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I used to know how to write in Japanese

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#171

Post by codedokode »

svara wrote: post #55
hintymad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

One of the advantages of Chinese characters is that you can express an emotion using a single character - like "laugh" or "tears" and you don't need emoji for that. Western alphabet cannot do this.

Also the text is more dense and you can write more using limited number of characters, for example, when you have a button in UI with limited size.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#172

Post by cosmic_cheese »

simianparrot wrote: post #48
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 am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge. But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally.…

I might have to play with writing alongside vocab reviews.

Back in the earlier days of the online Japanese learning sphere (when AJATT was still the big new thing), I tried learning by starting with writing by studying kanji independently, but that went nowhere even after several months in.

More recently I’ve been making a point of audibly speaking the sentences associated with vocab cards and that’s helped a lot with being able to fluidly speak the various long trains of sounds that are common in Japanese but rare in English as well for improving recall and improving reading speed. It would follow that writing might enhance that effect.

My foremost goal is to become conversational too. The rest should follow more naturally if I can achieve that.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#173

Post by codedokode »

xandrius wrote: post #128
koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say. And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere. It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but…

The advantage though is that even if you don't know the word, you can guess the meaning if it contains familiar character(s). Also except for the first one, your examples are easy to distinguish.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#174

Post by codedokode »

e4325f wrote: post #132
koakuma-chan wrote: post #124

"is point is that learning kanji presents two obstacles: remembering what the shapes mean and remembering how they are pronounced." How is this different from English words? How is conscientiousness pronounced? Not to mention rendezvous.

Words in English are built from characters we can pronounce individually and this extends to words so whilst you might not get it perfect you can at least guess the sound of an English word. This isn't the case for characters in Mandarin or Japanese, no sound is encoded in the strokes, the equivalent of a character.

Actually English spelling is pretty complicated and completely different from pronunciation. Why on Earth you Englishmen write "a" (as in skate) but pronounce it as "ei". And why you have so many versions for each vowel and why you have 3 letters for "k" sound and 2 letters (i, y) for the same sound.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#175

Post by xandrius »

codedokode wrote: post #173
xandrius wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say. And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere. It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but…

The advantage though is that even if you don't know the word, you can guess the meaning if it contains familiar character(s). Also except for the first one, your examples are easy to distinguish.

Yep and no. That's a common misconception. Like Chinese, old Japanese went through a systematic simplification of its kanji 100 or so years ago. The rules were decided a priori to make the job easier. This meant that several kanjis ended up looking somewhat similar even though they have nothing to do with each other. That's why comparing kanji can work but it can also backfire and lead you astray.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#176

Post by xandrius »

numpad0 wrote: post #129
xandrius wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say. And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere. It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but…

It actually works the same way in Japanese. Radicals give rough clues about meanings as well as pronunciation. Similar looking kanji do read similarly. It's just... you can read pronounce "brochures" in either French style or in Southern American, and which one is more appropriate depends. edit: Simple examples: - 臆 and 億 - 誤 and 語 - 諦 and 締

Not always, as I wrote in another comment this is because of the Japanese script reform for "modernising" and simplifying the script. So sometimes kanji look similar but are not. More info at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform#Mazeg...

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#177

Post by idkfasayer »

ktosobcy wrote: post #167
joshdavham wrote: post #160

This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily. 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 someo…

>> 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)? Erm... great that you gave English as an example but I'd argue this mostly applies to English. I remember wondering why "spelling bee" was a thing when watching shows from the USA…

[dead]

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#178

Post by oracel »

victorp13 wrote: post #101

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…

The other weird thing about that term is that it's somewhat uncommon to see 馬鹿 actually written out in kanji, as those characters mean horse and deer with no direct association with 'idiot' (the proposed etymology is a reference to Chinese history and/or a Sanskrit loanword). I guess in a way the kanji form is a word processor autocomplete tell.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#179

Post by taeric »

jaylaal wrote: post #163
joshdavham wrote: post #160

This article actually hits on a pet peeve of mine where I feel people sorta “mystify” kanji/hanzi unnecessarily. 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 someo…

Nice comparison. When I was living in China, I'd encounter someone who forgot how to write the characters for a word on a weekly basis. I think the difference is that with Latin alphabets you can still misspell something, and having gotten it down on paper, still rely on phonetics to convey your meaning.

This is an area where the modern insistence that English isn't phonetic baffles me.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#180

Post by dionian »

vunderba wrote: post #46

From the article: > On the surface, this atypical trait seems to explain quite well why I can draw a blank when asked to write the kanji for "plant" (植) from memory. I don't see the character in my mind, so it makes sense that I can't reproduce it on paper. While the author's aphantasia may have posed some recall issues - it wouldn't explain why they had ever been able to reproduce 植. Kanji has the concept of radical…

Writing characters without knowing the radicals is kind of like spelling without really clearly understanding the alphabet. The stroke order is easy to remember, the radicals make the full characters easier to remember.
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