9 ms·

It bothers me so much that the pairing of katakana and alphabetical characters has nothing to do with pronunciation. >The positive thing about Kanji is that it

It bothers me so much that the pairing of katakana and alphabetical characters has nothing to do with pronunciation. >The positive thing about Kanji is that it allows for quite an efficient expression with more nuance. As a person only a year and a half into learning Japanese, the positive thing is clearly marking separate words and particles. Japanese only has a few unique syllables and rarely uses spaces or other separators. I've repeatedly had trouble parsing loan words written in katakana, especially when it's more than one word smushed together.

rootsudo 6y ago
What are you talking about? Have you used a proper Japanese input on Android or Google? They are paired, vowels first and then phonetically. On Android and iOS, あうえおい A, u, e, o, i かくけこき Ka, ku, me, ko, ki さすせそし Sa, su, se, so, shi The alphabet has no real existence in the Japanese language, it is a different language and romaji is bad to pick up, but the characters are grouped together to enable fast typing and auto detection of grammar and Kanji. -- Then with any proper keyboard, you can change the input setting so you do not need a Japanese keyboard, you can write solely phonetically via a English keyboard and have the software correct it , which I think is annoying because you have to type two keyboard inputs for one character.
- Izkata 6y ago
  GP is referring to the first typewriter in the article, where the katakana has no relation to the English letters they share a key with.
  - junar 6y ago
    Such a mapping would not be feasible, for several reasons. * There are more kana than English letters. You can see that there are numbers paired with kana, keys in the bottom-right with two kana, and on this particular keyboard, ヲ (wo) appears to be omitted. * Broadly speaking, each kana represents a pair of sounds: one of ten consonants plus one of five vowels. You will have English consonants with no real Japanese counterpart, and Japanese consonants with fewer than five appropriate English counterparts.
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  The comment was referring to the keyboard of the Olivetti typewriter. The Katakana are arranged without regard to the Roman letters on the same keys. There's some amount of logical organization, vowels are on the top row, the タ group is on QWASZ. And next to it on DXZ is シサソ, and ス not too far away on R, but what is セ doing all the way on P? At a glance it doesn't seem to match a recent frequency analysis[1], so I have no idea what motivated this particular arrangement. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195600 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195600
chrischen 6y ago
Japanese actually have intonations (like Chinese) to differentiate between words that have the same hiragana construction. For example “hashi” can mean bridge or chopsticks depending on the up and down tones.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
>> The positive thing about Kanji is that it allows for quite an efficient expression with more nuance. > As a person only a year and a half into learning Japanese, the positive thing is clearly marking separate words and particles. The positive thing about kanji is a function kanji don't perform?

rootsudo 6y ago

What are you talking about? Have you used a proper Japanese input on Android or Google? They are paired, vowels first and then phonetically. On Android and iOS, あうえおい A, u, e, o, i かくけこき Ka, ku, me, ko, ki さすせそし Sa, su, se, so, shi The alphabet has no real existence in the Japanese language, it is a different language and romaji is bad to pick up, but the characters are grouped together to enable fast typing and auto detection of grammar and Kanji. -- Then with any proper keyboard, you can change the input setting so you do not need a Japanese keyboard, you can write solely phonetically via a English keyboard and have the software correct it , which I think is annoying because you have to type two keyboard inputs for one character.

Izkata 6y ago
GP is referring to the first typewriter in the article, where the katakana has no relation to the English letters they share a key with.
- junar 6y ago
  Such a mapping would not be feasible, for several reasons. * There are more kana than English letters. You can see that there are numbers paired with kana, keys in the bottom-right with two kana, and on this particular keyboard, ヲ (wo) appears to be omitted. * Broadly speaking, each kana represents a pair of sounds: one of ten consonants plus one of five vowels. You will have English consonants with no real Japanese counterpart, and Japanese consonants with fewer than five appropriate English counterparts.
whoopdedo 6y ago
The comment was referring to the keyboard of the Olivetti typewriter. The Katakana are arranged without regard to the Roman letters on the same keys. There's some amount of logical organization, vowels are on the top row, the タ group is on QWASZ. And next to it on DXZ is シサソ, and ス not too far away on R, but what is セ doing all the way on P? At a glance it doesn't seem to match a recent frequency analysis[1], so I have no idea what motivated this particular arrangement. [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195600 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03195600

chrischen 6y ago

Japanese actually have intonations (like Chinese) to differentiate between words that have the same hiragana construction. For example “hashi” can mean bridge or chopsticks depending on the up and down tones.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

>> The positive thing about Kanji is that it allows for quite an efficient expression with more nuance. > As a person only a year and a half into learning Japanese, the positive thing is clearly marking separate words and particles. The positive thing about kanji is a function kanji don't perform?