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The lack of spaces in Japanese is not a major problem. Japanese has three visually distinct types of characters: Chinese characters (kanji), and two phonetic sy
by gizmo686 9y ago
The lack of spaces in Japanese is not a major problem. Japanese has three visually distinct types of characters: Chinese characters (kanji), and two phonetic syllabaries (one for foreign words (katanaka), one for native (hiragana)). Further, because of the grammar of spoken Japanese, almost all words are suffixed with some gramatical marker. In most cases, "words" will be written in kanji or katana, while the grammar markers are in hiragana, so it is easy to identify word boundries visually. There are some times where words themselves are in hiragana, but as long as you do not have a long sequence of these, they are not to difficult.
Of course, back when I was starting with Japanese, my teacher insisted that we use spaces until we knew enough kanji to make our writing legible without them.
- vacri 9y ago> "words" will be written in ... katana Vicious :)
- gizmo686 9y agoI put "words" in quotes because often time the "grammar marker" is actually part of the word. For instance, in "食べる", I do not actually mean to say that "食" is a word. Rather, that you can look at something like "食べる林檎" and, using just orthography, find the word boundary "食べる 林檎". I threw katakana in there just because a word written using katakana instead of kanji does not actually present a problem for this. Words written in hiragana, however, do present a problem for this naive approach of finding word boundaries, but do not pose a problem unless you have a long string of them.
- vacri 9y agoI was pointing out a curious typo :)