19 ms·

Japanese writing system basics

961 points by bemmu 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Ok, thats a fun hack.
- biot 10y ago
  A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :) I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    A meta HN post composed entirely of previous HN posts.
  - gleenn 10y ago
    What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn Japanese.
    - foota 10y ago
      Very interested to know as well.
      - biot 10y ago
        I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books, so someone please start writing them. :)
        whiteandnerdy 10y ago
        Maybe you're thinking of https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-languages-through-stories https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-langua...? That's all I could find by googling around.
  - escape_goat 10y ago
    I feel sort of like it's a fun hack for getting email addresses within minimal effort, but the material wasn't entirely new to me, so perhaps I am underestimating how genuinely interesting it was to other people.
  - asadlionpk 10y ago
    I would love to know about this too!
Joof 10y ago
Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.
- akavi 10y ago
  Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work? Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).
  - sidedishes 10y ago
    There are a lot of homophones between Chinese loanwords in Japanese. A writing system like Romaji that only records the phonetic information would be no more useful than just hiragana (which might then arguably more useful as it aligns with the syllables?)
    - Margh 10y ago
      Spaces carry a lot of semantic weight, as do other components such as capitalisation and punctuation (most of which in use in Japan is borrowed from romaji anyway). iimagineitdgetprettyannoyingtryingtoreadenglishifitwaswrittenlikethisbutitshardtotellwithouthavingdonesofortwentyyears
      - sidedishes 10y ago
        Well, in English spaces certainly carry weight, partly because the word unit has so many characters. In languages like Chinese and Japanese, units /are/ the characters (or a few of them). Particles then make natural separators in strings of kanji.
        Margh 10y ago
bootload 10y ago
@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?
- ggreer 10y ago
  It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.
  - Gigablah 10y ago
    Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on font: ロ
    - tasnent 10y ago
      But there's usually context given.
  - chaostheory 10y ago
    It's also hanzi character for mouth, the Chinese ideograph system that Kanji is derived from
  - jpt4 10y ago
    Curiously, a stereotypical infant directed speech instance that seems distinctly "oral" [0] is the union of those three options: "coo-chee, goo-chee, [k|g]oo". [0] Perhaps only idiosyncratically.
andreygrehov 10y ago
I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
- asimjalis 10y ago
  Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.
  - siong1987 10y ago
    you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yueshi_lunareclip.htm http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...
    - andolanra 10y ago
      The link you provided has no information as to whether that's a correct etymology or not, only that 月食 yuèshí is made up of characters 月 yuè 'moon' and 食 shí 'eat'. There are numerous other explanations for why those two characters could be used: for example, perhaps 食 used to have a different meaning which dropped out of common usage, or maybe 月食 used to be written with different characters and people switched to the easier-to-write 食 from a more complicated character, or any of a number of other reasons. I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!
  - haimez 10y ago
    Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.
    - sdrothrock 10y ago
      Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.
kevindeasis 10y ago
How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?
- donatj 10y ago
  Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    I highly doubt that's true, based on my experience with Chinese pinyin IMEs. A Japanese phonetic IME should have enough local context to guess which Kanji is correct. You type, then go back and quickly proofread later.
    - donatj 10y ago
      It's been about 10 years, but I used the IME in Windows 2k quite extensively. http://blog.gatunka.com/img/Convert3.gif http://blog.gatunka.com/img/Convert3.gif I recall this window strongly, with ~10 items in it being common. Playing with it now in OS X perhaps it's improved in recent years.
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
        Again just talking about my experience with Chinese, but the IME guessing quality has really improved markedly over the last decade. In fact, you can often just type initials for your entire sentence and the IME will guess correctly all the way through. It's like being able to type 'w a y u t?' and getting 'What are you up to?' filled in for you. I'm pretty sure Chinese is even more homophonic than Japanese, which is why I'd expect the Kanji inference to work better.
  - sdrothrock 10y ago
    > The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time. I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and you select the one you want. In addition, hiragana input on mobile devices is FAR faster than romaji input, so I'm not sure how you lose time.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal? If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed? Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go beyond two symbols.
- Gigablah 10y ago
  I think you're pointing out the idiosyncrasies of English here. "Mouth" is both a noun and a verb. The past tense of "eat" is "ate", not "eated". No wonder English is so difficult to learn.
- jaykru 10y ago
  >already terrible Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones. Japanese's appropriation of hanzi is largely a historical accident due to geographical circumstance, but most learned in the language most would agree it's far more efficient than simply using hiragana or katakana or even romaji; disambiguation by pictographs (though in modern times they are more accurately phono-semantic compounds) is of great value in written language where space is at a premium.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones. It is the opposite. A writing system that requires multiple years to learn is not "efficient".
    - imtringued 10y ago
      It's more efficient if you have a lot of words with the same pronounciation.
rezashirazian 10y ago
That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with emojis.
- arthurcolle 10y ago
  This was my thought about how the article would progress until finishing it!
- labster 10y ago
  Exactly. Although the Japanese realized that the emoji are moji a long time ago.
viraptor 10y ago
This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.
- robzyb 10y ago
  I agree. And I'm an Australian in Japan learning Japanese. (I was expecting it to be a rant about insufficient unicode usage.)
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    Doesn't help that at least for me it gets rendered differently in the title on HN and the actual article. That said, I expected something Japanese related, given that it's Candy Japan, but you'd think common fonts would have different looking characters for “no glyph” and the kanji for mouth.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      Another problem is that if the character appears in isolation, it's hard to tell whether you are looking at 口　(mouth) or 囗 (the "box radical" kanji, or "kunigamae"). Ha, for me, they look quite different in the font used for editing, but not so much in the rendered comment other than a small difference in size.
- cynix 10y ago
