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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#71

Post by EE84M3i »

blacktriangle wrote: post #67
rational_indian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

Honestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -…

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#72

Post by andrewzah »

Jonnax wrote: post #17
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

I am currently memorizing Hiragana (~100% done) and Katagana (~10% done), before venturing into learning some basic Japanese. It's incredibly and unnecessarily complicated, from the perspective of a "westerner" (Italian roots, fluent in English, some Spanish, bits of French). I'm still fascinated by it, and still want to learn some, primarily because I like visiting Japan and I plan to spend several weeks per year th…

Just because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated. It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"

As someone who has studied Korean and some Japanese, Japanese is definitely much more complex. If someone saw English had two syllabaries for the same exact sounds (like katakana and hiragana) they would probably also say it's unnecessarily complex. From a foreign perspective, lowercase and uppercase could be seen as arbitrarily complex.

I would guess they're talking about kanji though, which really isn't very complex. It's moreso just annoying to have glyphs that you can't pronounce if you don't already know an onyomi/kunyomi reading...

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#73

Post by earthboundkid »

kadrian12 wrote: post #55

Katakana, to me, is such a trouble. I really wonder whether I'm the only one who believes that Katakana is a big part of the reason, why it's very hard for native Japanese speakers to learn English. In a Japan of today, you grow up with a plentitude of words taken from English and written + pronounced in Katakana. So you learn to pronounce "san-do-i-chi" for sandwich, "de-za-i-na" for "designer", "su-ma-ho" for smart…

English has an alphabet, but we still slaughter the pronunciation of harakiri, karaoke, and kamikaze because our phonology demands it. The one Japanese word we pronounce okay is "tsunami" which has a sound we don't have, lol!

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#75

Post by earthboundkid »

Clewza313 wrote: post #21
Jonnax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated. It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"

Well, you can actually make a pretty good objective case for Japanese writing being the most complicated writing system on the planet, since no other language that I'm aware of regularly mixes 4 scripts, where basically entirety of Chinese forms just one of those scripts. Except that whereas in Chinese it's rare for a character to have more than one or two readings, in Japanese there are characters with over 70： http…

Japan definitely has one of the most complicated writing systems in the world, but you can get pretty complicated with alphabets if you just go too long without spelling reform. Look at the split between Tibetan as written and Tibetan as pronounced, or basically anything to do with English and our complete lack of spelling integrity.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#76

Post by earthboundkid »

WildParser wrote: post #28
Jonnax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated. It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"

When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn. Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange. It most likely helped the leaders th…

WE USE THREE SYLLABLE SCRIPTS ALL THE TIME IN ENGLISH. lowercase and uppercase are two divergent evolutions of the roman alphabet that got shoved together for no particular reason. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝕬𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖒𝖔𝖗𝖊.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#77

Post by andrewzah »

kadrian12 wrote: post #55

Katakana, to me, is such a trouble. I really wonder whether I'm the only one who believes that Katakana is a big part of the reason, why it's very hard for native Japanese speakers to learn English. In a Japan of today, you grow up with a plentitude of words taken from English and written + pronounced in Katakana. So you learn to pronounce "san-do-i-chi" for sandwich, "de-za-i-na" for "designer", "su-ma-ho" for smart…

Unlikely. English and Japanese have different phonetics. The writing system just reflects the spoken language.

Korean has this same problem. Ice cream becomes ah-ee-suh kr-ee-muh, etc. I don't know very much Japanese but I believe it's even worse for Korean in this regard.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#78

Post by blacktriangle »

EE84M3i wrote: post #71
blacktriangle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -…

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

I don't see the book on Amazon, but it was a pretty basic Kanji book that made a point of sorting them out by radicals so you could see how things were built, nothing too special.

I think the key was I bought tons of manga for children, the ones where all the kanji have the hiragana above them so you can get lots of vocabulary and kanji reenforcement from those.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#79

Post by kazinator »

OMG, I read 藩, cold: "han" feudal domain. I did stare at it for a second or three, but got it. I added it to my vocabulary maybe a year-and-a-half ago?

It, and words that include it, are not such common words. How/why did he choose that for the example, I wonder.

For that matter, how did I add it? It was due to some recursive chasing of words in a dictionary, where some word's older meaning was being explained as relating to some feudal situations in the Edo period, and that explanation used 藩 in it. Evidently, I have reviewed it 24 times. The fact that it contains 番 ("ban", number in a series, turn, ...) helps a lot.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#80

Post by [deleted] »

euske wrote: post #13

What's amazing about hentai-kana (hentai as "alternative form", not pervert) is that governments and town registrars still allow using them as an official name in their electronic registry. I recently got a copy of my family register, and found out that my grandma's name was officially in hentai kana. Apparently they made special fonts for each unique character, but I don't know how they're encoded on their database.…

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