8 ms·

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see t

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time (stopped) 己 is self So 自己 is me/self, while 已經 means already. There is also 巳, which is ancient Chinese clock means 9-11am I believe.

yuhong 9y ago
At least these are all in the BMP...
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱
- yeukhon 9y ago
  I said in handwritings if not careful.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.
  - jack1243star 9y ago
    No educated Chinese-writer will write those in a single stroke AFAIK
    - shard 9y ago
      I think you will be amazed at what can be written in a single stroke when you are in a hurry.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese. Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g. か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.
  - timr 9y ago
    "And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going." Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway. Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns. Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.
- baddox 9y ago
  That’s also true of common characters used in English depending on font and other things. Context generally makes things pretty clear, which I would guess is also the case with these glyphs in other languages. Capital I, lowercase l, numeral 1 Numeral 0 and uppercase O
- CrystalLangUser 9y ago
  Yeah, but they are side by side here, and not in handwriting.. If you're not careful in handwriting it'd be real hard to tell the difference.
contingencies 9y ago
Chinese has a lot of tricky ones. 荼 vs 茶日 vs 曰已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴士 vs 土水 vs 氺人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几干 vs 千 vs 于天 vs 夫 ... the list goes on.
- kunimu 9y ago
  I've been learning Japanese for a relatively short time, so perhaps that's why the 巳 vs 巴 onwards in your list aren't tricky at all to me.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Here's some more. I made these mistakes when typing using Pingtype, and then checking my results with my teacher. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io 給耠辦辛力辛重量困因痕㾗眉㞒部卶蓑䒾任仼挑狣推猚䒷苦阿冋共芖休你衡𧗾一 – 幹龫幸辛我找
  - jhanschoo 9y ago
    As in homographs in other languages, context is often sufficient to disambiguate.
- thewayfarer 9y ago
  >> 荼 vs 茶 Also 苶 looks similar.
marcoperaza 9y ago
Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.
- innocentoldguy 9y ago
  It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.
  - fasdgafa 9y ago
    This hits you hard when you read children's books for the first time as an adult.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Early video games didn't have enough resolution to display Kanji, which is why all text was Kana-only. With spaces as word separators and sentence context homonyms are no more of a problem than in other languages.
    - innocentoldguy 9y ago
      What do video games have to do with it? Pong didn't have the resolution to display Shakespeare, but we didn't stop using words because of it. Video games provide a visual context that reading alone does not. Also, early video games, especially consoles like the NES Famicom, were geared towards kids who don't understand many kanji. The same is true of books aimed at children in Japan. They don't use kanji and they provide visual context in the form of illustrations. Ask any Japanese person why they use kanji and not just hiragana, katakana, or romaji and they'll tell you the same thing: Because it is hard to determine the meaning. They don't say it is impossible, just that it is difficult, which it is. For a contrived example, if I write はしをさがしてる。What am I looking for, a chopstick, a bridge, or the side of something? There is no way to discern from the sentence alone. However, if I use this kanji for hashi, 箸, then it is obvious I'm talking about chopsticks. There is no ambiguity. This doesn't always help. Sometimes the homonyms use the same kanji. 青山, for instance, can be read あおやま, which is a surname, or it can be read せいざん, which means a lush, green mountain. Most of the time though, kanji provides meaning and clarity where hiragana, katakana, and romaji do not.
poizan42 9y ago
> > Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. > Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference whether the diagonal dash touches the part to the left? Seems very hard to notice.
- yuhong 9y ago
  And probably why no one cares, especially when Unicode was limited to 16-bit.
- Iv 9y ago
  I l 1 O 0 We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same. Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on. In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise. I think that this particular pair is confusing because in Japanese orientation is not supposed to be important, but is, in that case.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    I and l looking exactly the same in some fonts is a different problem, really. You're not being asked to pick out a two pixel difference in slope (seriously, two pixels using pretty standard resolution). You use grammatical rules to tell the difference, which is annoying but not visually difficult. And numbers aren't getting freely mixed with letters in text.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  They were originally drawn with brushes, and the stroke direction was obvious. In handwriting, you're also supposed to use the same stroke order and direction. A font doesn't have that, so some fonts use differences in shape and thickness of the line to indicate the stroke direction. So I'd say that the difference is mostly how your font chose to indicate the proper stroke direction.
drwu 9y ago
also 戊戌戍
- glandium 9y ago
  And their friend 戉.
stordoff 9y ago
> How can you NOT see the difference? I saw the difference, because it reminded me of the difference between ン and ソ in katakana, but if you aren't Chinese I can see how you could assume they are the same. You can draw the same character differently in English without changing the meaning (e.g. 9 straight or curved, 7 with or without a bar through it, looped k or f), so overlooking the difference between 𠮟 and 叱 seems easy enough.

yuhong 9y ago

At least these are all in the BMP...

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

yeukhon 9y ago
I said in handwritings if not careful.
microcolonel 9y ago
I think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.
- jack1243star 9y ago
  No educated Chinese-writer will write those in a single stroke AFAIK
  - shard 9y ago
    I think you will be amazed at what can be written in a single stroke when you are in a hurry.
IgorPartola 9y ago
The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese. Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g. か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.
- timr 9y ago
  "And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going." Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway. Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns. Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.
baddox 9y ago
That’s also true of common characters used in English depending on font and other things. Context generally makes things pretty clear, which I would guess is also the case with these glyphs in other languages. Capital I, lowercase l, numeral 1 Numeral 0 and uppercase O
CrystalLangUser 9y ago
Yeah, but they are side by side here, and not in handwriting.. If you're not careful in handwriting it'd be real hard to tell the difference.

contingencies 9y ago

Chinese has a lot of tricky ones. 荼 vs 茶日 vs 曰已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴士 vs 土水 vs 氺人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几干 vs 千 vs 于天 vs 夫 ... the list goes on.

kunimu 9y ago
I've been learning Japanese for a relatively short time, so perhaps that's why the 巳 vs 巴 onwards in your list aren't tricky at all to me.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
Here's some more. I made these mistakes when typing using Pingtype, and then checking my results with my teacher. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io 給耠辦辛力辛重量困因痕㾗眉㞒部卶蓑䒾任仼挑狣推猚䒷苦阿冋共芖休你衡𧗾一 – 幹龫幸辛我找
- jhanschoo 9y ago
  As in homographs in other languages, context is often sufficient to disambiguate.
thewayfarer 9y ago
>> 荼 vs 茶 Also 苶 looks similar.

marcoperaza 9y ago

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

innocentoldguy 9y ago
It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.
- fasdgafa 9y ago
  This hits you hard when you read children's books for the first time as an adult.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Early video games didn't have enough resolution to display Kanji, which is why all text was Kana-only. With spaces as word separators and sentence context homonyms are no more of a problem than in other languages.
  - innocentoldguy 9y ago
    What do video games have to do with it? Pong didn't have the resolution to display Shakespeare, but we didn't stop using words because of it. Video games provide a visual context that reading alone does not. Also, early video games, especially consoles like the NES Famicom, were geared towards kids who don't understand many kanji. The same is true of books aimed at children in Japan. They don't use kanji and they provide visual context in the form of illustrations. Ask any Japanese person why they use kanji and not just hiragana, katakana, or romaji and they'll tell you the same thing: Because it is hard to determine the meaning. They don't say it is impossible, just that it is difficult, which it is. For a contrived example, if I write はしをさがしてる。What am I looking for, a chopstick, a bridge, or the side of something? There is no way to discern from the sentence alone. However, if I use this kanji for hashi, 箸, then it is obvious I'm talking about chopsticks. There is no ambiguity. This doesn't always help. Sometimes the homonyms use the same kanji. 青山, for instance, can be read あおやま, which is a surname, or it can be read せいざん, which means a lush, green mountain. Most of the time though, kanji provides meaning and clarity where hiragana, katakana, and romaji do not.

poizan42 9y ago

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

yuhong 9y ago
And probably why no one cares, especially when Unicode was limited to 16-bit.
Iv 9y ago
I l 1 O 0 We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same. Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on. In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise. I think that this particular pair is confusing because in Japanese orientation is not supposed to be important, but is, in that case.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  I and l looking exactly the same in some fonts is a different problem, really. You're not being asked to pick out a two pixel difference in slope (seriously, two pixels using pretty standard resolution). You use grammatical rules to tell the difference, which is annoying but not visually difficult. And numbers aren't getting freely mixed with letters in text.
khedoros1 9y ago
They were originally drawn with brushes, and the stroke direction was obvious. In handwriting, you're also supposed to use the same stroke order and direction. A font doesn't have that, so some fonts use differences in shape and thickness of the line to indicate the stroke direction. So I'd say that the difference is mostly how your font chose to indicate the proper stroke direction.

drwu 9y ago

also 戊戌戍

glandium 9y ago
And their friend 戉.

stordoff 9y ago

> How can you NOT see the difference? I saw the difference, because it reminded me of the difference between ン and ソ in katakana, but if you aren't Chinese I can see how you could assume they are the same. You can draw the same character differently in English without changing the meaning (e.g. 9 straight or curved, 7 with or without a bar through it, looped k or f), so overlooking the difference between 𠮟 and 叱 seems easy enough.