  It's not exactly a rectangle though, the two downward strokes extend slightly past the bottom horizontal stroke.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    In handwriting, or calligraphy, it might be rendered like this, in fact: 2 --------+ 1 \ / \ ---- / 3 The three strokes not all connected, and the left and right sides tapering downward a bit (exaggerated in the ASCII above). Image search for "kuchi-no kanji + shodou (calligraphy)": https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%8F%A3%E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E3%80%80%E6%9B%B8%E9%81%93&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%8F%A3%E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%... It seems there are two schools on the relationship between stroke 2 or 3: 2 can extend downward past 3, or 3 can underscore 2.
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
囧
- et-al 10y ago
  For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?
  - fenomas 10y ago
    Totally thought that was supposed to be a 3.5" floppy disk.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Jiong is the craziest character that you'll never use, then there is 晕 (sun on top of car, haze, smog, but also means feint). I just moved from Beijing to LA this week to work for a YCR funded/managed research lab. My time in China has finally come to an end!
- flyrain 10y ago
  I love this better.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.
dingo_bat 10y ago
Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.
- pcr0 10y ago
  Japan isn't famous for candies per se but they do have a lot of very interesting/sometimes bizarre treats that you won't find anywhere else in the world. E.g. Yuzu KitKat, chilli KitKat, caramel lamb, chocolate squid, coffee bubblegum, caramel chips, cake soda, DIY candy, etc.
  - mistercow 10y ago
    I'd say rather that Japan is famous for its candies for different reasons than Switzerland is for its chocolate. It's not that Japanese candy is of outstanding quality (although it is often quite good), but that they use candy as a vehicle for such a wide variety of novelty products.
- ConbrastanJorji 10y ago
  I was curious about this as well and upon further research found that there are at least 10 competing Japanese candy box businesses (Japan crate, Japan Candy Box, Candy Japan, Skoshbox, WowBox, Japan Yum, Oyatsu Box, Okashda, Nandemobox, Snakku...). If anyone would like to recommend one, I'd be all ears.
rett12 10y ago
Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c'). Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that. The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    > I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.
    - gizmo686 10y ago
      Removed the "do not" As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess. Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal. Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.
partycoder 10y ago
The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical. Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.
- cynix 10y ago
  Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too. The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.
  - mistercow 10y ago
    > The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals. Except that usually, almost nothing about the arrangement of strokes can be inferred from the sound or meaning of the word, and vice versa.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      "Ghoti"
  - wccrawford 10y ago
    No, you also have to learn the sounds of the words so that you can speak them, and then most of the characters have multiple sounds used in different places, and they place multiple characters together for a lot of words. It's a lot more complex than just using letters, which is something they can also do.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.
- azernik 10y ago
  This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the sounds. Similar to the origins of the Japanese kana system, but NOT its use of kanji.
  - giancarlostoro 10y ago
    I'm not following you too much, I'm not saying it is like Hebrew modern or paleo. I'm saying it's like Ancient Pictographic Hebrew[0]. Each character has a meaning, and they're simpler than the second character shown in the article to register (though in their defense that character is likely made up of variations of a couple of other characters). Also, the Hebrew didn't have vowels up until the Masoretes who added to the Hebrew Scriptures by adding vowels to them, but that's another topic not related to this topic. [0]: http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  Hebrew is an abjad - a writing system where you (mostly) only write the consonants. It's true that, like other very ancient writing systems such as Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, the letters are pictoral, but functionally it's still more like an alphabet than anything else. Far from being like this, the only major kind of writing that Japanese doesn't use is an abjad. It uses logograms (kanji, like what this article shows), two different kinds of syllabary (hiragana and katakana), and an alphabet (romaji - the Latin alphabet).
fogleman 10y ago
That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?
- bemmu 10y ago
  I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: http://eepurl.com/ccistz http://eepurl.com/ccistz
  - comboy 10y ago
    Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views just from the current wave.
    - bemmu 10y ago
      It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before it's finished. Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the comments or another article. I know I do. Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I removed the sign-up link from the post.
      - comboy 10y ago
        FWIW I'm very likely to check out the second part, but completely unlikely to fill out the form that you provided. Not sure it's rational, but my guess is that others can feel the same.
- etatoby 10y ago
  Considering the number of characters in that crazy language, you'd need 1000s of lessons (which in fact you do in order to learn it.) I think OP is in another business :-)
zatkin 10y ago
Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis? They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them, nonetheless. ‍️
- alannallama 10y ago
  That's why you see services with lots of pictographic functions eclipse pure test-based ones in Asia, because they are very used to that kind of symbolic communication. And why complex emoji using text characters in creative ways were developed in Asia in the first place. For example, Twitter never really took off in southeast Asia, but Line is incredibly popular. Why? Stickers. Line offers endless little pictures you can use with your messages, while Twitter doesn't. Now stickers (and emoji) are taking off a lot more in the West, because they are super compact and effective communication symbols. I think we'll see more and more of it.
Sniffnoy 10y ago
Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
- danvayn 10y ago
  Thanks for this, it's a great primer.
- bemmu 10y ago
  That certainly looks more complete. I was mostly wanting to see if I can pull the reader into learning Japanese without realizing that they were doing so.
  - HaloZero 10y ago
    Your domain was a bit of a hint. ^_^
drwicked 10y ago
I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people do now?
- comboy 10y ago
  After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered "number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing CGI for that was not that easy). Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;) It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account e-mail so that you can add them.
- bemmu 10y ago
  Sometimes I wonder how popular something is, so I figured someone similarly chart-inclined might get a kick out of seeing it. I'd like to see a similar counter for something that reaches the top page of Yahoo News in Japan or the top spot on a main page subreddit. Those stats must be crazy.
dghughes 10y ago
I just discovered NativLang on YouTube so this really is in my zone of interest today. I've just spent the last few hours learning all about languages how they developed and each culture's spin on adding as much meaning as efficiently as possible to written symbols. I've always loved languages so this was more of a brush up plus learning. It seems and rightly so ambiguity is death to any characters and efficiency is also fundamental to the character. I'm not Korean but I like their style literally I like how their language style is so efficient in context to mouth position. It was created because Chinese characters didn't suit Korean language. Japan also streamlined Chinese characters to better suit their culture. Mayan is another wild language full of meaning in such compact symbols. I had a hard time following their characters.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
sova 10y ago
As someone who has spent years of their life dedicated to mastering Japanese, I must say, you sir are a genius. By the way, I'm happy your site is rockin! I saw it when you launched candyjapan and I am happy for you =)
wch4999 10y ago
Well, reading the first part I just realized this is japanese/chinese! In Chinese all characters are like 口 or 食. Sometimes we can also break the character down to several parts to understand its meaning.
paradite 10y ago
This has the added advantaged of being recognized by both native Japaneses and Chinese speakers instantly, as long as we keep it to kanji. I recognized what the author is doing from the start as a Chinese speaker.
deleted 10y ago
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monomaniar 10y ago
Nobody said these are all Chinese letter? Japanese is "invented" and forced educated by Meiji government one hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration
anqurvanillapy 10y ago
In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在 (zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'. It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗? (Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.
- geomark 10y ago
  Same in Thai. They ask กินข้าวหรือยัง ("Have you eaten yet?", or literally "Have you eaten rice yet?") as a greeting.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    In lowland Scotland one finds 'You'll have had your tea?' which is a semi-polite way by which the enquirer informs the visitor that he'll not be given any tea ( i.e. dinner, food ). Has entered mainstream as a cliche of Scottish parsimony but does exist in the wild.
    - geomark 10y ago
      Interesting. It's sort of the opposite when Thais ask if you have eaten already because if you answer "not yet" it is common for them to offer you something.
      - dingaling 10y ago
        The Scottish response to 'not yet' is usually something like 'well it seems foolish to have ventured out in that case', obviously delivered in the local dialect. Though I have extracted one dinner from an Edinburgh man who deploys the phrase, but that was probably because his ( English ) wife had put it on to cook earlier!
  - leafsleep 10y ago
    If you want literal, it's "eat rice already" - Thai does not have conjugation
BlakePetersen 10y ago
That path tho, /%E5%8F%A3 rendering as /口, so slick
falcolas 10y ago
Everything old is new again. I have no , but I must ... Edit: Nevermind, HN swallowed the Emojis.
- thunderbong 10y ago
  Actually, without the emojis, it's even more intriguing!
imron 10y ago
In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí. As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.
- matthewrudy 10y ago
  Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a much older language than modern Mandarin) So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it is the correct verb. In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk" ("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh") Edit: "sikh"
  - edwinyzh 10y ago
    Yes, 食 is a verb in Cantonese and Hakka! Both of them are more close to archaic Chinese than Mandarin.
    - matthewrudy 10y ago
      As I understand Hakka is actually a collection of languages, not necessarily mutually intelligible. I learned a bit of one dialect from a friend's mum. And the basics were very similar to Cantonese. Would be interested to learn more dialects once I'm done with Mandarin and Cantonese.
  - binaryabyss 10y ago
    Not to mention that Mandarin would use 嘴（里）rather than 口 The pronunciations of kanji correlate to different Chinese eras and areas. The usage and choice of characters are influenced by Classical Chinese, which was the literary language in Japan until, uhm, recently-ish. There is a very good recent YouTube video that explains the usage of Chinese characters in Japanese and which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20 I was very impressed by the accuracy and knowledge displayed, as most of what is written and said on the subject is ehhh somewhat disappointing.
Grue3 10y ago
入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Entering the mouth of the building?
  - force_reboot 10y ago
    Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".
    - Symbiote 10y ago
      "Put your foot on it" means the accelerator / gas pedal, that seems very much equivalent.
      - force_reboot 10y ago
        I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.
    - gayprogrammer 10y ago
      put the pedal to the metal (idiomatic) To exert maximum effort. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#En...
dhfromkorea 10y ago
Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like wild fires or crimes like thefts or vandalism. It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems. The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive to this day.
- edwinyzh 10y ago
  Anybody care to explain why "costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems"? I know nothing about printing technology but I'm a Chinese.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Far many more symbols are required to represent a word with alphabetical systems. I used 65 symbols and 11 spaces to write this sentence whereas with ideograms I'd need about 13 symbols.
    - edwinyzh 10y ago
      OIC, To express the same meaning, using Chinese needs far more less physical space than using English. And you know what? Classical Chinese takes the compactness to the next level ;D I'll try give an example: English: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Chinese: 敏捷的棕毛狐狸从懶狗身上跃过 Classical Chinese：棕色敏狐跃懶犬 Note: This is composed by me, maybe not very well-written, and maybe it can be even more compact, but you see what I mean ;)
- dctoedt 10y ago
  A counterpoint: When a message is written with an alphabet, it's not as compact, but its meaning can be guessed at even if significant portions of the message are missing (known as lacunae). See, e.g., the TV game show Wheel of Fortune; another example is the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts that have deteriorated over time.
dhfromkorea 10y ago
Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like fire or crimes like thefts or vandalism. It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems. The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive to this day.
euske 10y ago
Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods". Languages are weird, man.
- jimworm 10y ago
  Out of the several uses of 品, one is the verb "taste" which makes slightly more sense.
- ju-st 10y ago
  I interpret that character as "three boxes" so "goods" is a very intuitive translation :)
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm not sure what world you have to live in for "three-mouthed monster" to be a more obvious meaning for that glyph than "stacked crates". But I think I might like to visit.
    - cheiVia0 10y ago
      I see you haven't gotten to the 4th paragraph of TFA... "口" = mouth, not crate "品" is a stack of mouth characters
      - throwanem 10y ago
        I read the whole article, thanks. Do you think it's possible that more than one square or rectangular thing may exist?
  - comex 10y ago
    According to kanjinetworks.com that is, in fact, what the etymology boils down to: > Square-shaped object (tripled) → high-quality goods spread throughout a protective container (compare 舗 and 販) → quality; counter for goods; (person's) character; grade; value. http://www.kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-dictionary/online-kanji-etymology-dictionary.cfm?kanji_id=PAM04 http://www.kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-dictionary/online-kan...
