8 ms·

I really think any techie would appreciate the consitency of two of the three alphabets in Japanese. (Hiragana and Katakana) The very fact that both of these al

I really think any techie would appreciate the consitency of two of the three alphabets in Japanese. (Hiragana and Katakana) The very fact that both of these alphabets are the exact same phonetic pronunciations, but written slightly different to visually distinguish them, is the only complication. But that they are designed specifically to distinguish between Japanese and foreign words is just brilliant. Their Kanji script/written alphabet is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese. But the spoken language is easy, easy to learn. The variations with polite (public or hierarchical relationships) vs common speaking, seem to mainly affect verb conjugations. But their sentence structures are reversed from ours, but many languages seem to be, but they have fewer words, and make a number of a assumptions about context that make speaking actually less complicated, but require more understanding. Also, they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation like English, which is huge. The extra effort saved on this alone can balance out the other complications. This is my limited experience with a few years training in the language, family members learning it and a few relatives that lived there for years. (one permanently now) Feel free to correct any errors I've thrown out. My point is that Japanese can be easier to learn than other languages, but for reasons that may not be obvious.

Someguywhatever 8y ago
Would it be possible to learn only Hirigana/Katakana and ignore Kanji altogether?
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  No. Even the word for Japanese in Japanese is 日本語 (Nihongo), all Kanji.
- Grue3 8y ago
  No. You won't be able to read anything that isn't designed to be read by kindergarteners if you can't read kanji (at least primary-school level [1]). But even learning the most common ones is really useful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji
- nayuki 8y ago
  I traveled in Japan with friends, and we were all Japanese language learners. We could all read kana, but only I could read kanji, so I took the opportunity to evaluate how our experiences differed. In terms of street signage (e.g. train station names, place names, restaurant menus, merchandise shopping), it's very hit-and-miss if you only read kana. Place names are almost always full kanji (especially on maps), but trains and buses usually display the kana version (as well as romaji). Kana will allow you to identify products named with foreign words, as well as some Japanese words that are written in kana for various reasons. Otherwise, any real sentence is written with kanji, with kana only acting as the glue between the substantial words. Bottom line is that if you don't read kanji, you are missing out on a lot of Japanese text. It would roughly be the equivalent of bleeping out every English word that is more than 6 letters long.
stealthcat 8y ago
Japanese grammar structure is almost total inverse of English, worse, it has particle 'screws' system to make sense of any sentence. Japanese vocab is not robust to noise, i.e. it is high-entropy. Unlike English, there are tons of homophones, plus, its intolerance to dropped/swapped phonemes usually lead to words confusion and incomprehensible sentences to beginners
deleted 8y ago
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throwaway936396 8y ago
Sorry, but I really strongly disagree with this. I've studied Japanese for 6 years, Chinese for 3 and am currently in Japan. Some of your comments come off as extremely ignorant. For example, neither the kana syllabries nor the logographic kanji system are alphabets. The distinction between Hiragana and Katakana is more of a distinction between emphasis on sound (Katakana) and normal writing of words. Katakana is used for more than foreign words. Kanji / hanzi is absolutely not a travesty. In fact, Japanese would be nearly unusable without it (in my opinion). But your calling it "left over from cave paintings" seems to imply that you're simply not familiar with it, so I'll do my best to explain: A very small percentage of kanji / hanzi are pictographic (in the range of 1-3%) with a similar percentage being ideographic. Thus nearly all kanji / hanzi have written forms that have nothing to do with what they mean. There are around 200 radicals which make up kanji. They're compounds of these simple pieces, much like letters make up a word. For example, it doesn't make sense to ask why there's a "t" in water and it doesn't make sense to ask why a radical is part of a character (in general, there are exceptions to this in both English and Japanese). I wouldn't describe Japanese sentence structure as strictly reversed. For simple sentences it often is, but in general sentences are just structured in an entirely different way. Japanese "exceptions in pronunciation" are in fact the hardest part of the langauge in my opinion. Pronunciation of kanji in Japanese can be a bit messy, especially compared to Chinese. In fact the island of Iwojima was famously misread by Japanese admirals. The island's name's proper pronunciation would be something like iwotou. Despite the pronunciation issue with kanji in Japanese (especially in edge cases), the written form is useful and beautiful enough to justify the cost. Japanese is a truly beautiful language and I recommend anyone with the patience to commit thousands of hours to it, to absolutely go for it -- you'll be rewarded. I'm very sorry if this comes off as insulting by the way. It's 12:40am here and I got triggered by this comment and felt a strong compulsion to add my thoughts and opinions.
- aaronblohowiak 8y ago
  I think the main difference between your post and the post you are replying to is how high-level or low-level your analysis is. I dont see many disagreements between you and the OP, your post added a lot of detail which is all correct but none of which violates the spirit of the parent. Eg what is an alphabet vs character vs whatever.. in a very colloquial sense, the list of graphemes used to represent the language is commonly referred to as an alphabet. Re: kanji, I believe this was a frustration in character-based approaches vs phonetic approaches, particularly for a language with relatively few phonemes, and particularly coming from a quasi-phonetic language like english.
nayuki 8y ago
> two [...] alphabets in Japanese They are syllabaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary > distinguish between Japanese and foreign words There are occasionally Japanese words written in katakana (e.g. ラーメン) and foreign words written in hiragana (e.g. たばこ). Also, katakana can be used to emphasize Japanese words (like WE DO in English) (e.g. キミ). > Kanji script [...] is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese There is no evidence that Chinese characters come from cave paintings. You haven't explained what makes kanji a travesty, so I'll grant you the assumption that you think it's hard because there are thousands of characters to learn. I assure you, from all the people I've met who can read kanji/hanzi (including Chinese, Korean, and American people), they agree that the writing system makes sense and delivers a lot of meaning in a small space. > the spoken language is [...] easy to learn Again, no justification given. I would say it's a mixed bag. Some aspects of spoken Japanese are easy to learn, such as most phones overlapping with other languages (i.e. not needing to learn many new sounds), no European grammatical stuff like {plurals, subject-verb agreement, noun genders, case}. But some parts are harder, like distinguishing long consonants and vowels, politeness levels for verbs and nouns, dropping subjects and other information implied by context, and the postfix word order. > they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation There are a couple I can think of. The consonant g can be pronounced [g] or [ŋ], for example in が. The consonant in ず/づ can be pronounced [z] or [dz]. And the major one is that many -u and some -i should be suppressed (e.g. です, ～ます, して); in fact if you don't do this, you sound noticeably non-native. I think overall, Japanese is okay to learn at a casual/colloquial level. The pronunciation structure is transparent, the particles make it easy to prescribe some known-good sentence structures, and the vocabulary seems reasonable. But mastering Japanese, oh boy, that will take a lifetime. (e.g. Just to name some off the top of my head - politeness, nuances over vocabulary, onomatopoeia, different registers like manga vs. newspaper vs. legal, classical Japanese, classical Chinese, reformed spellings and grammars, multiple on'yomi and kun'yomi readings, how to read personal name kanji, reverse-engineering loanwords, studying kanji, puns, distinguishing homophones in speech, ...)
- tokyodude 8y ago
  AFAIK ラーメン is not a Japanese word. It is Chinese "Lo mein". 中華そば is a effectively a synonym for ラーメン. Also no Japanese restaurant guide lists ラーメン under Japanese cuisine. They either list them on their own or under Chinese cuisine. I'd say one of the hardest parts is the multiple ways to say every kanji with almost no rules, just memorization. Example: 行, 実行, 行う, 膝行, 売れ行き or 先生, 一生, 芝生, 往生, 千生り, 埴生, 平生, 弥生, 蓬生, 生り, 相生, 下生え, 生える

