171–180 of 416 posts
"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?
Given than English is not the author's first language, and he finds it chaotic, perhaps he actually meant, {despite} being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age
Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.
Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advan…
"I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Something about "I eat beef" as a statement conjures chest pounding imagery (it sounds primitive), so I'd propose we often pass through a sort of politeness filter too?
Anyways as a English only programmer, I don't know if I learned anything from the article - maybe you have to speak Japanese to get it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji. Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ
This is a very nice website! Thank you to share. Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say…
Too bad the Romans only used five vowel sounds and left us with an alphabet that has trouble expressing the however many sounds English has.
As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second lang…
I could see the h-insertion leading to comical lost-in-translation situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology. Do explain!
I learned English for school material (math, physics, etc). I then learned further while taking Computer Science at University. I can watch full length videos on any topic from physics to philosophy to politics and understand nearly everything. But I have a hard time following casual conversations about small daily life things. Further more, I can only think about programming and technology in English. If I have to t…
If you had learned Chinese (or Portuguese, or whatever) for your school material and computer science courses at university, you'd probably think it's Chinese that's "purpose built" for logic/math.
English seems to me a very illogical language, see for example the pronunciation rules compared to a more "logical" (pronunciation-wise) language like Spanish. Or Japanese, I hear, though I wouldn't know about that. Written English can feel similarly illogical very often.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji. Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ
This is a very nice website! Thank you to share. Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.
Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.
This craps me up in Reddit: While we, Western Europeans (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...) have been watching manganime since forever Americans keep lying about DB and manganime availability in the West in early 90's as if the West was just the US.
For instance, the big lie on DBZ knowledge on SNES/MegaDrive games from the West. Fore sure the US didn't know nothing at all. Meanwhile, we were nearly finishing the Buu saga. So we were pretty aware of DB games in arcades, the SNES, the MD and any platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say…
Too bad the Romans only used five vowel sounds and left us with an alphabet that has trouble expressing the however many sounds English has.
There's a lot of sound variation in regional dialects of Spanish, from country to country and even regions within a country. People pronounce vowels and consonants differently, and even the "accent" varies a lot (some people can seem as if they were "singing" instead of speaking, to speakers of other countries/regions).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad the Romans only used five vowel sounds and left us with an alphabet that has trouble expressing the however many sounds English has.
Spanish isn't particularly rich in sounds but other languages use combination of vowels or accents. French or Portuguese have much more than 5 sounds and the same vowels.