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Japanese explained to programmers

346 points by iraldir 4y ago

traceroute66 4y ago
Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only way you are going to gain any sort of fluency. Just knowing that X translates to Y is not going to help you, even if you memorise the whole dictionary. You might get away with translating back into your native tongue with a Western language, but you won't with Japanese. With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar and other aspects. It's just your choice if your want to do it the hard way (textbook theory) or the harder way (immersion via graded readers, conversations with patient natives, or anything else similar). All the time and effort people put into rote-learning Japanese Kanji should really be expended learning Japanese in a more holistic way. Otherwise you might as well just buy one of those books with set-phrases such as "where's the toilet".
- david04 4y ago
  > With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".
  - wst_ 4y ago
    Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows. It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto). Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
  - frogulis 4y ago
    Incomprehensible to me. Learning the grammar of a language is the most fun part, in my opinion! Vocab is hard work, but learning ways to form a sentence? Magical.
    - xvilka 4y ago
      Agree, learning vocabulary or characters is the most boring part of any language.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    It can work for some people? You aren’t so much not learning grammar as you are inferring the grammar via practice instead of up front studying the rules. Like the difference between training a neural network to compile code vs writing a parser.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Eh, worked fine for me in Latin. Well, until "Hannibal, with his friends, the Romans, traversed the alps". At least my teacher had her laugh for the year.
- 0x2c8 4y ago
  While I agree with your sentiment, I do not believe the author tried to "promote rote-learning" here -- they just presented a nice little analogy between Japanese and programming constructs.
- airstrike 4y ago
  I tried learning it with Duolingo and was disappointed to see it was just trying to teach me characters via rote-memorization... gave up after a 10-day streak
  - Tor3 4y ago
    Duolingo doesn't manage to show you the structure of the language. I wasted a very long time with Duolingo. It's much better to use the time on just about anything else if you want to learn Japanese.
- fenomas 4y ago
  Who are you responding to? TFA doesn't discuss learning methods at all, let alone "promoting the rote-learning of Kanji". Is it just the mention of WaniKani? Personally I don't like WK either, but the author barely mentioned it in passing, and says nothing at all about the stuff you're criticizing.
- louhike 4y ago
  Yes! And I would insist that learning how the language works is easier, even if it might seem more intimidating at first. If you just want to get by for your holidays, sure just learn to translate with Duolingo. But if want to speak the language, you will just lose time.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean it's probably the best way to get some basic proficiency in a language or any skill, teach you enough to become familiar with the language and give you the confidence to move to the next level. Rote learning and gamified approaches like duolingo have a low barrier to entry; buying a textbook, enrolling in a class or living in the country for a year are much higher and the latter two are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for casual learners.
- iraldir 4y ago
  For the spoken language I whole heartedly agree, but as far as reading is concerned, immersion is super hard. Most resource won't have furigana and even with the one that do, it's "down one ear and out the other", I don't particularly learn to read Kanjis this way. Once you've got a base of say the 500 most used kanji, and you're able to recognise patterns (components, composition) of kanjis then it's a different story. I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.
  - kouteiheika 4y ago
    > However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji. Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      Oh wow. Difficulty lists for books too? With vocab lists! This is awesome!
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      This is a very nice website! Thank you to share. Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
      - kouteiheika 4y ago
        > Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...") All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used. リンゴ is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in 林檎 is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in So you can see that the kanji form is used relatively often in novels (which makes sense, as those often use higher level/more flower-y language). (I also use modern news articles in my corpus and that's also included in the stats, although this isn't shown on the "used in" pages.)
- mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  > You need to learn to think in the language you are learning The article uses code to illustrate how this might be different thinking in Japanese with a URL request: > request.setURL("serverurl").send()" I think there is formality/ceremony here like "I have a request, it is for this URL, and I want to send" vs. the other style in the article: send().request.setURL("serverurl") is more forceful as in "I'm sending you a request for this URL" there is no politeness of the exchange. I almost had a business trip to Japan some years back and people were discussing the formal and polite ceremonial business card exchange process with certain sequences of presenting, bowing, etc. I think learning about the cultural norms might be a key here with learning the language and the reasons why things are structured differently.
- TheDong 4y ago
  > really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji > its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop First, let me say that you may be responding to a strawman. There's few-to-zero people who will recommend memorizing kanji to the exclusion of learning grammar and other aspects. Realistically, people who promote rote-memorization of kanji are also suggesting to learn grammar, attempt to think in the language (not translate in their head), and suggesting immersing/talking/etc as much as possible too. So, let me ask you, what do you suggest people do instead of rote-memorization of the readings of kanji? How do you suggest someone become able to read a sentence in japanese, guess the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, if they have not memorized how to pronounce the relevant kanji? Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    > Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves? They do indeed, but in a context of everyday immersion, so it’s not rote learning to the exclusion of all else.
- coliveira 4y ago
  And language "learning" via duolingo was tremendous disservice provided by technology. They basically took the worst method of learning (flashcards) and made it available in the 21st century as something "revolutionary".
- freeopinion 4y ago
