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I used to know how to write in Japanese

aethermug.com

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#141

Post by goosedragons »

lyall wrote: post #11

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel str…

It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful.

At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#142

Post by [deleted] »

latentsea wrote: post #138
numpad0 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Koreans don't seem entirely fine to me, but besides, Japanese pronunciation is actually more aggressively simplified than the other two CJK languages during Edo era that numbers of homophone is out of control. There are as many as 50 homophones for koushou due to this, for example[1]. Communication by phonetic transcripts alone just isn't going to work. 1: https://togetter.com/li/2380657?page=2

Guess Japanese people just can't talk to one another without subtitles.

[deleted]

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#143

Post by Razengan »

makeitdouble wrote: post #140

This is a fascinating subject, that would merit some input from other languages IMHO. > Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet. In alphabetic languages with separate pronounciation (French, English etc.) people forget spelling instead. And of course we recognize spellings we know, even if we couldn't recall it cold from memory. Another point: the article defin…

Learning about radicals was a massive Level Up in my Japaneseability.

THey're like protocols/interfaces on OOP classes ^^ or more accurately, like "tele" and "phone" in "telephone", "icon" in "iconography" and obviously many more words in English made up of bits and pieces of other words.

Once you recognize the parts, you'll be able to able to guess/infer what the word means even if it's your first time seeing it. Same with radicals in Kanji.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#144

Post by happa »

hintymad wrote: post #50

What drove me crazy when I started to learn Japanese was that a Kanji characters can have so many different pronunciations. The most egregious example is 煙草, whose pronunciation is the really just tabacco(tabako, or タバコ). I knew the etymologies and the historical context on why Japanese evolved like that, but it's nonetheless hard for me to remember all the pronunciations, at least initially. Also, I find that knowin…

It's Kinugawa, and Akihabara is written as 秋葉原.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#145

Post by Barrin92 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #71

I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doub…

>have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways.

It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty much everyone can understand the meaning of written Chinese. And so can even Japanese or Korean people.

In contrast spoken language tends to change so quickly that phonetic writing systems can rapidly become completely unintelligible. Old English is practically a foreign language. Probably nobody understands that "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum" means "Hey! We the Spear Danes, in years gone by".

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#146

Post by pazimzadeh »

Interesting topic but a lot of the articles on this blog reads like undeclared LLM slop:

> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long. The fact that people can fail even at something as basic as sketching a kanji or a vehicle they've seen hundreds of times before is just another example of the same phenomenon.

A pet peeve of mine is when someone uses their personal datapoints to generalize for humanity. Every sentence here should say “for me”.

What they said doesn’t even support the idea that language is a bottle-neck for thought, it actually argues against it. If language can’t capture the complexities of thought, then that’s the opposite point as language is a bottle-neck for thought.

I read the linked article https://aethermug.com/posts/the-beautiful-dissociation-of-th... and it clearly is comprised of a lot of LLM slop.

“In techie terms, the Chinese script doesn't support the structure of languages like English and Japanese. It doesn't have what it takes.”

That’s not techie that LLM slop

“Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation. By ignoring the original content of a kanji, they could string them together to form almost any sound.”

I’m becoming allergic (gasp!) to this kind of writing

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#147

Post by pessimizer »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #17
lyall wrote: post #11

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel str…

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#148

Post by bitbasher »

I can relate a lot to this post.

I learned Japanese around the same time (2010~). I even lived in Japan and studied at a Japanese university.

To this day I have a hard time recalling Japanese on the spot. However, when I hear Japanese or see it written, I can read and understand well. Even kanji I haven't seen in a decade. It's kinda strange.

I'm pretty sure if I re-studied Japanese I would learn very quickly as I re-activate that part of my brain... something that has been on my todo list for a long time!

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#149

Post by snozolli »

I had a friend in college whose mother was an immigrant and whose father had grown up bilingual and spent years in the mother's county. My friend was able to hear and understand the mother's tongue with apparent fluency, but had an extremely difficult time forming real sentences in the language, even though he'd heard and understood it for his entire life.

I think there's a significant difference between consuming language and producing it, whether that's written or spoken. It might explain the number of people I see these days who don't understand basic English grammar and make words plural by slapping on an apostrophe and an s.

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