321–330 of 416 posts
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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
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That's American. English would be: I'm up for that. I'm not ok with that. I'm ok with that.
As an American, the "down" slang sound weird. The most I've heard in the wild is a short "I'm down.", you wouldn't say "I'm up." (unless you're saying you woke up, or you're high, or your gambling is going well) Other than that, your versions are more common in the US as well, from my experience. edit: Thinking more on it... "I'm up for that" would be used if you were slightly hesitant. "I'm down for that" implies a…
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It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English". The thing is though, human…
> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of…
Orthographic English is probably the best example to show the inefficiencies alphabets sometimes bring. The English language has ~24 constants which are often well-represented, but then you have things like "ng" or "sh" which is actually a single phoneme that we lack a symbol for. On the flip side, English has an unusually large number of vowel phonemes, around 13 monophthongs and 7 dipthongs. Yet we have only 5 symbols for vowels and often use them in very ambiguous and end up having strange combinations of them leading to ghoti:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
The point is you only have 26 letters, but now you end up having to memorize a vast array of combinations and how they work in different contexts. You're really not saving yourself any more memory space than if you'd learned a syllabary
Honestly 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.
Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.
This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years.
But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner.
The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange meetups, but if you can find online ways to do it, that should work too.
The great thing about podcasts is you can listen to it while walking/commuting/etc.
To be quite honest it can be quite an overwhelming endavour, and it's very easy to think "f this I give up I don't care about this anymore".
Physiucal language exchange events help give you an "anchor" so that your learning has a purpose: you're meeting people and having positive social experiences with them.
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> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of…
Hmm I'm not sure you're completely clear on how syllabaries (including katakana, hiragana, kanji, etc) work. You can use them to encode anything as well Orthographic English is probably the best example to show the inefficiencies alphabets sometimes bring. The English language has ~24 constants which are often well-represented, but then you have things like "ng" or "sh" which is actually a single phoneme that we lack…
Kanjis are not a syllabary, they're originally ideograms but they're not really, some of them "make sense", some don't really. So they become mostly another layer of mapping symbols to meaning, except this time you have tens of thousands that can't be decomposed properly into smaller parts (like words with letters), which is terrible for many reasons.
On the other hand kanjis offer you the opportunity to play around with different meanings, in a way that you just can't in English. That makes Japanese richer and more interesting, at the cost of being a harder language. I'm glad both exist.
I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way…
It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English. The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially beca…
Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.
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I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to…
読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.
Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s
Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services.
One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.
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> 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'm not familiar with many Japanese song lyrics, so not familiar with the phenomenon mentioned. I'd also be interested in examples. There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other comm…
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> there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other. Furigana are essential for karaoke.
> 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…
Traditional examples would be 本気 (honki) -> マジ (maji), 頭文字(kasiramoji) -> イニシアる(initial), 因果(inga) -> カルマ(karma)
I remember a live stream where a comment with "超電磁砲"(choudenjihou) was straight read into "railgun", as at this point the novel/manga/anime just established it as a popular reading.