  I have often thought that people who advocate anything but rote-learning of English spelling are misguided. I know that phonetics are a popular myth in English. Rote learning of English spelling is a much more daunting task than rote learning of kanji. To unfairly cherry-pick from the paragraph above, the English word "person" is about 10 strokes; "people" is also 10 strokes. But there is no obvious connection between the two words and the different spellings have to be memorized individually. 人 is two strokes; 人人 is four strokes; 人々 is six? All are easier to memorize, easier to write, and easier to read. Of course, I might have cherry-picked the most extreme comparison. But even that little four letter word "myth" is 9 strokes and must be rote memorized. It is a small word in English. Somebody else can correct my belief that 9 strokes is not short in kanji. Ok, I'll correct myself. 神話 is a 9? stroke character and a 13? stroke character. So 22 strokes total? It's funny what we convince ourselves to believe when we cherry-pick. "God talk" is a 5 stroke word + an 8 stroke word. "God speek" is 5+10. So even if I go out of my way to justify my belief in Japanese brevity I have to start rethinking. Maybe if I can think of a word like "deity" or something with even more strokes I could eventually avoid having to adopt a new position on which language is easier. Another observation is the number of times each day a Japanese person whips up their hand as a chalkboard and asks, "This or this?" while air drawing out two different kanji. The fact that the observer can recognize the characters written in air has always seemed instructive to me, though.
louhike 4y ago
Just a nitpick but the particle “ha”/“は” is not really used to set the subject but the topic or context. The topic or context can often be the subject but it’s an important subtlety. The particle to set the subject is “ga”/“が”.
- Tor3 4y ago
  A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.
  - shiomiru 4y ago
    Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?
    - louhike 4y ago
      That may seem strange but that would be 「私が」私は牛乳を食べます
      - shiomiru 4y ago
        That's interesting. It indeed seems unnatural because I've never heard anybody say it like that - my impression is that you generally can't just use both particles with the same subject for the same sentence (or at least not like this.) But maybe that's just because of my inexperience. Do you have a real-life example of this pattern being used? (It's also strange because I typoed 牛肉 in my earlier comment, and milk is difficult to eat. Sorry for the confusion.)
      - Tor3 4y ago
        Almost - you would write it 私は「私が」牛乳を食べます, and obviously 私は doesn't serve a grammatical purpose, it only has an indicative function.
      - louhike 4y ago
        Yes, thanks for the correction tor3!
Cruncharoo 4y ago
"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?
- karatinversion 4y ago
  Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.
  - thegeomaster 4y ago
    Not just France, I think the majority of Europe is like that. Here in the Balkans, local dubs of anime (Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ...) were 90% of what we watched on TV as kids.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      Add on Pokemon and Sailor Moon and that also describes the US.
      - anthk 4y ago
        In Spain we finished DBZ in ~1993 or so. That makes me smile when some Americans say "in the West, in early 90's, no one knew about manganime/Japanese video game"... while in Spain, France and Italy in the 90's we already had a long way along that culture. By 1998-9, go figure, we were watching Dragon Ball GT. Yes, we saw DBGT before Pokémon. In the West. Something very odd to explain to Americans, often they didn't believe me. Until I show them the printed proofs of Spanish magazines about DB with a clear Copyright date, which is understood from nearly anyone in the world.
  - nicolas_t 4y ago
    Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.
Tor3 4y ago
As for explaining Japanese to programmers.. When I try to explain basic Japanese grammar to people in general, they always respond "Sounds complicated". But if I explain basic Japanese grammar to long-time programmers they simply reply "Sounds logical." (Edit: Added 'basic' - I don't go around trying to explain Japanese grammar in full..)
vvilliamperez 4y ago
request.setURL("serverurl").send() This style of sentence structure was one of the strangest things to get comfortable with. You have to think a bit differently. The function chaining makes sense here and I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. Anyone interested in the language should definitely check out the Genki series. It's written well enough you could fully teach yourself. https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/intro/ https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/intro/ or amazon.
- kijin 4y ago
  The Japanese language does lend itself easily to an endless chain of run-on sentences where the subject quickly becomes blurry. Very useful for programmers and politicians alike. :p
- chris_st 4y ago
  > I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.
  - vvilliamperez 4y ago
    Yeah that's the link what I was referring to, I forgot to add context. What I meant was if Matz "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple" was due in part to the way the language is spoken.
    - corroclaro 4y ago
      Possibly inspired by message parsing objects in Smalltalk, no?
- zirgs 4y ago
  That's only a problem if your native language has strict word order.
ickoonite 4y ago
I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it. English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
    - makaren 4y ago
      My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough. French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.
raverbashing 4y ago
> The japanese standard library offers a bunch of chainable functions to add meaning to your primitive types. English and French work in the same way. However roles are usually determined by word order. But in essence it's the same thing as obj.do_stuff(), 'obj' is the thing that do_stuff.
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO. I've never really thought of programming languages in passive voice before, but it explains why I've increasingly written and spoken in passive voice structure even though I know it's "wrong" to do so.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    I wouldn't say that programming is expressed as OVS. Function calls are VSO, e.g. `push(array, element)`. Method calls are SVO, `array.push(element)`. I speculate that this is why method-style dot-notation has become so dominant over the past few decades, because of its natural familiarity to English speakers as compared to the functional VSO style.
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      Programming doesn't have a definite order, it depends on language. Some examples: movq %rax, %rbx add rbx, rax (cons a b) a := b; b 1 a + !
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        It's not a "programming style" in this case, assembly is the only "computer language" that doesn't fit the Chomsky hierarchy paradigm, because it is too simple
  - Liquid_Fire 4y ago
    > English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO. Maybe I misunderstood you, but Japanese is neither of those - it's usually SOV, although could be OSV (and you can omit the subject or object sometimes).
macspoofing 4y ago
Very interesting. How does regex/pattern matching work with Kanji? Or does it?
- deleted 4y ago
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- olsgaarddk 4y ago
  It works okay. You can setup unicode blocks and use them. I have a collection of python scripts you can use for text manipulation: - regex:https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master... - translitteration tables: https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master... https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts
samwestdev 4y ago
Should have used Ruby :p
hsn915 4y ago
Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Quite. I suspect there are other natural languages far more suited to programming analogies than Japanese. Latin, anyone?
