This thread is reminding me that I desperately want a way to way to have different font sizes for different languages. I like my English text small, but kanji/Chinese characters are obviously more visually dense. So I default to 10/12 point for latin alphabet but I need somewhere between 20-25 point to read Japanese comfortably. Where the two are mixed, like in this thread or on social media (where maybe half my feed is Japanese) it's a massive pain in the ass.
I used to know how to write in Japanese
201–210 of 277 posts
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#202Being able to read but not write Kanji is so common that it's a meme amongst Japanese people -- to the point where it's a game. For example, here you can watch some Japanese television people play a game where they compete to write words in 10 seconds or less: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQQqLno9hw I (and every other learner) have the same problem. It's not special, and has nothing to do with aphantasia.
Completely off topic but that is the shakiest camera work I have ever seen, and I learned to shoot before gimbals were cheap and easily available. For that matter, it's been easy to automatically correct that sort of thin in post for years now. How were they not embarrassed to upload something so unwatchable?
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.
Latin script for Vietnamese replaced Chinese-based script under the French colonial government and were helped by the Nguyen Emperors going along with it. (Interestingly this did not take off in neighboring Cambodia or Laos.) Hanja is also mostly gone in Korea, particularly in North Korea. The big thing is that both shifts happened before rapid literacy growth. It's much easier to teach new writing systems when the m…
I've always wondered how some countries manage to drop Chinese characters, while others can’t—or just don’t want to. And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?
From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace. Sure, we don’t need them when we’re speaking, so in theory it seems like we could just get rid of them altogether. But in practice, we still rely on them a lot - especially when we’re trying to understand what a certain pronunciation means. And reading is a whole different story. Recognizing characters is just way faster than sounding out spellings. Maybe one reason is that the basic unit in Chinese is not word but morphemes, which mostly are just single characters.
Maybe we could come up with a different writing system, kind of like what Koreans did, instead of sticking with Romanized pinyin.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#204Earlier 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…
That first example is amazing; where does it come from?
There were online discussions on abolishing Kanji in Japanese (漢字廃止論). There were tons of interesting examples, and I took some notes. Unfortunately I don't remember the original sources now.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#205Perhaps if there were fewer radicals this would be less of a problem. Many thousands of characters could probably be generated from a small number of radicals.
32 radicals are enough for ~75% of characters though. My biggest problem with writing is that I default to writing fairly small so if I have to do a character with more than 12-15 strokes it's either way too big or hard to read later.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
So, I don't know what to say, but to be honest, I never even thought 千 and 干 can be considered similar...
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…
> it's chunking.
I guess the ultimate question is whether we can have a spelling system that totally mimics how we communicate verbally, so chunking becomes as easy as when we listen to the the spoken language.
I doubt it will happen though. Historical heritage aside, Kanji does pack enough information to make reading very easy. Unless government interferes hard, the new system needs to be way better than the existing one to get adopted.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#208Earlier 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.
This made me spend 20 minutes cleaning up all the drinks from my desk and my screen.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The term that would cover what you mean here is regular. And that is only in regards to correct spelling. Is obviously complicated when considering that we don't have official pronunciation across all dialects for the same word. Even if we do agree on a spelling. But it is a complete non-sequitur to lead to the modern idea that English isn't phonetic.
This is not about regular VS irregular, there are aspects of English spelling that are highly non-phonetic. It's not uncommon to have letters in words that are entirely irrelevant to the pronunciation. For example the spellings "programme" and "program" would be read the same by any English reader, and yet both persist in certain places. The s in island is completely unnecessary. Also, the same English word can be re…
That is what is typically meant by a regular orthography. Wikipedia also calls it deep and shallow. These are legit terms that pre-exist to this odd debate that English isn't phonetic.
Nobody that knows how to read English at a level to be on an internet forum is surprised that English has odd spelling. Many people would be deeply confused to be told that written English doesn't follow a phonetic system. Rightfully so.
Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese
#210A 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.
This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia.
Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet.
Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word.
It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form.
I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel.
Do it like Korea
Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier.