Live data from Hacker News

Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

namakajiri.net

71–80 of 153 posts

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#71
post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

> > Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. > Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference…

I l 1

O 0

We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same.

Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on.

In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise.

I think that this particular pair is confusing because in Japanese orientation is not supposed to be important, but is, in that case.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#72
post #48

Is the 'unspecified' rendering supposed to be the same as the 'popular' rendering (on the right); or is it supposed to be the one in the middle? For me seemingly every example's left most and right most column (for the sets of 3) looked identical, while the middle form was different.

That’s left up to the font.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#73
post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#75
I wish more handwritten kanji input systems would use stroke order and count as a weight and not a filter. As a learner is generally know the stroke order when looking at an unknown kanji but as most input method filter on order and count a single wrong order or count means the matching kanji doesn't even show up in the list of possible matches

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#76
post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Chinese has a lot of tricky ones. 荼 vs 茶 日 vs 曰 已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴 士 vs 土 水 vs 氺 人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几 干 vs 千 vs 于 天 vs 夫 ... the list goes on.

Here's some more. I made these mistakes when typing using Pingtype, and then checking my results with my teacher.

https://pingtype.github.io

給 耠

辦 辛力辛

重 量

困 因

痕 㾗

眉 㞒

部 卶

蓑 䒾

任 仼

挑 狣

推 猚

䒷 苦

阿 冋

共 芖

休 你

衡 𧗾

一 –

幹 龫

幸 辛

我 找

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#77

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwa…

> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https:…

The alphabets are phonetic representations, and require reading in order to type.

I've made Pingtype, which lets you decompose a character into the parts, and rebuild another similar character if your handwriting recognition isn't perfect.

https://pingtype.github.io

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#78
post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

The hardest part for me is not the characters (I type using Pinyin, which is Romanised).

What Chinese lacks is spaces between words.

Even Korean has spaces. It makes reading a large block of text so much easier, and it helps me to identify vocabulary that I recognise.

Adding spaces and Pinyin are just a couple of the many features of Pingtype.

https://pingtype.github.io

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my browser, those are just 4 identical empty squares. I guess I'm a beginner since I can't distinguish between them!

Installing the free hanazono fonts should sort you out For arch: pacman -S ttf-hanazono

awesome, thank you for actually being helpful rather than just downvoting and moving on!

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#80
I'm often surprised these kinds of issues aren't fixed quicker. There are so many issues in browsers related to non Roman based letters (assuming that's the correct term for it)

on the one hand I get that most browser (and OS?) dev happens in the West by people unaffected by these issues. One the other hand with > 1 billion people using non Roman based languages I'd expect this kind of stuff to be more of a priority.

maybe this particular issue isn't that important? the one that bites me the most is pressing ESC to cancel IME editing and having it exit some dialog because the browser/os passed the ESC all the down to the app when it was meant only for the IME. I get there are probably no easy solutions tho

this is also a place where VSCode fails because VSCode and any other is based text editing in html needs more IME info than current broswer APIs provide

Post reply on HN