- dayvid 4y ago
  Programmers are really attracted to Japanese. It's the language with the most over-engineered tools for learning.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college. I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest). Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago. I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.
mrweasel 4y ago
Maybe a little off-topic, but do you in general need to account for larger fonts when designing software to work with kanji og traditional Chinese? It could just be my untrained eyes, but I find it hard to see the details in many of the glyphs.
- blahgeek 4y ago
  Yes. If you compare the dialog UIs between WeChat (the most popular IM in China) and telegram, it’s clear that WeChat’s font size is bigger
  - qwezxcrty 4y ago
    I'm not sure about that.. I just measured on screenshots of WeChat and WhatsApp, at least on my Android phone with no UI customization, the text height only differs by a few pixel. WeChat even have a denser user interface showing more chat channels on a single screen than WhatsApp.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It depends a lot on the text rendering system and screen in question. For the longest time the font rendering in Windows for example was absolutely garbage for kanji/hanzi on screens like most would be using and in that situation, and yes font size generally needed to be larger than it would be for Latin language users. While Windows technically worked for these languages it clearly wasn’t designed for them. This is somewhat fixed in newer releases. On the other hand the text rendering on macOS has handled those characters considerably better at small sizes for the past couple of decades, which isn’t too surprising because macOS has aimed to replicate printed text with more accurate letterforms ever since OS X was released, as opposed to the pixel snapping technique used by Windows’ ClearType which only plays nice with Roman characters. Linux/Freetype has been pretty good with Japanese/Chinese for the past decade too, ever since the improved antialiasing algorithm was added in. HiDPI screens on smartphones, tablets, and laptops handle these characters pretty well regardless of OS because at those pixel densities, text rendering systems can usually render in adequate detail even at small sizes without doing anything special.
w-m 4y ago
As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second language, one would learn that H's at word beginnings need to be pronounced in English. And then the brain sneaks them in with English words that didn't have any to begin with, like hangry, or habout. I find the whole topic of overcompensation super fascinating [1]. Another good one is German ESL speakers subconsciously overcompenthating by changing s into th. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
- Adverblessly 4y ago
  On the subject of typos there's also a "woudl" that should have been a "would"
  - iraldir 4y ago
    thanks, corrected
- iraldir 4y ago
  I definitely know it's wrong, but whether it's a pure typo, or an overcompensation which my brain somehow converted into typing, I wouldn't know. That's definitely a thing though (hilariously shown in what the fuck france: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ)
  - w-m 4y ago
    Ha, of course he would talk about this. But I hadn't seen this one yet, thanks for the link! I've been to his show, my favorite bit was the one about carrelage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls
PurpleRamen 4y ago
TIL Japanese kanjis are like German words, composed to make a new meaning. Quite insightful. Is this also the case for chinese usage of Kanji? I vaguely remember that Japanese language differs from Chinese language because of using sybils or something?
- hsn915 4y ago
  Japanese inherited this property from Chinese. You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first. Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.
- stefncb 4y ago
  Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  In Chinese creative hanzi combination happens a lot more than in Japanese, as in Japanese foreign concepts tend to get transliterated into katakana first, though sometimes you do get kanji combinations, like vending machine -> jidouhanbaiki (自動販売機): automatic selling machine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
999900000999 4y ago
By far the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. In addition to pissing my Korean girlfriend off, it was so difficult I dropped the class after 2 weeks or so. Chinese is much much easier by an order of magnitude. Particularly if your focusing on speech and grammar vs writing. Not that Japanese writing is any easier. Hindsight is 20/20. Shoulda took Spanish...
- presentation 4y ago
  I’ve learned both and found Chinese harder just because if you lose context then it’s hard to understand anything else being spoken. Japanese has more semantic repetition in the sentence structures. Both are equally logical grammatically though, and Chinese does have a much easier time learning character pronunciations.
  - 999900000999 4y ago
    Is English your native language, I find Chinese grammar to be dead simple, at least at an HSK1 level.
  - LZ_Khan 4y ago
    Chinese has easier character pronunciations? I find it hard to believe that. The tones are what makes Chinese the hardest language to learn. Most people who learn Chinese will never be able to sound Chinese. To Chinese people they will look like some fool who has learning deficits (I know this is not true, but the lack of empathy in mono-cultural nations is quite high). I don't think there's any language in the top 20 most popular that punishes you as hard for incorrect pronunciation. While in English having an accent is quite common and charming, in Chinese bad pronunciation will make things incomprehensible. For Japanese on the other hand I have multiple friends who after a couple years are indistinguishable from natives. The pronunciation system in Japanese is super easy in my opinion. It's almost a subset of the English language.
    - vertexmachina 4y ago
      In my experience, Chinese people are thrilled when non-Chinese people speak their language (even poorly), probably because it's pretty rare. But yes, the tones are the hard part. The grammar is straight forward and similar to English, and characters are (almost always) pronounced only one way.
aeonik 4y ago
In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel. Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now. You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out): In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば). Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいうお). The middle character in "青い魚 (あおいうお)" is い, which is a form of the auxiliary verb "to be". In this case, it indicates that the noun "fish" (魚) is in a state of being "blue" (青い). By using the auxiliary verb "to be", the phrase "blue fish" (青い魚) can refer to any fish that is blue, as opposed to a specific type of fish like mackerel (鯖). This helps to avoid confusion and allows for a clear distinction between different types of fish.
- hsn915 4y ago
  ChatGPT's response is full of BS. 青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいうお The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix. 青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.
  - aeonik 4y ago
    I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea. Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.
    - hsn915 4y ago
      What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together? There's no technique per se. It's just the character size. Example: 好 vs 女子
      - aeonik 4y ago
        Exactly, thanks for the information!
    - fenomas 4y ago
rideontime 4y ago
The AI-generated origins of the shrine image at the foot of the article are extremely obvious, btw.
- iraldir 4y ago
  I mean, yes... and? It's a pretty image is it not?
teddyh 4y ago
“The bottom line is that Politeness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don't even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.” — So You Want To Learn Japanese http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm
- janeerie 4y ago
  This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. I used to work for a Japanese company and was surrounded by anime fans who had fantasies of learning the language. I was perfectly happy to work with our translators.
hikkijp 4y ago
It's no different from english or probably most other languages if you think every character is a primitive. Example: word.new("T", "E", "A") would be equivalent to word.new("牛"). Then word.new(word.new("T", "E", "A"), word.new("S", "P", "O", "O", "N")) would be equivalent to word.new(word.new("牛"), word.new("肉")). Next concept the author mixed is working with the verbs, verb.new(word.new("E", "A", "T")).PastTense() would give you "ate" Just like verb.new(word.new("食", "べ", "る")).Polite().Past() would output "食べました" Then working with sentences, ex: Topic.new("me").toString() would be just "meは"... Put it all together and output everything subject > object > verb, instead of the more familiar subject > verb > object. The author mixed a lot of those grammar concepts, with the words etymology... and it got confusing. "2 kanjis becoming 1" is just the radical. 涙 (tear) 汗 (sweat) 泳ぐ (swim) 沈む (sink) 溺れる (drown), they all share the same radical (氵/sanzui/mizu/water). While it's not a rule, they are likely to have some relation to it. Just like in english waterfall, waterproof, waterspout, watermelon, etc. I like the fact that the author is fascinated by the Japanese language and wants to share his discoveries. I guess everybody learning a seemingly completely new (unrelated to anything you know), experiences a similar phase. In his case he found similarities with a programming language. And I guess we all do that, we connect the things we're learning to the things we already know. Someone learning english would probably be equally amazed by the watermelon. I mean... It's not so surprising if watermelon in your native language is, let's say: Melancia (portuguese). It takes half of the discovery surprise from you, as you already could suppose it's melon related. I can't deny, "Fire + Mountain = Vulcan" was awesome to me as well. Learning that "Vulcan = god of fire in ancient roman mythology" does not hit me the same way, I already expect it to be greek/roman/latin.
- amiga386 4y ago
  One of the things I like about Japanese are the particles, but I don't know enough about the language to say if they're completely interchangable in any order. e.g. could you say things in these orders in Japanese? You can't in English, it just doesn't sound right. ジェームズはダブリンに車で水曜日に行きました。 James-subject Dublin-to car-using Wednesday-on went. James went to Dublin in a car on Wednesday. ダブリンに水曜日に車でジェームズは行きました。 Dublin-to Wednesday-on car-using James-subject went. To Dublin on Wednesday in a car, James went. In charge of words, Yoda was. 水曜日に車でジェームズはダブリンに行きました。 Wednesday-on car-using James-subject Dublin-to went. On Wednesday, in a car, James went to Dublin. Similarly, specific to English, there is a definite order in which you have to place adjectives. You can pile up adjectives in front of a noun, but unless they're in the right order, they just don't sound right. "The big red balloon" works, "the red big balloon" is just wrong. As far as I know, Japanese does not have such restrictions. So something the author has noticed, and as far as I know is correct, is that Japanese is a significantly more composable language than English.
crosser 4y ago
That was fascinating reading, thank you! I take an issue though with this assertion: > The order [...] is quite different to english but very similar to functional programming. The most widely accepted (imo) order of function composition is right to left: send(makeUrl("http://...")) just like in English "blue fish": transformation stands to the left to the object that is being transformed (*). Whereas "transformation follows the object" is an OO tradition, as shown in your examples. "Take object, apply transformation (method) yielding another object, apply transformation to that new object, etc." (*) In quintessentially functional Haskell, you can compose functions both ways, but right-to-left is more traditional: {- - Find numeric value of the first figure of the decimal representation - of a number: - 1. convert it to a string of decimal characters (show) - 2. take the first character of the string (head) - 3. convert the character to a string containing one charcter (:[]) - 4. convert the string of one decimal character into an integer (read :: Int) -} main = do let firstfigure1 :: Int firstfigure1 = read . (:[]) . head . show $ 413 print firstfigure1 {- - Reverse the order of composition. Define "right-pointing" versions for - (.) and ($) -} let (.>) = flip (.) -- it will become infixl 9 by default ($>) = flip ($) infixr 0 $> -- We need value lower than the above. Use the same as $ firstfigure2 :: Int firstfigure2 = 413 $> show .> head .> (:[]) .> read :: Int print firstfigure2
brthsim 4y ago
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abecedarius 4y ago
Surprised this post didn't mention Forth. https://arcanesentiment.blogspot.com/2011/02/japanese-lisp-forth-and-historical.html https://arcanesentiment.blogspot.com/2011/02/japanese-lisp-f... BTW this toy language came up in my search for the above: https://gist.github.com/typeswitch-dev/ac86d7e32167c1e5bf311c796cedc1a8 https://gist.github.com/typeswitch-dev/ac86d7e32167c1e5bf311...
- int_19h 4y ago
  What makes Forth really distinctive is LIFO, not merely being postfix. You can have stack-based LIFO human languages, too, but it's very hard for humans to parse things that correspond to non-trivial nested constructs in them because of the need to maintain said mental stack. Fith is/was a conlang built on that idea: http://web.archive.org/web/20110610231636/http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20110610231636/http://www.langmak...
  - abecedarius 4y ago
    Nice find! It may be interesting to compare Shallow Fith to Japanese grammar -- I don't know Japanese, but I have played with variations on Forth to try for better readability. While Forth has little point nowadays, RPN still is worth keeping in mind for combining direct manipulation with programmability in UIs.
laurieg 4y ago
Here's my take on explaining Japanese as a programming language. Verbs are functions. In English, arguments are positional. SUBJECT verb OBJECT. I eat pizza. But in Japanese they are named arguments with small helper words called particles. The subject uses 'wa' and the object used 'wo'. The convention is postfix in contrast to English's prefix notation. Watashi-wa pizza-wo taberu. With other verbs English uses named arguments too: I go to the bank by car. Japanese uses "e" and "de" for the arguments to this verb. Car is kuruma so "by car" becomes "kuruma-de". Watashi-wa kuruma-de ginko-e iku Obviously this is a massive simplification but I always found thinking about verbs as functions and the other words as named arguments to be very easy to understand. (Edited for clarity)
- lighttower 4y ago
  did you misspell "ha" instead of "wa"¿
  - laurieg 4y ago
    Yes, but with good reason. It's pronounced "was" but always written and typed as "ha".
antiterra 4y ago
I recognize that one can’t expect English speakers to consistently pluralize foreign words in ways that match the origin language, and that it is not objectively incorrect when people just add an s. However, in my opinion, an article purporting to inform about Japanese in a programmatic way really should avoid using “hiraganas,” “kanjis” and “katakanas” as pluralization of thise terms.
