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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#271

Post by godot »

presentation wrote: post #105
999900000999 wrote: post #65

By far the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. In addition to pissing my Korean girlfriend off, it was so difficult I dropped the class after 2 weeks or so. Chinese is much much easier by an order of magnitude. Particularly if your focusing on speech and grammar vs writing. Not that Japanese writing is any easier. Hindsight is 20/20. Shoulda took Spanish...

I’ve learned both and found Chinese harder just because if you lose context then it’s hard to understand anything else being spoken. Japanese has more semantic repetition in the sentence structures. Both are equally logical grammatically though, and Chinese does have a much easier time learning character pronunciations.

Isn't the context thing true for anyone learning a second language?

I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context.

As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin. Mandarin to me is like that as well. I have to pay 100% attention to keep up, and as soon as I lose context, all hope is lost in understanding anything in the conversation forward.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#272

Post by ickoonite »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #253
pessimizer wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you just said that English has complicated spelling both because of its borrowed words and its native words. I think this could be shortened to "English has complicated spelling because of the spelling of its words." Or even "English has complicated spelling."

GP said "unpredictable" spelling, not complex. And I said "Old English". I was saying it's unpredictable if you include Old English spelling and words (which you don't in Simplified English). The remaining unpredictable words are imported foreign words, usually French.

There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally defined, as the majority of the most commonly used words - italicised here - have such heritage. The spelling of such words is probably not the most troubling part of English orthography anyway.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#273

Post by ickoonite »

detrites wrote: post #214
ickoonite wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin. Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not…

> outside of very limited contexts, furigana Sarcasm aside, I only take issue with this. The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga. It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves…

OK, but you’re moving the goalposts. A written form of the language curated specifically for the purpose of learning is not really relevant to a discussion of the language, just as would be the case for any other language. That is not the language used in daily life. There are no furigana in a newspaper or on the Internet (technological assistance notwithstanding). Magazines, business communication…anything useful is off limits if you can’t read, say, 500 kanji at an absolute minimum. Anything more advanced, academia, etc. requires far more.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#274

Post by ickoonite »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #270
philsnow wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form e…

I can't think of any examples of the top of my head, but I have definitely seen this many times. One form it comes in is writing the meaning in kanji but then using an English word in Katakana as the Furigana for it. One example I can remember in that form, though it's not song lyrics, is "とある科学の超電磁砲" where 超電磁砲 has the Furigana レールガン (rail gun). Another form it takes is doing the same thing but using a different Jap…

Yes, this is quite common in subtitles. I seem to remember that in GoldenEye, Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ。

(I will try to dig out a relevant song lyric.)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#275

Post by opportune »

Groxx wrote: post #242
outworlder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.

As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity). So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is comm…

Commas do follow rules, they are just hard to explicitly lay out. Usually they are used to separate clauses. For example, in some cases you need to use a semicolon instead of a comma to avoid the “comma splice” (though outside of formal writing this comes off as pretentious).

If you use commas only to denote when you’d pause when speaking, your writing can come off as juvenile or uneducated. It’s not just a signaling thing. It is jarring to read a sentence with them misplaced.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#276

Post by layer8 »

louhike wrote: post #28
kijin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another nitpick: "は" is pronounced as "wa" not "ha" when it is used as the topic marker, as in the well-known greeting "Konnichiwa".

Yes but the romanji is still “ha”.

The correct word is “romaji” [0], and in the standard Hepburn romanization, “は” as a particle is written “wa” [1].

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ローマ字

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Particles

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#277

Post by ghc »

shiomiru wrote: post #90
wst_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's implicit, depending on context. Quite often it's "myself" when omitted and without any context. If you'd like to stick to programming examples, it would be default value. Even if not specified, it's always there. Typically you use が when expressing some new information but follow up conversation uses は. There are few other rules, too. The は vs が is a subject of never ending confusion among Japanese students.

Indeed, my interpretation is also that the subject can be expressed by any of は, が, or the context. I am having trouble understanding the "implicit が" analysis because it seems to me that in many cases adding a が would make the sentence nonsensical (like in the example.) So it just feels like retrofitting が into a role that it really doesn't have. Then again, I'm not an expert, so I may very well be wrong about this.

I recall the explanation of an excellent little Japanese grammar book that made it click for me: 私は puts the emphasis on what you, as opposed to everyone else is doing, and the closest english equivalent is "As for me,".

If you translate it that way, 「私は牛肉を食べます」means, in English: "As for me, I will eat beef."

Notice now that both "me" and "I" are present in the translation. So adding が doesn't in fact change the sentence at all!

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#278

Post by bsder »

ickoonite wrote: post #153
Tor3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble). As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the…

This is not uncommon for the children of Japanese people living in the West, particularly when they have married non-Japanese. They pick up the spoken language via osmosis but the written language…not so much. It is, as I said, very hard and cannot be mastered without extensive study. Many of these hafu , as the Japanese refer to them, nonetheless enjoy successful careers in Japan, presumably usually in environments…

> Its particle-based system for annotating subjects and objects mean their position is unimportant; the only real requirement is that the verb comes at the end.

Particles are one of the most maddening things about Japanese. Order in sentence may be unimportant but it may not be clear which particle you are supposed to choose. Even native speakers regularly screw up particles and particle use has high regional distinctiveness.

It also doesn't help that Japanese is infuriatingly aggressive about omitting things that are supposed to be "implied shared knowledge". If you thought English was bad about pronouns/antecedents, you ain't seen nuthin' until you've tried to unpack a Japanese conversation. Sure, if the particles are present, you can unpack things. However, Japanese speakers like to remove complete subordinate clauses because they are "shared context".

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#279

Post by anthk »

johnwalkr wrote: post #182
iraldir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry it's almost a meme at this point that France has a thing for Japan and vice versa. The 90s in particular were ripe with animes on the main French channel, lots of collaboration between France and Japan. We got Japanese movies in the cinema much prior the rest of the world and even today you can find gigantic sections for mangas and anime in bookshops, cinemas...

I did my PhD in Japan, in a lab focusing on robotics for lunar exploration, among other things. Every semester there was a revolving door of interns and exchange students from France[1], and a good percentage of them came not for the very interesting subject matter, but for their interest in manga and anime. It was always cringy when they introduced themselves as an anime cosplay enthusiast with the mistaken impressi…

Honestly, the reverse it's a bit true... for Japanese girls/women. They love Disney.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#280

Post by anthk »

franciscop wrote: post #219
brozaman wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say…

As a Spaniard, I find it funny how in English some times they use both the latin/french and germanic/anglosaxon roots of the same word, but at some point in time they arbitrarily adopted the translation to mean something different and more specific, like: "poison" vs "venom", "tea" vs "ocha/chai", "comic" vs "manga", "teacher" vs "professor", "connoisseur" vs "expert", "memento" vs "souvenir/keepsake", etc. Then I st…

Heh. In English, the fancy/cultured/technical words are Romance origin. In Spanish, the cool/modern/techie words are English/Germanic origin.
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