I once heard that Rails the aggregate object for Person is People.
I went like, wow.
In Spanish you say: "Baraja la baraja" .. shuffle the deck. Which makes
sense (the object changes itself but the verb is the same as the noun"
Is like Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Japanese explained to programmers
221–230 of 416 posts
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#222> The japanese standard library offers a bunch of chainable functions to add meaning to your primitive types. English and French work in the same way . However roles are usually determined by word order. But in essence it's the same thing as obj.do_stuff(), 'obj' is the thing that do_stuff.
English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO. I've never really thought of programming languages in passive voice before, but it explains why I've increasingly written and spoken in passive voice structure even though I know it's "wrong" to do so.
> English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO.
Maybe I misunderstood you, but Japanese is neither of those - it's usually SOV, although could be OSV (and you can omit the subject or object sometimes).
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and v…
I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing.
But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.
In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.
And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.
Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Something similar happens to me, but it doesn't seem to be related with how logical/math-related English is, but rather the context in which you've learned it. 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…
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Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet Spanish is a very expressive language, and it has no trouble expressing whatever you want using fewer vowels (note there are more than just five vowel sounds even in Spanish, it's just that variations don't have different meaning). 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 eve…
what's cool is that regional dialects have different vowel/consonant pronunciation but the differences are almost completely consistent internally and between the dialects. Like, Peruvians pronounce anything with "y" or "ll" like an English "j" and Argentines like "sh", always. Everything maps 1 to 1.
> Argentines like "sh", always
Porteños do. Not everyone does in Argentina!
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#226Earlier 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!
Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s
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Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#227Honestly 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.
I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the m…
The best way to teach: start teaching ireggularities first; then teach patterns that cover the whole.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the examples you gave are pretty obvious to read because of suffixes, called okurigana, or the other kanji next to it. Problem arises only when the kanji stands alone and that doesn't happen so often as people think. Even when it does, most often than not, you can infer the reading from the context.
わたし (私） and わたくし (私） is probably my favorite example. Good bless furigana. きょう (今日） and こんにち (今日） is sometimes fun as well.
だいにんき(大人気) and おとなげ(大人気) can be fun too. The latter usually is followed by ない, which wouldn't usually happen with the former, but the usual way I'm hit with these is in sentences where the word is at the end of the line (or better, when the line ends at 大人).
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#229I can see where the author is comming from . . . although its a bit of romanticism.
Japanese is extremely regular, which makes the grammar easier to learn though it is completely different to any language with indo-european roots.
For valuable insights into Japanese grammar I recommend 'Making Sense of Japanese' by Jay Ruben (he translated works of Murukami including Norwegian Wood into English).
Also a youtube channel Cure Dolly https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Who sadly died a few years ago, but who's insights nonetheless are very helpful (if you can get past the modified voice audio)
It was a coincidence that I had just finished some reviews on wanikani just before reading this. I find it very helpful along with using the Core 2k/6k Anki deck for learning Vocabulary.
Re: Japanese explained to programmers
#230Honestly 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.
Yeah. Putting the hat of a product manager, I have to ask: what value does this programming analogy offer? Japanese is a pretty structured language that is quite easy to understand. You use particles to "glue" phrases to sentences, and you use conjugations of verbs, for lack of better words, to modify the meaning of a sentence. Of course, there are exceptions and nuances and advanced concepts in Japanese, but it's damn easy to start learning Japanese and I fail to see the utility of using a programming analogy (not that it's not fun, mind you).
Or are we saying that programmers are so one-dimensional that have to square any concepts into the round hole of programming?