- karaokeyoga 4y ago
  Maybe a refactor is in order.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Those are just plain wrong. It's like talking about "English alphabets". There's only one. What they mean is "hiragana characters", etc.
  - antiterra 4y ago
    It looks like it’s been edited and is far more agreeable to the idea that ‘hiragana’ et al are already plural.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      It's not plural at all; it doesn't even make sense. This is like debating whether the word "happiness" is singular or plural. There's no such thing as "a hiragana".
      - antiterra 4y ago
        In regular usage there definitely is, it’s easy to find something like this on a Japanese website: “どの漢字がどのひらがなになったの？” That means “Which kanji became which hiragana?” If there’s no such thing as ‘a hiragana’ that wouldn’t make sense. As for kanji, “この漢字” also shows up all the time when referring to a specific character. References to specific amount of kanji are everywhere too, eg the “100 Kanji” here. https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-08-EK-1085796 https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-08-EK-1085796
philsnow 4y ago
The author has discovered (linguistic) morphology. The `setRole` function he describes compiles to various morphemes in Japanese like は, を, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) We have this in English too except remarkably little of it actually comes out. Pluralization and possession being marked with -(e)s and -'s suffixes, and "subject-verb agreement" (one wouldn't say "the birds eats the food" but rather "the birds eat the food") are examples of morphology in action in English. Several folks think that the capacity for language in general is common to all humans, and that we have some proto-language hidden away deep in our brains, inaccessible, where our conception of the world bubbles up through layers of our brain/consciousness, until thoughts-as-words eventually fall out of our mouths or onto paper, and then the reverse process happens as well. (Incidentally I think the particle は marks the "topic" of the sentence, not the subject. The subject of the verb is marked with が, and Japanese speakers elide/omit a lot of parts of sentences, so there's tons of sentences where there is no explicit subject but there is a topic. Please correct me here, this is all from faint memory.)
- philsnow 4y ago
  To abuse the idea in the article, you could imagine the layers I mentioned in the brain are various stages of a thought compiler, and English is one front-end. In this analogy, C/Java/whatever are the "thought" and linked executables / bytecode bundles are the "words". Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind). One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.
- Ferret7446 4y ago
  I would hazard a guess that Japanese is the second natural language the author has learned. When you learn your second language, you see the aspects of a language that you never explicitly learned with your first language, and additionally are able to connect that knowledge back to your first language.
javier_e06 4y ago
I once heard that Rails the aggregate object for Person is People. I went like, wow. In Spanish you say: "Baraja la baraja" .. shuffle the deck. Which makes sense (the object changes itself but the verb is the same as the noun" Is like Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
- jacobmartin 4y ago
  The rhetorical device here is called polyptoton. It have noticed it usually sounds clunky in English, though it was a favorite of Latin and Greek authors. For instance, "Et lux perpetua luceat eis," is usually translated, "And may perpetual light shine upon them." But in Latin, the same root is in the subject and the verb. "And may perpetual light light them," is grammatical and (mostly) semantically equivalent in English. But it sounds clunky and looks like a typo :P My uninformed supposition would be that it sounds clunky in English because English has less variation in word morphology, so the words are too similar when they have the same root.
greybox 4y ago
I can see where the author is comming from . . . although its a bit of romanticism. Japanese is extremely regular, which makes the grammar easier to learn though it is completely different to any language with indo-european roots. For valuable insights into Japanese grammar I recommend 'Making Sense of Japanese' by Jay Ruben (he translated works of Murukami including Norwegian Wood into English). Also a youtube channel Cure Dolly https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Who sadly died a few years ago, but who's insights nonetheless are very helpful (if you can get past the modified voice audio) It was a coincidence that I had just finished some reviews on wanikani just before reading this. I find it very helpful along with using the Core 2k/6k Anki deck for learning Vocabulary.
katsura 4y ago
What's most interesting to me about Japanese is that if you look at the Wikipedia page for most spoken languages [0], all of the top 15 show more than 10 million people who speak the language as a second language, except Japanese, there only 0.1 million (100k) is shown. This means that either there is no good way to track this, or barely anybody gets to a level in Japanese where they would end up in the statistics. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
DennisP 4y ago
Back in the early 2000s I saw a wonderful 3-part series explaining Japanese as a context-free grammar. It was on kuro5hin, which later shut down and everything disappeared. At one point I was able to find two of those posts archived, but never the whole thing. For a moment the title got my hopes up.
praveen9920 4y ago
I wonder if there is any "natural" language which has the precision of programming language, Perhaps there are efforts to create one? I believe a language like that could be truly globalised without any cultural aspects
0xmarcin 4y ago
For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example). Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I see that Japanese culture is based on much more ancient and broad Chinese culture. I also see a pick up in interests to learn Mandarin among my friends/coworkers. I watched a few Chinese movies and I have to say they bring a breath of fresh air. I think whenever we want it or not we will see more Chinese media in the future, simply because they are different from what a typical person is used too. That makes them more interesting at least in the beginning.
- MrOwnPut 4y ago
  > For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). It's popular among all types, very much so in the states and France due to anime. But they export A LOT of culture. and they are very good at streamlining that export. Fashion, video games, anime, food, etc. It's really no surprise it's popular. If you end up consuming the culture (as many of us did as kids) you will be attracted to the origins of it as it contains many elements of the culture you consumed. But yes, there's a lot of cross over between "nerds" or "otaku" and Japanese culture exports. I assume because they didn't fit into their home culture fully, so they found escape in another foreign one that was adapted for them, and thus found a community to share common interests with, which reinforces that "obsession". tldr: you can nerd/otaku out on anything, but Japan makes some good stuff to nerd out on, so you get hardcore fans.
terrorOf 4y ago
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janniks 4y ago
Great stuff!! If there were a whole course in this style, I would pay good money for it!

