Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

japaneseruleof7.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#21

Post by glandium »

abjwam wrote: post #20
bokumo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because it is not racist. The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture. This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and…

Reminds me of the "I have a black friend" argument. >"It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level" This claim is ridiculous. There is no way you can construe this as anything other than racist.

It also completely goes completely opposite from my own experience, which is that on average the Japanese people I know are more literate in their language than the French people I know are literate in theirs (including myself). That sure is anecdata, but it's about as much anecdata as the OP.

Edit: I should mention that I live in a "relatively" small city in Japan (180k inhabitants), that many qualify as "inaka" (countryside), although I wouldn't. So the population of Japanese people I know is not necessarily biased towards highly educated people.

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#22

Post by texthompson »

glandium wrote: post #21
abjwam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the "I have a black friend" argument. >"It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level" This claim is ridiculous. There is no way you can construe this as anything other than racist.

It also completely goes completely opposite from my own experience, which is that on average the Japanese people I know are more literate in their language than the French people I know are literate in theirs (including myself). That sure is anecdata, but it's about as much anecdata as the OP. Edit: I should mention that I live in a "relatively" small city in Japan (180k inhabitants), that many qualify as "inaka" (co…

I've never seen anecdata before. Thanks for sharing that word, love it. :)

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#23

Post by grobaru »

bokumo wrote: post #18
yifanlu wrote: post #15

So, umm, is nobody else going to call this racist? > Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level. > Kids in Spain are re…

No, because it is not racist. The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture. This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and…

I wonder if there has been a research that tried to incorporate Hangul (aka the best writing system on earth) to Japanese/CHinese lang...just for pragmatic reasons

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#24

Post by yifanlu »

bokumo wrote: post #18
yifanlu wrote: post #15

So, umm, is nobody else going to call this racist? > Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level. > Kids in Spain are re…

No, because it is not racist. The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture. This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and…

I have lived in America for a long time and can speak English fluently. However if I say "Americans are stupid, and most people don't know how to speak their own languages properly." even though it may be based on my observation living here for over a decade, it is ignorant at best and racist at average. I'm showing my feeling or superiority when in fact I'm the stupid one because I don't understand regionism and slang.

But that's besides the point. Just because you lived there and learned the culture (who's to say how well) doesn't mean you can't be racist against them. Otherwise, there's a lot of colonists who we own an apology to.

I've read the author's bio on their site and even there it downplays Japan and Japanese culture and up plays the author themselves.

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#25

Post by wodenokoto »

yomly wrote: post #17
wodenokoto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing ... arguably Japanese is not a Chinese character based language, but a Chinese character adopted language. Looking at Mandarin it kinda makes sense why a character based written language sprung up. Looking at Japanese and Korean, it boggles the mind why only the Koreans moved away from Chinese characters. Except for the borrowed wor…

You're right in that linguistically its roots did not come from Chinese, but I don't agree with > except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English. That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are plenty of features in Japanese that make learning Chinese (or vice versa) easier than Mandarin/English. Assuming by "borrowed words" you're referring to onyomi (which is a hu…

> no verbal conjugation

I don't know how you define conjugations, but I consider 食べた a conjugation of 食べる. I know some tokenization systems will split the former into 2 tokens and keep the latter as a single.

The other points in your list I agree with, but I am sure we can find just as many dissimilarities between Japanese and Chinese, although I concede that I was exaggerating with my comment about English.

My point is that the way Chinese is shaped, the character system is befitting. The way Japanese is shaped, it is not, but effort has been made to put them there anyway, which has lead to (at least a written language) far more complicated than necessary.

A friend of mine once described Korean as "Chinese words with Japanese grammar" and the Koreans transitioned away from Chinese characters with great success (and I dare say they are better off having done so) and retain plenty of words that more than resembles their Japanese and Chinese counter parts. I'm assuming you wouldn't argue that Korean is a "Chinese character based language"

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#26

Post by nicolas_t »

bokumo wrote: post #18
yifanlu wrote: post #15

So, umm, is nobody else going to call this racist? > Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level. > Kids in Spain are re…

No, because it is not racist. The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture. This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and…

Well, the author who has studied Japanese for a long time didn't even pass the JLPT level 1, so a) he mustn't have studied very hard b) he's not good enough at writing and reading Japanese to be able to comment on it.

Regarding word processors, it is true that a lot of people cannot write kanji by hand but that's orthogonal to literacy. I can barely write legibly in the latin alphabet and that's purely because I almost never need to write by hand but that doesn't stop me from consuming books or writing.

In term of the level of universities here, he does have a bit of a point, the undergraduate level in a lot of universities is very low (it gets better in graduate classes though) but, in my experience, good universities like Todai or Kyodai are much better... That's hardly a problem limited to Japan though, I've seen liberal arts degrees in other countries that weren't worth much more than the paper they were printed on.

And, lastly, I agree with Yifanlu, his claim about writings, movies and music is laughable and show a lack of culture from someone who claims to like Japanese culture.

It's not because someone has been living in a country for x years or that someone claims to admire the culture of the country that that person is not racist. If he makes racist comments then he is racist (a cultural racist to use the correct term in this case) ..

Re: The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage

#27

Post by [deleted] »

bokumo wrote: post #18
yifanlu wrote: post #15

So, umm, is nobody else going to call this racist? > Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level. > Kids in Spain are re…

No, because it is not racist. The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture. This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN