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Japanese is a language with three alphabets, theres not much room for comparison when talking about All Caps. These three alphabets can all be used in the same

Japanese is a language with three alphabets, theres not much room for comparison when talking about All Caps. These three alphabets can all be used in the same sentence. Readability for Japanese is a whole different science. They have their own fonts, no all caps, characters comprised of 30 individual strokes, top-to-bottom-right-to-left writing, but also horizontal reading. One of the biggest readability issues for Japanese would be which characters are used would be my guess. You need to know 2000 characters before you can start reading the newspaper. As an English person we can read every word, but might not know the meaning of sparingly used words. In Japanese you might nit even be able to read it, or you might even misread it. (characters can be read differently based on the character next to it) By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words.

patio11 16y ago
By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences Well, printer status boxes, bank ATM receipts, older pagers, etc. ヨウシガキラシテオリマス is really obnoxious to read, particularly when it is rotating over the printer status dialog. (After a minute or two, I figured it out: "Out of paper.")
harisenbon 16y ago
>By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words. As patio mentions, that's a common misconception. When computers were first being developed for Japan, they used a half-width katakana font in order to fit in a smaller byte-size, and also be able to be displayed on small screens such as cash registers. This has carried over, and many appliances, printers, atms, etc still use the half-width katakana for display. It is truly a pain in the butt. Sometimes all-katakana sentences are also used in books for when robots, aliens or foreigners are talking in order to give the speech a halting or "non-japanese" feel to it. I personally find it obnoxious, and like the Full Metal Alchemist way of dealing with it, where they only changed the last character of each line into katakana. Katakana can also be used as english-speakers would use italics (or even all caps) in order to put stress on a certain word in a sentence. かれのスタイルはサイコー！ >You need to know 2000 characters before you can start reading the newspaper. Honestly, for foreigners this is considered a huge hurdle, but 2000 characters is nothing. Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal.
- scott_s 16y ago
  Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal. Assuming the 12 years of education happen! Consider that the amount of education one needs to be literate in Japanese is more than the amount of education it takes to be literate in, say, French, English or Spanish. Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that they're different.

patio11 16y ago

By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences Well, printer status boxes, bank ATM receipts, older pagers, etc. ヨウシガキラシテオリマス is really obnoxious to read, particularly when it is rotating over the printer status dialog. (After a minute or two, I figured it out: "Out of paper.")

harisenbon 16y ago

>By the way Japanese don't encounter all katakana sentences, since it's just used for the 'imported' words. As patio mentions, that's a common misconception. When computers were first being developed for Japan, they used a half-width katakana font in order to fit in a smaller byte-size, and also be able to be displayed on small screens such as cash registers. This has carried over, and many appliances, printers, atms, etc still use the half-width katakana for display. It is truly a pain in the butt. Sometimes all-katakana sentences are also used in books for when robots, aliens or foreigners are talking in order to give the speech a halting or "non-japanese" feel to it. I personally find it obnoxious, and like the Full Metal Alchemist way of dealing with it, where they only changed the last character of each line into katakana. Katakana can also be used as english-speakers would use italics (or even all caps) in order to put stress on a certain word in a sentence. かれのスタイルはサイコー！ >You need to know 2000 characters before you can start reading the newspaper. Honestly, for foreigners this is considered a huge hurdle, but 2000 characters is nothing. Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal.

scott_s 16y ago
Especially for a native, who will have about 12~ years of learning before they start reading newspapers, it's really not a big deal. Assuming the 12 years of education happen! Consider that the amount of education one needs to be literate in Japanese is more than the amount of education it takes to be literate in, say, French, English or Spanish. Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that they're different.