weinzierl 10y ago
Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke? Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help. EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.
- gkya 10y ago
  No it goes to the page.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Make sure you're clicking on the article's title (口) and not on the article's domain, which comes right afterwards. Clicking on the domain takes you to a list of past submissions from the same site. For a title like this one it's pretty confusing. I'm guessing you and I aren't the only ones to misclick.
  - weinzierl 10y ago
    I feel dumb:-). That's it, thanks a lot.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      Modern computing has transformed intellectual activity into an exercise in eye-hand coordination.
primitivesuave 10y ago
Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" - one who orders rules. An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  What traditional character using place are you speaking of? In Taiwan, programmer is 程式設計師 and in Hong Kong, it's 程式設計員. I had thought 程序 was basically a mainland-only variant. Also, FWIW, I couldn't read a paper at 3k characters. It's more like 4-5k if the goal is reading rather than slogging through with a dictionary.
  - cynix 10y ago
    Perhaps GP was thinking of the mainland variant, but only had a Traditional Chinese IME available on the computer. Speaking of mainland-only variants, their official translation of computer is "计算机" (lit. computation machine).
- unfamiliar 10y ago
  > you only need to learn around 3000 symbols This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write. Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer, politician, etc).
frostymarvelous 10y ago
After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up for me on Facebook.
- andrewaylett 10y ago
  If you don't like that, you might find Privacy Badger useful: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
- wtbob 10y ago
  There are ads on Facebook? Also — disable JavaScript. The page renders just fine without it.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Congratulations! You are making an entrepreneur successful!
disruptalot 10y ago
Finding it surprising no one has corrected the article in that you technically learned Chinese and by proxy Japanese. Chinese traditional characters + meanings largely carried over from Chinese as well. I'm studying mandarin and i was enjoying it until I was told I just learned "Japanese".
itaysk 10y ago
why is this post getting so many voteups?
- mcguire 10y ago
  Because it is a brilliant introduction to a difficult foreign language, for most of us.
  - itaysk 10y ago
    The essence of the post is "In Japanese there are characters that represent words". Is that a surprise to anyone? (I don't speak Japanese or any similar language)
danielrhodes 10y ago
I'm interested in how this compactness changes the expressiveness and evolution of the language. In English, as in other languages written in the latin alphabet, you can make changes to the spelling of a word and create new meanings rather fluidly and it's usually easy for the reader to comprehend. I have no knowledge of Japanese, but are there similar possibilities? How do new words/slang get created?
- kailuowang 10y ago
  Yes Chinese characters (used in Japanese as kanji, which means Chinese character) often are composed of smaller elements or other characters. it common for a character to be composed of two common parts,one indicating meaning in some way,the other indicating pronunciation.
  - ryao 10y ago
    Someone made a video showing how this is the case for some characters: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA The entire character set is not that simple though.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Japanese is little different from English on stuff like this - new words crop up, die out, get borrowed from abroad etc., as you'd expect. Of course this doesn't involve creating any new kanji, but slang and such is usually written phonetically (or sometimes takes the form of new readings applied to existing kanji).
nxzero 10y ago
>> "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce [in English]" English has 26 letters, but there are 40+ sounds; which is to say that there are NOT symbols for all the sounds.
- mcguire 10y ago
  One of my goals in life is to introduce Khoisan words into common English use. We need more clicks.
daveheq 10y ago
"Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce"... Not with 26 letters we don't. Other languages have other sounds that English can only try to emulate, and even English has sounds that require multiple letters.
- dsr_ 10y ago
  Here are the 44 sounds that English generally uses: http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm It does not include sounds which are borrowed from other languages, like the Hebrew 'ch' which happens at the top of your throat, or the Spanish trilled r, or the glottal stop which actually occurs in spoken English all the time in some dialects.
ryao 10y ago
口 and 食 are also Chinese characters for mouth and eat, although I had to check google for 食. Initially, I thought that he was teaching Chinese until I read 食 was eat (which needed Google) and that it was "Japanese".
- kailuowang 10y ago
  As mentioned below, 食in Cantonese or ancient Chinese means eat as a verb
alecsmart1 10y ago
This is off topic, but I can't find any pricing on the candyjapan.com website when visiting on mobile (iPhone). Anyone can tell me how much it costs per month?
- throwanem 10y ago
  $25 per month according to the top of the page. But yeah, that's not visible anywhere in the narrower of the responsive views; it's not just mobile, but if you narrow the window on desktop, you get the same result. I'll email bemmu and point that out.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
smnplk 10y ago
I'm struggling to find a comment that is actually related to the story of CandyJapan and not that character.
codedokode 10y ago
The problem is that many characters look similar but have nothing in common. For example, the article mentions the character 食　meaning "food". So when after reading the article you see similar character like 良　you might think it is somehow related to food. Well, it is not, it just means "good". And another similar character 長　meaning "long" or "leader" also has no relation to previous two. And when you get to more complicated characters like 感 it becomes even more confusing.
haddr 10y ago
This article is cool, I love the way is actually encourages to learn something by starting with something simple that you can grasp in seconds. I was like (｡◕口◕｡)!!!
fiatjaf 10y ago
Can I believe this? Does Japanese really mix characters that mean things with characters that mean sounds?
- kd5bjo 10y ago
  It does. Kanji represent meaning; hiragana and katakana both represent punctuation.
billmalarky 10y ago
Love the live video analytics! Such a simple yet effective hack.
sideproject 10y ago
Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on the weekend.
- joeyspn 10y ago
  Yeah, nice insights! Direct Link to the stream: https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu
raverbashing 10y ago
About Japanese writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY
vessfull1515 10y ago
if you need some help with writing essay,mb you can try to ask for some advices frome other people etc)As for me I long time could NOT understand how to essay writing , and probably would never have been able to if i do not accidentally found this site essaywriting1click.blogspot.com, who may be interested come in, it really helped me
andrezsanchez 10y ago
I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese. Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool. The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.
OOPMan 10y ago
"The English alphabet has only 26 letters, which most kids can master with little difficulty. But we are adults now, why limit ourselves to the 26?" Less is more. Why waste time learning 2k pictograms (Just for the standard stuff, there's over 50k in total) when you can achieve the same thing with less?