346 points by iraldir 4y ago

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji. Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop. No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only way you are going to gain any sort of fluency. Just knowing that X translates to Y is not going to help you, even if you memorise the whole dictionary. You might get away with translating back into your native tongue with a Western language, but you won't with Japanese. With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar and other aspects. It's just your choice if your want to do it the hard way (textbook theory) or the harder way (immersion via graded readers, conversations with patient natives, or anything else similar). All the time and effort people put into rote-learning Japanese Kanji should really be expended learning Japanese in a more holistic way. Otherwise you might as well just buy one of those books with set-phrases such as "where's the toilet".

david04 4y ago
> With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".
- wst_ 4y ago
  Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows. It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto). Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?
- frogulis 4y ago
  Incomprehensible to me. Learning the grammar of a language is the most fun part, in my opinion! Vocab is hard work, but learning ways to form a sentence? Magical.
  - xvilka 4y ago
    Agree, learning vocabulary or characters is the most boring part of any language.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  It can work for some people? You aren’t so much not learning grammar as you are inferring the grammar via practice instead of up front studying the rules. Like the difference between training a neural network to compile code vs writing a parser.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Eh, worked fine for me in Latin. Well, until "Hannibal, with his friends, the Romans, traversed the alps". At least my teacher had her laugh for the year.
0x2c8 4y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, I do not believe the author tried to "promote rote-learning" here -- they just presented a nice little analogy between Japanese and programming constructs.
airstrike 4y ago
I tried learning it with Duolingo and was disappointed to see it was just trying to teach me characters via rote-memorization... gave up after a 10-day streak
- Tor3 4y ago
  Duolingo doesn't manage to show you the structure of the language. I wasted a very long time with Duolingo. It's much better to use the time on just about anything else if you want to learn Japanese.
fenomas 4y ago
Who are you responding to? TFA doesn't discuss learning methods at all, let alone "promoting the rote-learning of Kanji". Is it just the mention of WaniKani? Personally I don't like WK either, but the author barely mentioned it in passing, and says nothing at all about the stuff you're criticizing.
louhike 4y ago
Yes! And I would insist that learning how the language works is easier, even if it might seem more intimidating at first. If you just want to get by for your holidays, sure just learn to translate with Duolingo. But if want to speak the language, you will just lose time.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean it's probably the best way to get some basic proficiency in a language or any skill, teach you enough to become familiar with the language and give you the confidence to move to the next level. Rote learning and gamified approaches like duolingo have a low barrier to entry; buying a textbook, enrolling in a class or living in the country for a year are much higher and the latter two are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for casual learners.
iraldir 4y ago
For the spoken language I whole heartedly agree, but as far as reading is concerned, immersion is super hard. Most resource won't have furigana and even with the one that do, it's "down one ear and out the other", I don't particularly learn to read Kanjis this way. Once you've got a base of say the 500 most used kanji, and you're able to recognise patterns (components, composition) of kanjis then it's a different story. I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.
- kouteiheika 4y ago
  > However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご. FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji. Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Oh wow. Difficulty lists for books too? With vocab lists! This is awesome!
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    This is a very nice website! Thank you to share. Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")
    - kouteiheika 4y ago
      > Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...") All of the stats are calculated by me analyzing texts from my corpus. If you follow the link that I've pasted and click on "Used in" then you can see where exactly this form of the word is used. リンゴ is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ/used-in 林檎 is used in: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/林檎/used-in So you can see that the kanji form is used relatively often in novels (which makes sense, as those often use higher level/more flower-y language). (I also use modern news articles in my corpus and that's also included in the stats, although this isn't shown on the "used in" pages.)