Someguywhatever 8y ago

Would it be possible to learn only Hirigana/Katakana and ignore Kanji altogether?

theandrewbailey 8y ago
No. Even the word for Japanese in Japanese is 日本語 (Nihongo), all Kanji.
Grue3 8y ago
No. You won't be able to read anything that isn't designed to be read by kindergarteners if you can't read kanji (at least primary-school level [1]). But even learning the most common ones is really useful. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Diku_kanji
nayuki 8y ago
I traveled in Japan with friends, and we were all Japanese language learners. We could all read kana, but only I could read kanji, so I took the opportunity to evaluate how our experiences differed. In terms of street signage (e.g. train station names, place names, restaurant menus, merchandise shopping), it's very hit-and-miss if you only read kana. Place names are almost always full kanji (especially on maps), but trains and buses usually display the kana version (as well as romaji). Kana will allow you to identify products named with foreign words, as well as some Japanese words that are written in kana for various reasons. Otherwise, any real sentence is written with kanji, with kana only acting as the glue between the substantial words. Bottom line is that if you don't read kanji, you are missing out on a lot of Japanese text. It would roughly be the equivalent of bleeping out every English word that is more than 6 letters long.

stealthcat 8y ago

Japanese grammar structure is almost total inverse of English, worse, it has particle 'screws' system to make sense of any sentence. Japanese vocab is not robust to noise, i.e. it is high-entropy. Unlike English, there are tons of homophones, plus, its intolerance to dropped/swapped phonemes usually lead to words confusion and incomprehensible sentences to beginners

