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I used to know how to write in Japanese

aethermug.com

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Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#61
post #55

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…

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking.

Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemming and deriving the meaning of the verb is trivial, because it closely follows from the Kanji (e.g. 見る => 'see', and pretty much every noun or verb involving 見 carries that connotation).

Toss in the few particles (を、で、に、へ、が、は), and you've broken a sentence into semantic chunks with very little mental effort -- and along the way, gained much of the meaning at the same time.

Doing the equivalent with a stream of nothing but hiragana requires a kind of parsing that is like depth-first prefix search, but with ambiguous matching at each terminal. It's incredibly tedious.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#62
post #61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

I can read Japanese, yes, and obviously also find hiragana-only text hard to parse. I think that would be almost completely solved by using spaces and getting more practice though.

I'm much better at reading than speaking/listening, so the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#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 them using pinyin on keyboards, and I can easily recognise and read / input the correct characters. It is a strange feeling trying to write the characters I once knew, but now have forgotten, yet being able to read them instantly...

I would like to recommend dong-chinese, a language app I came across when I prepared for my stay over there. It taught things in a very efficient manner.

At this point I would like to recreationally increase my vocabulary so I have started working on a game called LingoRogue. My goal is to make it addictive to play, with a sneaky vocabulary-increasing effect. In other words a game that is "learnified" rather than a learning software that is gamified.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#64
post #62
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

I can read Japanese, yes, and obviously also find hiragana-only text hard to parse. I think that would be almost completely solved by using spaces and getting more practice though. I'm much better at reading than speaking/listening, so the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think.

> the Kanji also help as a clue to the meaning, but that is entirely a non-native problem I think.

Not sure what you mean by that. It's almost a daily occurrence that someone tries to explain a word's meaning by drawing invisible kanji on their palms.

Someday I'll figure out how to read that.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#65
post #30

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.

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 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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#66
post #61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is substantially harder and slower to read a stream of hiragana than to read a stream of hiragana and kanji. I don't know if you know anything about the language, but it's not because of homophones (though that is certainly improved) -- it's chunking. Japanese written language has the property that when you see kanji followed by one of a very small number of hiragana patterns, you know you're seeing a verb. Stemmi…

Yet, that's exactly what you do when you read English - and many of us even read it as a foreign language with different roots and different grammar etc. So I don't understand how it would be more tedious in hiragana; it looks like a "just get used to it" thing to me.

english has spaces to separate words, japanese doesn't. have you tried reading english without spaces?

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#68
post #19
post #11

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing. Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel str…

I went to an old-school language school where I was forced to take tests in handwritten Japanese. I probably still have some of that in my brain, but like you, I almost completely abandoned it as soon as I didn't have to take language school tests anymore. It's occasionally useful to write out a character, but on the whole, it's completely unnecessary now that we have computers with hiragana keyboards. As a partial a…

Yes, I agree that trying to learn kanji upfront is a silly idea.

Heisig says in the introduction to RTK I that he learned 1900 characters "before the month was out". If like him you can do the whole set in a month and then have no further need of formal review or study beyond using them as they turn up, then I can see it not being a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, almost nobody has a mind that works like Heisig's does: people seem to need longer and to rely more on review via an SRS like Anki.

Personally I found my problem with RTK was that I successfully memorised "English keyword to write the character" for 2000 kanji, but this was not at all linked to my actual use of the language, so 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...

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#69

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 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 majority of the population can't write anyways. 95% of Vietnamese could not write in 1945; only 22% of Koreans were literate in that time period.

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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.

Re: I used to know how to write in Japanese

#70

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 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.

My understanding is that Japanese are very open to external influences, even when they come from enemies. Case in point, they embraced the legal framework and political reform that was pushed by the Americans. On the other hand, MacArthur was careful to respect Japanese culture (arguably, depending on who looked at it, I guess) when pushing his reforms. Nevertheless, Japan quickly became a pretty well run democratic country. It’s fascinating and respectable that Japanese could embrace western civilization while retaining their beautiful culture
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