alphabet. By comparison, most English speakers still participate in stuff like spelling bees and have to actively learn to spell individual words (remember, English is not a regular phonetic language) well into adulthood.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#102

Post by fenomas »

Clewza313 wrote: post #90
fenomas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're presenting this very misleadingly. Kanken 2 is basically comparable to something like an SAT; it covers what people are expected to have mastered by the end of high school (reading and writing, incidentally). As such it's odd to say it "requires 12 years of schooling" as if that proved something about the language. Kanken levels beyond 2 are a different matter; they cover words that aren't in common use, and a…

Most kids learn to read & write the alphabet in grade 1, although mastering the idiosyncrasies of English spelling takes a bit longer. By comparison, Japanese kids are still grinding their way through the jōyō kanji all the way to grade 12. So, yes, I think this tells you a lot about the complexity of the writing system.

Again: kanji tests are vocabulary tests, not just orthography tests, so Kanken is not comparable to first-graders learning the alphabet. If you're familiar with Japanese you must already know this, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#103

Post by [deleted] »

WildParser wrote: post #51
Jonnax wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've said is nonsensical. A good example of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" The language is structured around those two syllable letters.

Well, I haven't made that up myself - I got the idea from linguistics books - and from people that lived there for a long time. And those linguists were very clear that the language came first and then syllable script was bolted on.

[deleted]

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#104

Post by QuercusMax »

andrewzah wrote: post #83
ekianjo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja. While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0] From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day: - Korean names. For the most part, given names will have hanja chosen by the parents/grandparents/family. However recently it's beco…

English doesn't use a syllabary.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#105

Post by bumbada »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

I am currently memorizing Hiragana (~100% done) and Katagana (~10% done), before venturing into learning some basic Japanese. It's incredibly and unnecessarily complicated, from the perspective of a "westerner" (Italian roots, fluent in English, some Spanish, bits of French). I'm still fascinated by it, and still want to learn some, primarily because I like visiting Japan and I plan to spend several weeks per year th…

What you already knows determines what you consider "easy".

When you learn English, Italian, Spanish and French you are not learning really 4 different languages as those languages overlap each other, they are from the same family(English is part of the germanic[anglo-saxon] but also the Latin family[normand]).

If you are native English speaker, you will learn French easily as most of english vocabulary(more than 60% of adjectives, and adverbs for example) comes from French.

As a native Spanish speaker, I understand most Italian and Portuguese with little effort, and French only problem is pronunciation, reading it is very easy.

For a Chinese native(Mandarin or Cantonese), learning written Japanese is easy, almost trivial.

I find Hiragana and Katakana easy to learn, not different from a vocabulary. It is kanji what is harder.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#106

Post by pm215 »

kazinator wrote: post #79

OMG, I read 藩, cold: "han" feudal domain. I did stare at it for a second or three, but got it. I added it to my vocabulary maybe a year-and-a-half ago? It, and words that include it, are not such common words. How/why did he choose that for the example, I wonder. For that matter, how did I add it? It was due to some recursive chasing of words in a dictionary, where some word's older meaning was being explained as rel…

Commonness depends on your reading material, of course -- if you read Japanese novels set in the feudal era you'll trip over 藩 all the time :-)

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#107

Post by piercebot »

> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words...

I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice!

Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetition?

Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein?

I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji.

Has anybody played the Japanese version? Can you speak to the use of Kanji in the game?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#108

Post by sexy_devil »

piercebot wrote: post #107

> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words... I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice! Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetitio…

'Cutscene'y type talks like Tom Nook or Isabelle introducing are in kanji but irc pretty much everything else like items and villager chat is hiragana.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#109

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

anthk wrote: post #94
earthboundkid wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WE USE THREE SYLLABLE SCRIPTS ALL THE TIME IN ENGLISH. lowercase and uppercase are two divergent evolutions of the roman alphabet that got shoved together for no particular reason. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝕬𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖒𝖔𝖗𝖊.

False. Uppercase and lowercase are spelt identically, so do the italics.

Uppercase and lowercase are not spelt identically any more than katakana and hiragana are. q-Q, e-E, r-R, a-A, b-B and most of the rest are all completely different characters. Even m and M are not as straightforwardly connected as someone who learned a latin-character based language as their first language would think.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#110

Post by rangibaby »

piercebot wrote: post #107

> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words... I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice! Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetitio…

> Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein?

I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji.

This, but it’s the other way around. When characters speak to the player, who exists outside of the game world, it is in a mix of kanji and kana. When they write within the game world, it is in kana only.

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