151–160 of 277 posts
A similar thing happens with all kinds of iconography, from flags to logos. People can easily recognize many logos, but when asked to draw them they often can't come very close. https://magazine.adler.co.uk/promotional-idea/we-asked-100-p...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, altho…
> Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their lan…
>> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought I am not sure I agree with this. We think our thoughts using language. I don’t language is the bottleneck.
you're walking down a beautiful waterside bridge in kyoto during cherry blossom season. there's really delicious smelling grilled eel from the store next to you. there's a swedish lady walking by you with a cute accent. your skin feels slightly sticky from humidity.
what i just wrote doesn't even begin to encapsulate the entirety of that moment. there were a million other details your brain can form about that moment: the style of brick on the bridge, the other people around you, the sun being in your eyes, that you're smelly bc you forgot deodorant that morning.
to put it shorter: a picture is worth a thousand words. and the author is saying that by having to use language to describe pictures, we have a huge bottleneck
The ultimate goal of AI companies imo is to disincentivize people from pursuing programming as a career by loss-leading with low LLM prices until nobody actually knows how to code without an LLM, and then jack up the prices.
Small nuance, but the term ワープロ馬鹿 actually is unrelated to software like MS Word, and refers to the at one point ubiquitous ワープロ (Word Pro) dedicated hardware device that many Japanese people owned in the 80s/90s to write letters. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor#Japanese_word_p... Interestingly the English Wikipedia page above only mentions Japanese word processor devices in a small secti…
A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.
Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana： 「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招 じる空です。」 「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じる からです。 Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさく…
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 went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial a…
If one's mother tongue isn't Chinese/Japanese, I guarantee you that's impossible to understand kanji/hanzi as deeply as a native speaker does just by spending 17 months on memorizing how to write them. It simply never happens. Languages come first and writing systems come later no matter which target language you're trying to acquire.
Even native speakers get confused about their own writing systems. It's vs its. Should've vs should of. Doppelganger vs doppleganger. Being able to wield the writing system like a wordmaster is a big plus and a praiseworthy effort. But it really isn't the essence of language acquisition.
>> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought I am not sure I agree with this. We think our thoughts using language. I don’t language is the bottleneck.
The truth is that there’s actually nothing particularly weird about being able to read some kanji but not be able to write them…
You actually get close to my point here:
> Admittedly, I've never heard of someone forgetting how to write a letter from the Latin alphabet.
Yes! But have you ever heard of someone forgetting how to spell certain words in a language that uses the Latin alphabet (e.g., English)? I can use myself as an example here: while writing this comment, I forgot how to spell “peeve” in “pet peeve” (I thought it had an ‘a’ in it) and I also forgot how to spell “unnecessarily” (I thought it had one n and two c’s).
The western equivalent of being able to read some kanji but not write them is simply called bad speling. No need to mystify kanji in particular.