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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

#261

Post by coffeeling »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #260
coffeeling wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it. 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…

This is being pedantic. You cannot guess the pronunciation of a character from the way it is written. At most the "phonosemantic compound" might provide a clue to possibly reduce the space of possibilities.

It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#262

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mastermage wrote: post #98
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Americans can write cursive? I think it's time to abandon the Latin alphabet. It's too inefficient.

Is cursive a requirement to write the English language correctly?

Yes.

(Also, define "correctly".)

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#263

Post by mytailorisrich »

coffeeling wrote: post #261
mytailorisrich wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is being pedantic. You cannot guess the pronunciation of a character from the way it is written. At most the "phonosemantic compound" might provide a clue to possibly reduce the space of possibilities.

It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.

And so we are back to square one: it is not possible to know how to pronounce a character by looking at it (and any clues are not "decent" in the majority of cases), as opposed to alphabetic systems...

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#264

Post by klausa »

TheDong wrote: post #161
klausa wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the question you asked; but something that actually surprised me, as someone who has taken multiple language tests in the EU: The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels. You don't need to speak a single word, nor write a single character to pass the exam, it's all single-choice answers. AFAICT, the equivalent exams for Chinese and Koreans d…

> The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels. This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily. If you're talking about the JLPT, that's a test meant only for non-native speakers. > all single-choice answers. Not even multiple…

>This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily.

I would not qualify Kanji Kentei as a "language test" any more I would qualify a Spelling Bee as one; though I can see how someone might.

In any case; I thought that it was relatively clear from the context that I was using "language tests" as a shorthand to "tests for non-native speakers of that language"; but I did not explicitly mention that, you're right.

>Not even multiple choices? Maybe they should reconsider that one.

Is that not how these are called in English?

Where I'm from, there's a distinction for tests where given a list of answers, there can be only one valid one ("single choice") and where there can be multiple valid ones ("multiple choice").

Quick googling on my end indicated that _is_ how they're referred to in English, but the websites were quite AI-sloppy, so if I was mistaken, I'd love for you to let me know what the more widely understood terms are.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#265

Post by gwd »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #253
gwd wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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". IIRC, in Japanese, 他 is sometimes used for "hoka", which means "other"; as in, "Do you have this item of clothing in other (他) sizes?" The original text says, "some one or other of t…

> I'm sure I've run into other Chinese characters that are pronounced differently depending on whether they're in a verb or an adjective. The Japanese writing situation is much, much worse than that. Kanji get all kinds of different pronunciations on the theory that the semantics are the same. So the standard spelling of musume ["daughter"; "girl"] is 娘, but it might also be spelled 女. This gives you an alternative t…

> I'm not sure what a "moderate amount of Mandarin" means; if it's on the lower end, you might be interested to know that the "other" sense does survive in Mandarin, in the words 其他 ["other"; extremely common] and 他人 ["other people"; not so common]. 他 by itself is going to be overwhelmed by the far more common use as a pronoun, I would guess.

I had a snippet about how 他 was made up of 也 and 人, "also a person", but ended up editing it out, as I wasn't sure it was actually connected w/ Japanese using it to mean "other". "他人" is still about people, but I had forgotten 其他, which is clearly not specific to people.

At any rate, there's a lot of ways our hypothetical universe could go, WRT how such a 汉字 writing system would be incorporated into English. The point is, there's always a silver lining: It would certainly have some benefits, like making it possible for literate English-speakers to get around in China and Japan w/o learning anything about the local languages and vice versa (with some of the "false friend" [1] traps you've mentioned above -- but those are issues between European languages as well).

But on the whole, I'd consider the cost not worth the benefits by a long shot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#266

Post by TheDong »

klausa wrote: post #264
TheDong wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The (semi-official) Japanese language tests do not test language production in _any_ way, even on the highest levels. This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily. If you're talking about the JLPT, that's a test meant only for non-native speakers. > all single-choice answers. Not even multiple…

>This is simply not true. The Kanji Kentei is probably the most popular Japanese language test Japanese people might take outside of school, and it tests writing heavily. I would not qualify Kanji Kentei as a "language test" any more I would qualify a Spelling Bee as one; though I can see how someone might. In any case; I thought that it was relatively clear from the context that I was using "language tests" as a sho…

Since you used the phrase "highest levels", that made it sound to me like you were talking about native tests.

I apologize for misunderstanding.

Non-native japanese language tests do not ever go to a high level as far as I'm aware (N1 definitely doesn't classify as a high level, it's around "can read the newspaper very slowly and with greater than 50% comprehension", which is well below even the least-studious native-speaking adults).

> Is [single choice answer] not how these are called in English?

It's an unusual term to my american-english ears. I've only heard them called "multiple choice questions" regardless of how many answers you can select. It's unusual enough that it conjures to the mind a multiple-choice test where each question has only a single answer, say "a", and you just circle "a" for every answer.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#267

Post by xdfgh1112 »

pessimizer wrote: post #147
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm this. I passed N1 without learning to write. I later learned how to write all of the kanji, and all it does it help you distinguish very similar kanji without context. I tried learning all the compound words (i.e. which kanji to use for every word) but gave up a few thousand Anki cards in. It was time consuming and impractical. (Wanted to pass Kanken 2) Props for anyone who put in the work though.

Don't drill words drill sentences (no Japanese word means an English word, and no English word means a Japanese word.) And don't fall in love with any of the sentences, move on to new sentences. Eventually the knowledge accumulates, but only through volume and variety.

If that worked for you cool. My Anki deck is a lovingly curated set of sentences that I enjoy.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#268

Post by numpad0 »

latentsea wrote: post #215
numpad0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or there could be cues not captured well in the script. I don't know. But the rightmost column is real. 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86%E3%81%97%E...

I've spoken Japanese for the last 15 years. I'm aware of how many homophones there are. I still think by and large it wouldn't be a problem, and that natives would adapt to route around it. It's not a blocker.

I was just watching random QuizKnock video that came up on YouTube and hey, we're not pronouncing those "homonyms" same, or are we.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#269

Post by hintymad »

coffeeling wrote: post #241
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…

You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they d…

All good points. I really can't explain why it is perfectly okay for natives to listen to Chinese/Japanese yet it is so hard to parse Pinyin or Kana when reading, even when spaces are provided.

Maybe it is because we still think in individual characters when reading. As a previous post mentioned, there are many homophones for a given word, let alone for a single character: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%93%E3%81%86%E3%81%97%E.... It's not a problem in a conversation because we track context. Yet when we reading, we, at least psychologically, look for specific meaning per character or per word. Say, when I see こえん, I'll have to figure out if it means a park, a small yard, sound, or something else. Of course, I could figure it out from context, but I'd give up that precision and the warm and fuzzy feeling of seeing the corresponding characters, like 故園, or 子園, or 呼延。We'd solve this problem by giving up learning the individual characters and focus on words or phrases, but then it would be a drastic change.

While typing the above, I also realize that maybe the reason we don't mind homophones during a conversation is because we've already learned the associated characters. Using the example above, when I hear the word "こん” and it means "呼延”, I would know that it's an ancient family name that was associated with many famous generals because of the meaning of the characters. Or if the meaning is "故園”, I would get all the poetic feelings as it is precisely these two characters, not the sound, that deliver the meaning of ancestral land, or childhood home, or place left behind, and etc. And when we study the Chinese and Japanese poems, we focus on the masterful use of characters, and every character matters. Is it 推 or 敲 in 僧敲月下门? Why are the characters in 大漠孤烟直 so compelling and masterful even though each character is so commonly used? It's hard for me to imagine how homophones can differentiate such meanings.

Of course, I'm not saying that removing characters can't be done. I'm just trying to figure out the current state and why many people and I are in favor of learning characters.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#270

Post by coffeeling »

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

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