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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

#221

Post by thaumasiotes »

gwd wrote: post #89
jansan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, altho…

> Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system. I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their lan…

> and then when traveling, people could at a basic level read the signs and menus, and communicate at a basic level by writing, without having to know anything about the language

Well, you have to be careful; something that actually happened to me was recognizing that the first element of 牛蛙 meant "cow", without recognizing that the second part made it "bullfrog".

> We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on.

Interesting choice. Japanese doesn't do that - it follows classical Chinese by using the character 走 for the sense "run". 跑 is Chinese-specific.

> Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner

This comes off weirdly to me because it's so Japanese. But I guess that was the idea. I have some particular questions:

>> this 真理 is so 好 固定ed in the 心s

I haven't checked on the English text, but it's difficult for me not to read this as "this truth is so well fixed in the hearts...". But I'm not sure that that sense of 好 is available in Japanese, where I'd expect it to be a verb meaning "like".

>> he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

This doesn't appear to be a problem, but I still felt the need to call out what looks like the use of an exclusively masculine pronoun (in modern Chinese) to refer to "daughters".

>> Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

This seems wrong; I feel sure that 未 would be more appropriate than 不.

>> Mr. Bennet 作 no 答.

This would appear to render the English "Mr. Bennet made no reply." I'm not comfortable with the use of 作; just because the word in the idiom is make doesn't mean that any making is involved.

Do you know whether Japanese use of kanji focuses more on establishing that a kanji corresponds to some Japanese syllables and using that kanji wherever those syllables occur [as suggested by "作 no 答"], or more on using kanji to represent certain semantics however those semantics might be pronounced [as might suggest "言 no 答"]?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#222

Post by thaumasiotes »

bobthepanda wrote: post #69
astrobe_ wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

> One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.

If you look in the right places, you can find people complaining about how it's impossible to dynamically render hangul blocks, which means that a Korean font needs to define glyphs for every possible Korean syllable as opposed to just defining the elements of the system and letting a word processor assemble them as appropriate.

If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

The Chinese used typewriters by defining a typewriter code. Assuming that that was necessary for hanja, and also for hangul, why would it promote the disappearance of hanja?

If a typewriter code wasn't necessary for hangul, how did we forget how to lay out the blocks in between then and now? Hangul have been in continuous use for all that period.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#223

Post by thaumasiotes »

hintymad wrote: post #203
bobthepanda wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 character…

The Korean writing system is not different in any sense other than the appearance of the characters from Romanized pinyin.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#224

Post by BrenBarn »

Barrin92 wrote: post #145
BrenBarn wrote: post #71

I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doub…

>have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty m…

The problem with these advantages is that most actual uses of words depend on some amount of context, and only a relatively small set of word+context combinations can actually work across languages that way. It is like the equivalent of doing a word-by-word translation.

Another way to put it is that this is essentially no longer "writing language", it's some alternate form of meaning representation. Language is not just a sequence of independent words.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#225

Post by thaumasiotes »

jimbokun wrote: post #191
thaumasiotes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still had the problem I started with of "I want to write the word べんきょう but can't bring to mind the kanji for it", because I had no association between Japanese words and the English keywords for their component kanji... If you didn't know what べんきょう meant, how did you know it was what you wanted to write?

The characters you copy pasted are in a phonetic script called hiragana, conceptually similar to the English alphabet as each character denotes a sound. The kanji are pictographic characters that often have different pronunciations in different contexts. The kanji for べんきょう are 勉強 (meaning "to study").

I know that.

In your model of the problem, pm215 knows the following things:

1. There is a Japanese word pronounced benkyoo which refers to activities like reading books with the intent to learn something, doing practice exercises with the intent to learn something, preparing to take a test, doing things that a school might ask you to do, and other similar endeavors.

2. There is an English word "study" which corresponds to the Japanese word spelled 勉強.

But he doesn't know this:

3. In English, activities performed with the intent to learn or review something are referred to by the general term "studying".

I find this hard to believe. Anyone who chose to learn mappings from English words to kanji spellings must be familiar with the meanings of basic English words. He shouldn't be able to think of the activities he wants to refer to without the word "study" coming into his mind, but that was the problem he described.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#226

Post by bobthepanda »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #222
bobthepanda wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter. If you look in the right places, you can find people complaining about how it's impossible to dynamically render hangul block…

There are around theoretical 11,000 possible Korean blocks, which is a lot. But Unicode has ~98,000 Chinese characters.

Nine times the characters is a quaint problem for computers but a very difficult problem for a physical typewriter.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#227

Post by bobthepanda »

hintymad wrote: post #203
bobthepanda wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 character…

One thing to note is that for non-Chinese languages, Chinese may have semantic meaning but really has nothing to do with pronunciation; and the Chinese etymology really has nothing to do with how a Korean or Vietnamese speaker independently came up with the word so this is less important.

—-

Another thing to note is that a lot of “Chinese” words in the modern day language are actually Japanese in origin, since Japan was the first country using Chinese script to modernize and adapt Western thought in science and philosophy etc., and the associated terminology. This actually provides a political impetus to replace those words with native-constructed ones since they have a negative historical relation with Japan.

—-

People who replace Chinese script with letters often have dictionaries and whatnot from the transition period to trace back words, and people also still learn Chinese in these countries if they want to, so it’s not as if it’s gone and disappeared; in the same way that modern speakers probably couldn’t read Chaucer in Middle English, or Beowulf in Old English, as it was written on a whim, but there are plenty of scholars who have studied for it. And Modern Chinese has little to do with Literary/Classical Chinese anyways.

—-

Mandarin has a phonetic system, Bopomofo, which was abandoned for political reasons in the PRC. But the problem with replacing Chinese script is political; within the PRC and ROC there are multiple mutually unintelligible languages using Chinese script, and if you pick a phonetic script then it is now Mandarin vs. everybody else.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#228

Post by coffeeling »

vunderba wrote: post #165
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…

I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component. IMHO spelling is an inapt analogy. Every single word I can communicate orally, I can write. Sure I might mess up "I before E" or some other minor issue, but I'm BUILDING the word from first principles,…

> I don't think anyone is "mysticizing" the language. It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

People absolutely do mystify the operation of kanji, like they're more than scribbles that point to words, or that Japanese would fall to incomprehensibility and ruin if they were done away with.

> It's just that logographic languages in general present a uniquely interesting problem whereby the auditory component is largely divorced from the written component.

This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.

That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.

Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#229

Post by BrtByte »

I've noticed the same thing (not with Japanese), but even after learning to write in Korean, my ability to handwrite faded way faster than my reading skills. I figured it was just laziness, but it makes sense that reading and writing use totally different parts of the brain.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#230

Post by BrtByte »

boxedsound wrote: post #63

I have experienced this for simplified Chinese. I studied some Chinese while studying computer science in China. The classes would have us learn writing, reading, speaking and listening (sensibly so for a Chinese language class). Being able to write characters was handy whenever I came across documents that needed to be filled, but since leaving China I never had the need to write characters again. I now just input t…

It's like the muscle memory for writing just evaporates, even though the recognition part stays perfectly intact
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