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> You need to learn to think in the language you are learning The article uses code to illustrate how this might be different thinking in Japanese with a URL request: > request.setURL("serverurl").send()" I think there is formality/ceremony here like "I have a request, it is for this URL, and I want to send" vs. the other style in the article: send().request.setURL("serverurl") is more forceful as in "I'm sending you a request for this URL" there is no politeness of the exchange. I almost had a business trip to Japan some years back and people were discussing the formal and polite ceremonial business card exchange process with certain sequences of presenting, bowing, etc. I think learning about the cultural norms might be a key here with learning the language and the reasons why things are structured differently.
TheDong 4y ago
> really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji > its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop First, let me say that you may be responding to a strawman. There's few-to-zero people who will recommend memorizing kanji to the exclusion of learning grammar and other aspects. Realistically, people who promote rote-memorization of kanji are also suggesting to learn grammar, attempt to think in the language (not translate in their head), and suggesting immersing/talking/etc as much as possible too. So, let me ask you, what do you suggest people do instead of rote-memorization of the readings of kanji? How do you suggest someone become able to read a sentence in japanese, guess the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, if they have not memorized how to pronounce the relevant kanji? Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?
- ickoonite 4y ago
  > Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves? They do indeed, but in a context of everyday immersion, so it’s not rote learning to the exclusion of all else.
coliveira 4y ago
And language "learning" via duolingo was tremendous disservice provided by technology. They basically took the worst method of learning (flashcards) and made it available in the 21st century as something "revolutionary".
freeopinion 4y ago
I have often thought that people who advocate anything but rote-learning of English spelling are misguided. I know that phonetics are a popular myth in English. Rote learning of English spelling is a much more daunting task than rote learning of kanji. To unfairly cherry-pick from the paragraph above, the English word "person" is about 10 strokes; "people" is also 10 strokes. But there is no obvious connection between the two words and the different spellings have to be memorized individually. 人 is two strokes; 人人 is four strokes; 人々 is six? All are easier to memorize, easier to write, and easier to read. Of course, I might have cherry-picked the most extreme comparison. But even that little four letter word "myth" is 9 strokes and must be rote memorized. It is a small word in English. Somebody else can correct my belief that 9 strokes is not short in kanji. Ok, I'll correct myself. 神話 is a 9? stroke character and a 13? stroke character. So 22 strokes total? It's funny what we convince ourselves to believe when we cherry-pick. "God talk" is a 5 stroke word + an 8 stroke word. "God speek" is 5+10. So even if I go out of my way to justify my belief in Japanese brevity I have to start rethinking. Maybe if I can think of a word like "deity" or something with even more strokes I could eventually avoid having to adopt a new position on which language is easier. Another observation is the number of times each day a Japanese person whips up their hand as a chalkboard and asks, "This or this?" while air drawing out two different kanji. The fact that the observer can recognize the characters written in air has always seemed instructive to me, though.

louhike 4y ago

Just a nitpick but the particle “ha”/“は” is not really used to set the subject but the topic or context. The topic or context can often be the subject but it’s an important subtlety. The particle to set the subject is “ga”/“が”.

Tor3 4y ago
A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.
- shiomiru 4y ago
  Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?
  - louhike 4y ago
    That may seem strange but that would be 「私が」私は牛乳を食べます
    - shiomiru 4y ago
      That's interesting. It indeed seems unnatural because I've never heard anybody say it like that - my impression is that you generally can't just use both particles with the same subject for the same sentence (or at least not like this.) But maybe that's just because of my inexperience. Do you have a real-life example of this pattern being used? (It's also strange because I typoed 牛肉 in my earlier comment, and milk is difficult to eat. Sorry for the confusion.)
    - Tor3 4y ago
      Almost - you would write it 私は「私が」牛乳を食べます, and obviously 私は doesn't serve a grammatical purpose, it only has an indicative function.
    - louhike 4y ago
      Yes, thanks for the correction tor3!

Cruncharoo 4y ago

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

karatinversion 4y ago
Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.
- thegeomaster 4y ago
  Not just France, I think the majority of Europe is like that. Here in the Balkans, local dubs of anime (Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ...) were 90% of what we watched on TV as kids.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Add on Pokemon and Sailor Moon and that also describes the US.
    - anthk 4y ago
      In Spain we finished DBZ in ~1993 or so. That makes me smile when some Americans say "in the West, in early 90's, no one knew about manganime/Japanese video game"... while in Spain, France and Italy in the 90's we already had a long way along that culture. By 1998-9, go figure, we were watching Dragon Ball GT. Yes, we saw DBGT before Pokémon. In the West. Something very odd to explain to Americans, often they didn't believe me. Until I show them the printed proofs of Spanish magazines about DB with a clear Copyright date, which is understood from nearly anyone in the world.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.

