Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> - Korean names. Unless they're into trendy foreign names, both the given name and surname will have hanja chosen. Not necessarily true anymore. My wife has a completely made up given name that has nothing foreign: just two plain hangul characters without meaning on their own.
Ah right, I blanked on that.
Some of the most memorable people I ran into in Korea were named 하늘 and 보라. I also met someone with a single character name, but I can't remember which character... I think 강?
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.
I'm not the parent comment but I used an Anki deck from Nihongo Shark. It sorted the kanji by radicals. I did this for 2-3 months before burning out, but it made learning kanji much easier since I could see the radicals that they were composed of.
I did that as well. That deck is basically (with a few differences) an Anki version of Helsig's "Remembering the Kanji". I started with the book, and continued with the Nihongo Shark Anki deck later. The system works incredibly well for the first few hundred Kanji at least, after that it gets harder and harder to come up with the mnemonic devices the method is based on. But by that time it also starts to get easier to remember new kanji by traditional methods (in my experience at least).
Even with my still incomplete number of kanji it does help tremendously with reading. It's faster and takes much less effort than trying to read just Hiragana (which I learned to read many years ago - it's still hard to read text written only in Hiragana). And with just kana you'll run into the homonym problem all the time too, unlike with kanji, and that doesn't make it easier either. Oh, and knowing the kanji can also sort out the (probable) meaning of a sentence even if I have not learned the actual word yet..
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#114OMG, 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…
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that does this.
I write down Korean word definitions in Korean, and this usually leads me to a whole bunch of niche words.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#115The word 'sinogram' sounds a bit contrived, and is not something I see a lot of scholars on this topic use. I personally would recommend against using it. They are mostly just called 'Chinese characters' in English when referring to these logograms, or simply 'kanji' if specifically talking about the Chinese characters in use in Japanese writing. Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all.…
"Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all."
They mean that in the specific context of those languages. The set of hanzi is different than the set of kanji, which is different than the set of hanja, which is different than characters that Taiwan uses. They are -not- the same characters.
I see no real issue with using sinogram/sinograph over Chinese character since it refers to a Chinese character being used in another language. And it obviates the whole hanzi, kanji, hanja thing when not necessary.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well There's a lot more in common between the writing in Taiwan and Japan since Taiwan kept the "older" kanji while the CCP went thru the cultural revolution and the simplification of the number of strokes in each sign. Still, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot o…
Super interesting topic. Sometimes Japan uses the simplified version, or somewhat in between. Off the top of my head I only can think of 学/學. There’s a handful of kanji created in Japan (called) kokuji, mostly food related. Some of these made it back to China. And there are a few differences based on simple mistakes, for example a Chinese character mistakenly applied to the wrong species of fish.
This kind of thing happens with lots of language combinations as well, when loan words or Ana logical words embed themselves locally with different semantics.
You can even see this within a language e.g. UK/USA/Australia or Portugal/Brazil.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're right, I misunderstood that term.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
q-Q, e-E, a-A and b-B don't diverge a lot.
Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#119OMG, 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…
I suspect the author meant to use 漢 (as in hanzi/kanji), and keyed in the wrong one instead.
Answer from the author of the article herself : No no, I put the kanji 藩 on purpose, because I love this kanji! It is a beautiful one I think :)
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#120I read parts of the article, and skimmed the rest, and almost spat water at my screen when I read the last section: > Hentaigana : beauties > > The word hentaigana is made of kana, — syllabic elements —, and hentai [...] Here she (?) is referring to 変体 and not 変態. Earlier in the article she said "[j]apanese language is a very playful language" but I don't think she's thinking of homonyms. :-)
Sorry if I made you spat water on your screen haha! You are right, I should correct in my article "differs from the norm" by "different in shape". Thanks!