961 points by bemmu 10y ago

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Ok, thats a fun hack.

biot 10y ago
A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :) I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  A meta HN post composed entirely of previous HN posts.
- gleenn 10y ago
  What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn Japanese.
  - foota 10y ago
    Very interested to know as well.
    - biot 10y ago
      I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books, so someone please start writing them. :)
      - whiteandnerdy 10y ago
        Maybe you're thinking of https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-languages-through-stories https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-langua...? That's all I could find by googling around.
- escape_goat 10y ago
  I feel sort of like it's a fun hack for getting email addresses within minimal effort, but the material wasn't entirely new to me, so perhaps I am underestimating how genuinely interesting it was to other people.
- asadlionpk 10y ago
  I would love to know about this too!

Joof 10y ago

Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.

akavi 10y ago
Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work? Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).
- sidedishes 10y ago
  There are a lot of homophones between Chinese loanwords in Japanese. A writing system like Romaji that only records the phonetic information would be no more useful than just hiragana (which might then arguably more useful as it aligns with the syllables?)
  - Margh 10y ago
    Spaces carry a lot of semantic weight, as do other components such as capitalisation and punctuation (most of which in use in Japan is borrowed from romaji anyway). iimagineitdgetprettyannoyingtryingtoreadenglishifitwaswrittenlikethisbutitshardtotellwithouthavingdonesofortwentyyears
    - sidedishes 10y ago
      Well, in English spaces certainly carry weight, partly because the word unit has so many characters. In languages like Chinese and Japanese, units /are/ the characters (or a few of them). Particles then make natural separators in strings of kanji.
      - Margh 10y ago

bootload 10y ago

@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

ggreer 10y ago
It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.
- Gigablah 10y ago
  Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on font: ロ
  - tasnent 10y ago
    But there's usually context given.
- chaostheory 10y ago
  It's also hanzi character for mouth, the Chinese ideograph system that Kanji is derived from
- jpt4 10y ago
  Curiously, a stereotypical infant directed speech instance that seems distinctly "oral" [0] is the union of those three options: "coo-chee, goo-chee, [k|g]oo". [0] Perhaps only idiosyncratically.

andreygrehov 10y ago

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

asimjalis 10y ago
Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.
- siong1987 10y ago
  you are right: http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translation-yueshi_lunareclip.htm http://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/translat...
  - andolanra 10y ago
    The link you provided has no information as to whether that's a correct etymology or not, only that 月食 yuèshí is made up of characters 月 yuè 'moon' and 食 shí 'eat'. There are numerous other explanations for why those two characters could be used: for example, perhaps 食 used to have a different meaning which dropped out of common usage, or maybe 月食 used to be written with different characters and people switched to the easier-to-write 食 from a more complicated character, or any of a number of other reasons. I don't know which of these is true, if any of them is. But your link doesn't have enough etymological information to indicate one way or another, either!
- haimez 10y ago
  Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.
  - sdrothrock 10y ago
    Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.

kevindeasis 10y ago

How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?

donatj 10y ago
Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  I highly doubt that's true, based on my experience with Chinese pinyin IMEs. A Japanese phonetic IME should have enough local context to guess which Kanji is correct. You type, then go back and quickly proofread later.
  - donatj 10y ago
    It's been about 10 years, but I used the IME in Windows 2k quite extensively. http://blog.gatunka.com/img/Convert3.gif http://blog.gatunka.com/img/Convert3.gif I recall this window strongly, with ~10 items in it being common. Playing with it now in OS X perhaps it's improved in recent years.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      Again just talking about my experience with Chinese, but the IME guessing quality has really improved markedly over the last decade. In fact, you can often just type initials for your entire sentence and the IME will guess correctly all the way through. It's like being able to type 'w a y u t?' and getting 'What are you up to?' filled in for you. I'm pretty sure Chinese is even more homophonic than Japanese, which is why I'd expect the Kanji inference to work better.
- sdrothrock 10y ago
  > The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time. I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and you select the one you want. In addition, hiragana input on mobile devices is FAR faster than romaji input, so I'm not sure how you lose time.

thaumasiotes 10y ago

If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal? If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed? Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go beyond two symbols.

Gigablah 10y ago
I think you're pointing out the idiosyncrasies of English here. "Mouth" is both a noun and a verb. The past tense of "eat" is "ate", not "eated". No wonder English is so difficult to learn.
jaykru 10y ago
>already terrible Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones. Japanese's appropriation of hanzi is largely a historical accident due to geographical circumstance, but most learned in the language most would agree it's far more efficient than simply using hiragana or katakana or even romaji; disambiguation by pictographs (though in modern times they are more accurately phono-semantic compounds) is of great value in written language where space is at a premium.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones. It is the opposite. A writing system that requires multiple years to learn is not "efficient".
  - imtringued 10y ago
    It's more efficient if you have a lot of words with the same pronounciation.

rezashirazian 10y ago

That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with emojis.

arthurcolle 10y ago
This was my thought about how the article would progress until finishing it!
labster 10y ago
Exactly. Although the Japanese realized that the emoji are moji a long time ago.

viraptor 10y ago

This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.

robzyb 10y ago
I agree. And I'm an Australian in Japan learning Japanese. (I was expecting it to be a rant about insufficient unicode usage.)
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Doesn't help that at least for me it gets rendered differently in the title on HN and the actual article. That said, I expected something Japanese related, given that it's Candy Japan, but you'd think common fonts would have different looking characters for “no glyph” and the kanji for mouth.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    Another problem is that if the character appears in isolation, it's hard to tell whether you are looking at 口　(mouth) or 囗 (the "box radical" kanji, or "kunigamae"). Ha, for me, they look quite different in the font used for editing, but not so much in the rendered comment other than a small difference in size.
cynix 10y ago
It's not exactly a rectangle though, the two downward strokes extend slightly past the bottom horizontal stroke.
- kazinator 10y ago
  In handwriting, or calligraphy, it might be rendered like this, in fact: 2 --------+ 1 \ / \ ---- / 3 The three strokes not all connected, and the left and right sides tapering downward a bit (exaggerated in the ASCII above). Image search for "kuchi-no kanji + shodou (calligraphy)": https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%8F%A3%E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E3%80%80%E6%9B%B8%E9%81%93&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%8F%A3%E3%81%AE%E6%BC%A2%... It seems there are two schools on the relationship between stroke 2 or 3: 2 can extend downward past 3, or 3 can underscore 2.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

