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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#81

Post by andrewzah »

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'm not the parent comment but I used an Anki deck from Nihongo Shark. It sorted the kanji by radicals. I did this for 2-3 months before burning out, but it made learning kanji much easier since I could see the radicals that they were composed of.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#82

Post by mytailorisrich »

yorwba wrote: post #69
mytailorisrich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studies Japanese a bit in France a long time ago and was told that spoken French includes all the sounds of spoken Japanese so that a French speaker should have no problem pronouncing Japanese, apart from the accent. This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...

The stereotypical French speaker who has trouble with English [h] would definitely have the same problem with the Japanese [h], [ç] and [ɸ]. If they can't manage the tongue placement for English [θ], how are they supposed to handle Japanese [ɕ] and [ʑ]? And that's just the consonants. Usually when someone thinks that language X has all the sounds of language Y, it's a speaker of language X who hasn't yet realized tha…

It's only the letter H and R (as transcribed in romaji) that are not immediate for a French speaker but they are not difficult. Certainly much simpler than 'th' in English. (Source: not my ears but Japanese textbooks)

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#83

Post by andrewzah »

ekianjo wrote: post #23
GolDDranks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a MA of East Asian Studies at Helsinki University, and our professor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_Janhunen ) used the word sinogram as the standard terminology for the characters. I think this served two functions: 1) to disentangle the concept from a "character used in Chinese language", as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. 2) to create a parallel with words like…

> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja.

While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0]

From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day:

- Korean names. For the most part, given names will have hanja chosen by the parents/grandparents/family. However recently it's becoming more common to have pure hangeul names, or english/foreign names, with no associated hanja.

- To disambiguate homographs/homonyms. This is common on Korean tv shows.

- To represent countries, politicians, and surnames on news articles. For example, 朴 (surname Pak/Park) and 美 (USA). Here is a random article example. [1] and a list of common hanja that pops up. [2] Side note, it's humorous to me that the hanja used for USA is also the hanja for 'beauty' (미).

- For days of the week and months, I saw hanja being used somewhat commonly.

- To guess the meaning of unknown words. If you know a certain hanja reading like 비 or 경 then it makes figuring out words a bit easier.

[0]: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/entry/koen/27ed7d6b4161442885572...

[1]: https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2021/03/25/...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/km01fv/short_list_o...

edit: clarified about modern Korean naming practices.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#84

Post by supuun »

earthboundkid wrote: post #73
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!

Yeah, good point. Some more: anime, manga, samurai.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#85

Post by kazinator »

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.…

I practice rote memorization of some 340+ hentaigana with Anki.

It is completely brutal.

I reviewed this one 384 times already: https://www.benricho.org/kana/kana-img/f4f6.gif

The lapses are just crazy.

My second most reviewed, at 374 times, is https://www.benricho.org/kana/kana-img/f465.gif

Third, at 306 times, https://www.benricho.org/kana/kana-img/f4b7.gif

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#86

Post by anthk »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #63
DocTomoe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some additional information: France is actually a leading country when it comes to Japanese Studies, to the point where high-level knowledge of French is a relevant skill in pursuing Japanese studies elsewhere, as many papers were historically only available in French.

I studies Japanese a bit in France a long time ago and was told that spoken French includes all the sounds of spoken Japanese so that a French speaker should have no problem pronouncing Japanese, apart from the accent. This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...

>This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...

They have a whole country in the South to practice that sound...

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#87

Post by kazinator »

felixding wrote: post #58
Clewza313 wrote: post #8

> some words that are common and were originally written in kanji are now written with hiragana (such as the word "here", ここ instead of 此処). Not really. Japanese as a spoken language predates writing systems, and words like "koko" are yamatokotoba (original Japanese), not loans from other languages. It was first written in kanji (Chinese characters) because that was the only script they had initially, hiragana and ka…

> 此処 is valid Chinese as well No. In Chinese it's 此处 (simplified Chinese) or 此處 (traditional Chinese). AFAIK, 処 is simplified Japanese. The original kanji is 處, which is the same as traditional Chinese.

Interesting; that shares structure with 虚. That also has some nuances of place reference.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#88

Post by supuun »

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…

interesting perspective, but more important reason in my opinion is that Japanese has so simple pronunciation (many vowels and fewer sounds all together), so Japanese people are not accustomed to making those difficult sounds that are in English.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#89

Post by yorwba »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #82
yorwba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stereotypical French speaker who has trouble with English [h] would definitely have the same problem with the Japanese [h], [ç] and [ɸ]. If they can't manage the tongue placement for English [θ], how are they supposed to handle Japanese [ɕ] and [ʑ]? And that's just the consonants. Usually when someone thinks that language X has all the sounds of language Y, it's a speaker of language X who hasn't yet realized tha…

It's only the letter H and R (as transcribed in romaji) that are not immediate for a French speaker but they are not difficult. Certainly much simpler than 'th' in English. (Source: not my ears but Japanese textbooks)

How would a French speaker pronounce し [ɕi] and じ [ʑi]? My guess would be « chi » [ʃi] and « ji » [ʒi]. Close enough to be understood, but different enough to be noticeable.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#90

Post by Clewza313 »

fenomas wrote: post #62
Clewza313 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're presenting this very misleadingly. Kanken 2 is basically comparable to something like an SAT; it covers what people are expected to have mastered by the end of high school (reading and writing, incidentally). As such it's odd to say it "requires 12 years of schooling" as if that proved something about the language. Kanken levels beyond 2 are a different matter; they cover words that aren't in common use, and a…

Most kids learn to read & write the alphabet in grade 1, although mastering the idiosyncrasies of English spelling takes a bit longer. By comparison, Japanese kids are still grinding their way through the jōyō kanji all the way to grade 12. So, yes, I think this tells you a lot about the complexity of the writing system.
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