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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

#271

Post by thaumasiotes »

gwd wrote: post #265
thaumasiotes wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

> 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".

Well, I don't think it's true, either. As I understand it, the form 他 is just a graphical simplification of 佗, with no connection to the character 也. (You can think of this as similar to how the left-hand component in 脸 is 肉, not 月.) It isn't clear to me either that the character 也 would have held any sense of "also" when the form 他 appeared, though this is a question I'm agnostic on.

I've watched several videos on youtube in which someone presents Japanese people with uncommon kanji and asks them to read them, or failing that to speculate on what they might say. The Japanese unfailingly speculate that both halves of a compound character are relevant to the meaning, which surprises me - it's very rare for a character to be constructed from two meaningful parts. Far more common are the characters in which one part gestures at the meaning and the other part tells you the pronunciation, and 佗 is one of those. 从人它聲。

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#272

Post by coffeeling »

timr wrote: post #246
coffeeling wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly about lack of practice, frankly. The chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes…

Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people. But I (and all other learners of Japanese) started by reading hiragana, and only later did we move to mixed script -- this is by necessity. Yet even when you factor in the difficulty of learning to read Kanji, reading Kanji is vastly easier than reading kana, even as a beginner. Would spaces magically solve this problem? I guess it wou…

Korean faces the exact same problems as Japanese, though - the language structure is similar, they have a ton of Chinese loans, and have in general gone through a largely identical history of writing development. They have somewhat fewer homonyms than Japanese, sure, but they still have tons from Chinese loans (hell, "coffee" and "nosebleed" sound the same, as do "blood" and "rain" in many cases).

It's somewhat hard to believe that Japanese sits in some magic spot where a phonetic script wouldn't work just fine when Korean does it fine, and on the Sinitic side people write books in pinyin, Vietnamese is phonetic, and the Dungan people write their 3-tone Mandarin dialect with cyrillic alphabet without even notating tones.

> Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people.

It's not just hard-headed stubbornness - reading kana really is more difficult to proficient readers of today's Japanese, and change is work.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#273

Post by coffeeling »

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…

  > 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?
The answer to all of these are the same as everyone else. It's not like Chinese people routinely read the old classics in the original, and even then they're literally taught Classical Chinese in school as a separate language, because it is. But other countries have scholars who study the old languages and also work to translate classics into modern language for wider use - I certainly can't read Greek but have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sitting on the bench next to me, translated into modern English.

Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.

For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.

  > From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.
They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.

For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:

  Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.
In hiragana:

  ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。
The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji):

  人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。
人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.

For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:

  졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지
  Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#274

Post by numpad0 »

coffeeling wrote: post #270
numpad0 wrote: post #129

Earlier 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

皮 彼 波

pi, hi, ha?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#276

Post by kusokurae »

bapak wrote: post #259
kusokurae wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine. I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition…

> many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Yes but that's not really comparable. You can misspell "litrally" but how close can you get if you can't remember any stroke of the glyph? There's an inherent advantage in spelling words closely to how they sound. I'm not saying English is great at this either, but I can still write "Kernel Sanders" and you know what it means, without using a whole oth…

Hey! So in the vast majority of cases, what you're describing for english is more or less the same for these languages -- when I forget a real bastard of a character (usually a less complex one similar to many others), I can sort of mentally picture the shape, but not quite. I get a flash of the shape in my mind, but then it's gone, and I'm in a half-position where I know parts of it, maybe I know it has 广 and something like 多 inside there somewhere (this is purely academic, I'm not referencing a real character here), but I don't know the exact order. Quite often this is where the art of bodging it, scribbling it, or using a variant character comes in handy.

Also, for more fun, Chinese and even rarely Japanese will sometimes use a different character sharing the same pronunciation from a set of characters typically used for just phonetic pronunciation, in the place of the one they've forgotten.

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