囧

et-al 10y ago
For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?
- fenomas 10y ago
  Totally thought that was supposed to be a 3.5" floppy disk.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Jiong is the craziest character that you'll never use, then there is 晕 (sun on top of car, haze, smog, but also means feint). I just moved from Beijing to LA this week to work for a YCR funded/managed research lab. My time in China has finally come to an end!
flyrain 10y ago
I love this better.
cromwellian 10y ago
I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.
cromwellian 10y ago
I always thought 商 kind of looked lik a face with a hat.

dingo_bat 10y ago

Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.

pcr0 10y ago
Japan isn't famous for candies per se but they do have a lot of very interesting/sometimes bizarre treats that you won't find anywhere else in the world. E.g. Yuzu KitKat, chilli KitKat, caramel lamb, chocolate squid, coffee bubblegum, caramel chips, cake soda, DIY candy, etc.
- mistercow 10y ago
  I'd say rather that Japan is famous for its candies for different reasons than Switzerland is for its chocolate. It's not that Japanese candy is of outstanding quality (although it is often quite good), but that they use candy as a vehicle for such a wide variety of novelty products.
ConbrastanJorji 10y ago
I was curious about this as well and upon further research found that there are at least 10 competing Japanese candy box businesses (Japan crate, Japan Candy Box, Candy Japan, Skoshbox, WowBox, Japan Yum, Oyatsu Box, Okashda, Nandemobox, Snakku...). If anyone would like to recommend one, I'd be all ears.

rett12 10y ago

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

gizmo686 10y ago
I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c'). Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that. The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  > I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.
  - gizmo686 10y ago
    Removed the "do not" As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess. Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal. Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.

partycoder 10y ago

The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical. Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.

cynix 10y ago
Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too. The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.
- mistercow 10y ago
  > The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals. Except that usually, almost nothing about the arrangement of strokes can be inferred from the sound or meaning of the word, and vice versa.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    "Ghoti"
- wccrawford 10y ago
  No, you also have to learn the sounds of the words so that you can speak them, and then most of the characters have multiple sounds used in different places, and they place multiple characters together for a lot of words. It's a lot more complex than just using letters, which is something they can also do.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.

azernik 10y ago
This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the sounds. Similar to the origins of the Japanese kana system, but NOT its use of kanji.
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I'm not following you too much, I'm not saying it is like Hebrew modern or paleo. I'm saying it's like Ancient Pictographic Hebrew[0]. Each character has a meaning, and they're simpler than the second character shown in the article to register (though in their defense that character is likely made up of variations of a couple of other characters). Also, the Hebrew didn't have vowels up until the Masoretes who added to the Hebrew Scriptures by adding vowels to them, but that's another topic not related to this topic. [0]: http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif
bunderbunder 10y ago
Hebrew is an abjad - a writing system where you (mostly) only write the consonants. It's true that, like other very ancient writing systems such as Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, the letters are pictoral, but functionally it's still more like an alphabet than anything else. Far from being like this, the only major kind of writing that Japanese doesn't use is an abjad. It uses logograms (kanji, like what this article shows), two different kinds of syllabary (hiragana and katakana), and an alphabet (romaji - the Latin alphabet).

fogleman 10y ago

That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?

bemmu 10y ago
I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: http://eepurl.com/ccistz http://eepurl.com/ccistz
- comboy 10y ago
  Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views just from the current wave.
  - bemmu 10y ago
    It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before it's finished. Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the comments or another article. I know I do. Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I removed the sign-up link from the post.
    - comboy 10y ago
      FWIW I'm very likely to check out the second part, but completely unlikely to fill out the form that you provided. Not sure it's rational, but my guess is that others can feel the same.
etatoby 10y ago
Considering the number of characters in that crazy language, you'd need 1000s of lessons (which in fact you do in order to learn it.) I think OP is in another business :-)

zatkin 10y ago

Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis? They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them, nonetheless. ‍️

alannallama 10y ago
That's why you see services with lots of pictographic functions eclipse pure test-based ones in Asia, because they are very used to that kind of symbolic communication. And why complex emoji using text characters in creative ways were developed in Asia in the first place. For example, Twitter never really took off in southeast Asia, but Line is incredibly popular. Why? Stickers. Line offers endless little pictures you can use with your messages, while Twitter doesn't. Now stickers (and emoji) are taking off a lot more in the West, because they are super compact and effective communication symbols. I think we'll see more and more of it.

Sniffnoy 10y ago

Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's explanation: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

danvayn 10y ago
Thanks for this, it's a great primer.
bemmu 10y ago
That certainly looks more complete. I was mostly wanting to see if I can pull the reader into learning Japanese without realizing that they were doing so.
- HaloZero 10y ago
  Your domain was a bit of a hint. ^_^

drwicked 10y ago

I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people do now?

comboy 10y ago
After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered "number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing CGI for that was not that easy). Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;) It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account e-mail so that you can add them.
bemmu 10y ago
Sometimes I wonder how popular something is, so I figured someone similarly chart-inclined might get a kick out of seeing it. I'd like to see a similar counter for something that reaches the top page of Yahoo News in Japan or the top spot on a main page subreddit. Those stats must be crazy.

dghughes 10y ago

I just discovered NativLang on YouTube so this really is in my zone of interest today. I've just spent the last few hours learning all about languages how they developed and each culture's spin on adding as much meaning as efficiently as possible to written symbols. I've always loved languages so this was more of a brush up plus learning. It seems and rightly so ambiguity is death to any characters and efficiency is also fundamental to the character. I'm not Korean but I like their style literally I like how their language style is so efficient in context to mouth position. It was created because Chinese characters didn't suit Korean language. Japan also streamlined Chinese characters to better suit their culture. Mayan is another wild language full of meaning in such compact symbols. I had a hard time following their characters.