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

throwaway936396 8y ago

Sorry, but I really strongly disagree with this. I've studied Japanese for 6 years, Chinese for 3 and am currently in Japan. Some of your comments come off as extremely ignorant. For example, neither the kana syllabries nor the logographic kanji system are alphabets. The distinction between Hiragana and Katakana is more of a distinction between emphasis on sound (Katakana) and normal writing of words. Katakana is used for more than foreign words. Kanji / hanzi is absolutely not a travesty. In fact, Japanese would be nearly unusable without it (in my opinion). But your calling it "left over from cave paintings" seems to imply that you're simply not familiar with it, so I'll do my best to explain: A very small percentage of kanji / hanzi are pictographic (in the range of 1-3%) with a similar percentage being ideographic. Thus nearly all kanji / hanzi have written forms that have nothing to do with what they mean. There are around 200 radicals which make up kanji. They're compounds of these simple pieces, much like letters make up a word. For example, it doesn't make sense to ask why there's a "t" in water and it doesn't make sense to ask why a radical is part of a character (in general, there are exceptions to this in both English and Japanese). I wouldn't describe Japanese sentence structure as strictly reversed. For simple sentences it often is, but in general sentences are just structured in an entirely different way. Japanese "exceptions in pronunciation" are in fact the hardest part of the langauge in my opinion. Pronunciation of kanji in Japanese can be a bit messy, especially compared to Chinese. In fact the island of Iwojima was famously misread by Japanese admirals. The island's name's proper pronunciation would be something like iwotou. Despite the pronunciation issue with kanji in Japanese (especially in edge cases), the written form is useful and beautiful enough to justify the cost. Japanese is a truly beautiful language and I recommend anyone with the patience to commit thousands of hours to it, to absolutely go for it -- you'll be rewarded. I'm very sorry if this comes off as insulting by the way. It's 12:40am here and I got triggered by this comment and felt a strong compulsion to add my thoughts and opinions.

aaronblohowiak 8y ago
I think the main difference between your post and the post you are replying to is how high-level or low-level your analysis is. I dont see many disagreements between you and the OP, your post added a lot of detail which is all correct but none of which violates the spirit of the parent. Eg what is an alphabet vs character vs whatever.. in a very colloquial sense, the list of graphemes used to represent the language is commonly referred to as an alphabet. Re: kanji, I believe this was a frustration in character-based approaches vs phonetic approaches, particularly for a language with relatively few phonemes, and particularly coming from a quasi-phonetic language like english.

nayuki 8y ago

> two [...] alphabets in Japanese They are syllabaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary > distinguish between Japanese and foreign words There are occasionally Japanese words written in katakana (e.g. ラーメン) and foreign words written in hiragana (e.g. たばこ). Also, katakana can be used to emphasize Japanese words (like WE DO in English) (e.g. キミ). > Kanji script [...] is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese There is no evidence that Chinese characters come from cave paintings. You haven't explained what makes kanji a travesty, so I'll grant you the assumption that you think it's hard because there are thousands of characters to learn. I assure you, from all the people I've met who can read kanji/hanzi (including Chinese, Korean, and American people), they agree that the writing system makes sense and delivers a lot of meaning in a small space. > the spoken language is [...] easy to learn Again, no justification given. I would say it's a mixed bag. Some aspects of spoken Japanese are easy to learn, such as most phones overlapping with other languages (i.e. not needing to learn many new sounds), no European grammatical stuff like {plurals, subject-verb agreement, noun genders, case}. But some parts are harder, like distinguishing long consonants and vowels, politeness levels for verbs and nouns, dropping subjects and other information implied by context, and the postfix word order. > they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation There are a couple I can think of. The consonant g can be pronounced [g] or [ŋ], for example in が. The consonant in ず/づ can be pronounced [z] or [dz]. And the major one is that many -u and some -i should be suppressed (e.g. です, ～ます, して); in fact if you don't do this, you sound noticeably non-native. I think overall, Japanese is okay to learn at a casual/colloquial level. The pronunciation structure is transparent, the particles make it easy to prescribe some known-good sentence structures, and the vocabulary seems reasonable. But mastering Japanese, oh boy, that will take a lifetime. (e.g. Just to name some off the top of my head - politeness, nuances over vocabulary, onomatopoeia, different registers like manga vs. newspaper vs. legal, classical Japanese, classical Chinese, reformed spellings and grammars, multiple on'yomi and kun'yomi readings, how to read personal name kanji, reverse-engineering loanwords, studying kanji, puns, distinguishing homophones in speech, ...)

tokyodude 8y ago
AFAIK ラーメン is not a Japanese word. It is Chinese "Lo mein". 中華そば is a effectively a synonym for ラーメン. Also no Japanese restaurant guide lists ラーメン under Japanese cuisine. They either list them on their own or under Chinese cuisine. I'd say one of the hardest parts is the multiple ways to say every kanji with almost no rules, just memorization. Example: 行, 実行, 行う, 膝行, 売れ行き or 先生, 一生, 芝生, 往生, 千生り, 埴生, 平生, 弥生, 蓬生, 生り, 相生, 下生え, 生える