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sova 10y ago

As someone who has spent years of their life dedicated to mastering Japanese, I must say, you sir are a genius. By the way, I'm happy your site is rockin! I saw it when you launched candyjapan and I am happy for you =)

wch4999 10y ago

Well, reading the first part I just realized this is japanese/chinese! In Chinese all characters are like 口 or 食. Sometimes we can also break the character down to several parts to understand its meaning.

paradite 10y ago

This has the added advantaged of being recognized by both native Japaneses and Chinese speakers instantly, as long as we keep it to kanji. I recognized what the author is doing from the start as a Chinese speaker.

deleted 10y ago

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monomaniar 10y ago

Nobody said these are all Chinese letter? Japanese is "invented" and forced educated by Meiji government one hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration

anqurvanillapy 10y ago

In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在 (zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'. It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗? (Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.

geomark 10y ago
Same in Thai. They ask กินข้าวหรือยัง ("Have you eaten yet?", or literally "Have you eaten rice yet?") as a greeting.
- dingaling 10y ago
  In lowland Scotland one finds 'You'll have had your tea?' which is a semi-polite way by which the enquirer informs the visitor that he'll not be given any tea ( i.e. dinner, food ). Has entered mainstream as a cliche of Scottish parsimony but does exist in the wild.
  - geomark 10y ago
    Interesting. It's sort of the opposite when Thais ask if you have eaten already because if you answer "not yet" it is common for them to offer you something.
    - dingaling 10y ago
      The Scottish response to 'not yet' is usually something like 'well it seems foolish to have ventured out in that case', obviously delivered in the local dialect. Though I have extracted one dinner from an Edinburgh man who deploys the phrase, but that was probably because his ( English ) wife had put it on to cook earlier!
- leafsleep 10y ago
  If you want literal, it's "eat rice already" - Thai does not have conjugation

BlakePetersen 10y ago

That path tho, /%E5%8F%A3 rendering as /口, so slick

falcolas 10y ago

Everything old is new again. I have no , but I must ... Edit: Nevermind, HN swallowed the Emojis.

thunderbong 10y ago
Actually, without the emojis, it's even more intriguing!

imron 10y ago

In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí. As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.

matthewrudy 10y ago
Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a much older language than modern Mandarin) So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it is the correct verb. In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk" ("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh") Edit: "sikh"
- edwinyzh 10y ago
  Yes, 食 is a verb in Cantonese and Hakka! Both of them are more close to archaic Chinese than Mandarin.
  - matthewrudy 10y ago
    As I understand Hakka is actually a collection of languages, not necessarily mutually intelligible. I learned a bit of one dialect from a friend's mum. And the basics were very similar to Cantonese. Would be interested to learn more dialects once I'm done with Mandarin and Cantonese.
- binaryabyss 10y ago
  Not to mention that Mandarin would use 嘴（里）rather than 口 The pronunciations of kanji correlate to different Chinese eras and areas. The usage and choice of characters are influenced by Classical Chinese, which was the literary language in Japan until, uhm, recently-ish. There is a very good recent YouTube video that explains the usage of Chinese characters in Japanese and which I recommend to anyone interested in the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20 I was very impressed by the accuracy and knowledge displayed, as most of what is written and said on the subject is ehhh somewhat disappointing.

Grue3 10y ago

入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay or something.

colejohnson66 10y ago
Entering the mouth of the building?
- force_reboot 10y ago
  Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det gas".
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    "Put your foot on it" means the accelerator / gas pedal, that seems very much equivalent.
    - force_reboot 10y ago
      I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin and Danish it is.
  - gayprogrammer 10y ago
    put the pedal to the metal (idiomatic) To exert maximum effort. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_the_pedal_to_the_metal#En...

dhfromkorea 10y ago

Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like wild fires or crimes like thefts or vandalism. It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems. The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive to this day.

edwinyzh 10y ago
Anybody care to explain why "costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems"? I know nothing about printing technology but I'm a Chinese.
- gkya 10y ago
  Far many more symbols are required to represent a word with alphabetical systems. I used 65 symbols and 11 spaces to write this sentence whereas with ideograms I'd need about 13 symbols.
  - edwinyzh 10y ago
    OIC, To express the same meaning, using Chinese needs far more less physical space than using English. And you know what? Classical Chinese takes the compactness to the next level ;D I'll try give an example: English: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Chinese: 敏捷的棕毛狐狸从懶狗身上跃过 Classical Chinese：棕色敏狐跃懶犬 Note: This is composed by me, maybe not very well-written, and maybe it can be even more compact, but you see what I mean ;)
dctoedt 10y ago
A counterpoint: When a message is written with an alphabet, it's not as compact, but its meaning can be guessed at even if significant portions of the message are missing (known as lacunae). See, e.g., the TV game show Wheel of Fortune; another example is the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts that have deteriorated over time.

dhfromkorea 10y ago

Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a higher chance of survival against natural disasters like fire or crimes like thefts or vandalism. It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems. The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive to this day.

euske 10y ago

Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed monster" but "goods". Languages are weird, man.

jimworm 10y ago
Out of the several uses of 品, one is the verb "taste" which makes slightly more sense.
ju-st 10y ago
I interpret that character as "three boxes" so "goods" is a very intuitive translation :)
- throwanem 10y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure what world you have to live in for "three-mouthed monster" to be a more obvious meaning for that glyph than "stacked crates". But I think I might like to visit.
  - cheiVia0 10y ago
    I see you haven't gotten to the 4th paragraph of TFA... "口" = mouth, not crate "品" is a stack of mouth characters
    - throwanem 10y ago
      I read the whole article, thanks. Do you think it's possible that more than one square or rectangular thing may exist?
- comex 10y ago
  According to kanjinetworks.com that is, in fact, what the etymology boils down to: > Square-shaped object (tripled) → high-quality goods spread throughout a protective container (compare 舗 and 販) → quality; counter for goods; (person's) character; grade; value. http://www.kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-dictionary/online-kanji-etymology-dictionary.cfm?kanji_id=PAM04 http://www.kanjinetworks.com/eng/kanji-dictionary/online-kan...

weinzierl 10y ago

Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke? Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help. EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

gkya 10y ago
No it goes to the page.
fenomas 10y ago
Make sure you're clicking on the article's title (口) and not on the article's domain, which comes right afterwards. Clicking on the domain takes you to a list of past submissions from the same site. For a title like this one it's pretty confusing. I'm guessing you and I aren't the only ones to misclick.
- weinzierl 10y ago
  I feel dumb:-). That's it, thanks a lot.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Modern computing has transformed intellectual activity into an exercise in eye-hand coordination.

primitivesuave 10y ago

Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" - one who orders rules. An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.

xiaoma 10y ago
What traditional character using place are you speaking of? In Taiwan, programmer is 程式設計師 and in Hong Kong, it's 程式設計員. I had thought 程序 was basically a mainland-only variant. Also, FWIW, I couldn't read a paper at 3k characters. It's more like 4-5k if the goal is reading rather than slogging through with a dictionary.
- cynix 10y ago
  Perhaps GP was thinking of the mainland variant, but only had a Traditional Chinese IME available on the computer. Speaking of mainland-only variants, their official translation of computer is "计算机" (lit. computation machine).
unfamiliar 10y ago
> you only need to learn around 3000 symbols This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write. Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer, politician, etc).

frostymarvelous 10y ago

After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up for me on Facebook.

andrewaylett 10y ago
If you don't like that, you might find Privacy Badger useful: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
wtbob 10y ago
There are ads on Facebook? Also — disable JavaScript. The page renders just fine without it.
mcguire 10y ago
Congratulations! You are making an entrepreneur successful!

disruptalot 10y ago

Finding it surprising no one has corrected the article in that you technically learned Chinese and by proxy Japanese. Chinese traditional characters + meanings largely carried over from Chinese as well. I'm studying mandarin and i was enjoying it until I was told I just learned "Japanese".

itaysk 10y ago

why is this post getting so many voteups?

mcguire 10y ago
Because it is a brilliant introduction to a difficult foreign language, for most of us.
- itaysk 10y ago
  The essence of the post is "In Japanese there are characters that represent words". Is that a surprise to anyone? (I don't speak Japanese or any similar language)

danielrhodes 10y ago

I'm interested in how this compactness changes the expressiveness and evolution of the language. In English, as in other languages written in the latin alphabet, you can make changes to the spelling of a word and create new meanings rather fluidly and it's usually easy for the reader to comprehend. I have no knowledge of Japanese, but are there similar possibilities? How do new words/slang get created?

kailuowang 10y ago
Yes Chinese characters (used in Japanese as kanji, which means Chinese character) often are composed of smaller elements or other characters. it common for a character to be composed of two common parts,one indicating meaning in some way,the other indicating pronunciation.
- ryao 10y ago
  Someone made a video showing how this is the case for some characters: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA The entire character set is not that simple though.
fenomas 10y ago
Japanese is little different from English on stuff like this - new words crop up, die out, get borrowed from abroad etc., as you'd expect. Of course this doesn't involve creating any new kanji, but slang and such is usually written phonetically (or sometimes takes the form of new readings applied to existing kanji).

nxzero 10y ago

>> "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce [in English]" English has 26 letters, but there are 40+ sounds; which is to say that there are NOT symbols for all the sounds.

mcguire 10y ago
One of my goals in life is to introduce Khoisan words into common English use. We need more clicks.

daveheq 10y ago

"Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce"... Not with 26 letters we don't. Other languages have other sounds that English can only try to emulate, and even English has sounds that require multiple letters.

dsr_ 10y ago
Here are the 44 sounds that English generally uses: http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm It does not include sounds which are borrowed from other languages, like the Hebrew 'ch' which happens at the top of your throat, or the Spanish trilled r, or the glottal stop which actually occurs in spoken English all the time in some dialects.

ryao 10y ago

口 and 食 are also Chinese characters for mouth and eat, although I had to check google for 食. Initially, I thought that he was teaching Chinese until I read 食 was eat (which needed Google) and that it was "Japanese".

kailuowang 10y ago
As mentioned below, 食in Cantonese or ancient Chinese means eat as a verb

alecsmart1 10y ago

This is off topic, but I can't find any pricing on the candyjapan.com website when visiting on mobile (iPhone). Anyone can tell me how much it costs per month?

throwanem 10y ago
$25 per month according to the top of the page. But yeah, that's not visible anywhere in the narrower of the responsive views; it's not just mobile, but if you narrow the window on desktop, you get the same result. I'll email bemmu and point that out.
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smnplk 10y ago

I'm struggling to find a comment that is actually related to the story of CandyJapan and not that character.

codedokode 10y ago

The problem is that many characters look similar but have nothing in common. For example, the article mentions the character 食　meaning "food". So when after reading the article you see similar character like 良　you might think it is somehow related to food. Well, it is not, it just means "good". And another similar character 長　meaning "long" or "leader" also has no relation to previous two. And when you get to more complicated characters like 感 it becomes even more confusing.

haddr 10y ago

This article is cool, I love the way is actually encourages to learn something by starting with something simple that you can grasp in seconds. I was like (｡◕口◕｡)!!!

fiatjaf 10y ago

Can I believe this? Does Japanese really mix characters that mean things with characters that mean sounds?

kd5bjo 10y ago
It does. Kanji represent meaning; hiragana and katakana both represent punctuation.

billmalarky 10y ago

Love the live video analytics! Such a simple yet effective hack.

sideproject 10y ago

Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on the weekend.

joeyspn 10y ago
Yeah, nice insights! Direct Link to the stream: https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu

raverbashing 10y ago

About Japanese writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY

vessfull1515 10y ago

if you need some help with writing essay,mb you can try to ask for some advices frome other people etc)As for me I long time could NOT understand how to essay writing , and probably would never have been able to if i do not accidentally found this site essaywriting1click.blogspot.com, who may be interested come in, it really helped me

andrezsanchez 10y ago

I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese. Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool. The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.

OOPMan 10y ago

"The English alphabet has only 26 letters, which most kids can master with little difficulty. But we are adults now, why limit ourselves to the 26?" Less is more. Why waste time learning 2k pictograms (Just for the standard stuff, there's over 50k in total) when you can achieve the same thing with less?