Tor3 4y ago

As for explaining Japanese to programmers.. When I try to explain basic Japanese grammar to people in general, they always respond "Sounds complicated". But if I explain basic Japanese grammar to long-time programmers they simply reply "Sounds logical." (Edit: Added 'basic' - I don't go around trying to explain Japanese grammar in full..)

vvilliamperez 4y ago

request.setURL("serverurl").send() This style of sentence structure was one of the strangest things to get comfortable with. You have to think a bit differently. The function chaining makes sense here and I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. Anyone interested in the language should definitely check out the Genki series. It's written well enough you could fully teach yourself. https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/intro/ https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/intro/ or amazon.

kijin 4y ago
The Japanese language does lend itself easily to an endless chain of run-on sentences where the subject quickly becomes blurry. Very useful for programmers and politicians alike. :p
chris_st 4y ago
> I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.
- vvilliamperez 4y ago
  Yeah that's the link what I was referring to, I forgot to add context. What I meant was if Matz "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple" was due in part to the way the language is spoken.
  - corroclaro 4y ago
    Possibly inspired by message parsing objects in Smalltalk, no?
zirgs 4y ago
That's only a problem if your native language has strict word order.

ickoonite 4y ago

I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.

capableweb 4y ago
Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it. English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
  - makaren 4y ago
    My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough. French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.

raverbashing 4y ago

> The japanese standard library offers a bunch of chainable functions to add meaning to your primitive types. English and French work in the same way. However roles are usually determined by word order. But in essence it's the same thing as obj.do_stuff(), 'obj' is the thing that do_stuff.

Conan_Kudo 4y ago
English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO. I've never really thought of programming languages in passive voice before, but it explains why I've increasingly written and spoken in passive voice structure even though I know it's "wrong" to do so.
- kibwen 4y ago
  I wouldn't say that programming is expressed as OVS. Function calls are VSO, e.g. `push(array, element)`. Method calls are SVO, `array.push(element)`. I speculate that this is why method-style dot-notation has become so dominant over the past few decades, because of its natural familiarity to English speakers as compared to the functional VSO style.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    Programming doesn't have a definite order, it depends on language. Some examples: movq %rax, %rbx add rbx, rax (cons a b) a := b; b 1 a + !
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      It's not a "programming style" in this case, assembly is the only "computer language" that doesn't fit the Chomsky hierarchy paradigm, because it is too simple
- Liquid_Fire 4y ago
  > English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO. Maybe I misunderstood you, but Japanese is neither of those - it's usually SOV, although could be OSV (and you can omit the subject or object sometimes).

macspoofing 4y ago

Very interesting. How does regex/pattern matching work with Kanji? Or does it?

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olsgaarddk 4y ago
It works okay. You can setup unicode blocks and use them. I have a collection of python scripts you can use for text manipulation: - regex:https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master... - translitteration tables: https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master... https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts

samwestdev 4y ago

Should have used Ruby :p

hsn915 4y ago

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

ickoonite 4y ago
Quite. I suspect there are other natural languages far more suited to programming analogies than Japanese. Latin, anyone?
dayvid 4y ago
Programmers are really attracted to Japanese. It's the language with the most over-engineered tools for learning.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college. I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest). Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago. I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.

mrweasel 4y ago

Maybe a little off-topic, but do you in general need to account for larger fonts when designing software to work with kanji og traditional Chinese? It could just be my untrained eyes, but I find it hard to see the details in many of the glyphs.

blahgeek 4y ago
Yes. If you compare the dialog UIs between WeChat (the most popular IM in China) and telegram, it’s clear that WeChat’s font size is bigger
- qwezxcrty 4y ago
  I'm not sure about that.. I just measured on screenshots of WeChat and WhatsApp, at least on my Android phone with no UI customization, the text height only differs by a few pixel. WeChat even have a denser user interface showing more chat channels on a single screen than WhatsApp.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
It depends a lot on the text rendering system and screen in question. For the longest time the font rendering in Windows for example was absolutely garbage for kanji/hanzi on screens like most would be using and in that situation, and yes font size generally needed to be larger than it would be for Latin language users. While Windows technically worked for these languages it clearly wasn’t designed for them. This is somewhat fixed in newer releases. On the other hand the text rendering on macOS has handled those characters considerably better at small sizes for the past couple of decades, which isn’t too surprising because macOS has aimed to replicate printed text with more accurate letterforms ever since OS X was released, as opposed to the pixel snapping technique used by Windows’ ClearType which only plays nice with Roman characters. Linux/Freetype has been pretty good with Japanese/Chinese for the past decade too, ever since the improved antialiasing algorithm was added in. HiDPI screens on smartphones, tablets, and laptops handle these characters pretty well regardless of OS because at those pixel densities, text rendering systems can usually render in adequate detail even at small sizes without doing anything special.

w-m 4y ago

As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second language, one would learn that H's at word beginnings need to be pronounced in English. And then the brain sneaks them in with English words that didn't have any to begin with, like hangry, or habout. I find the whole topic of overcompensation super fascinating [1]. Another good one is German ESL speakers subconsciously overcompenthating by changing s into th. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

Adverblessly 4y ago
On the subject of typos there's also a "woudl" that should have been a "would"
- iraldir 4y ago
  thanks, corrected
iraldir 4y ago
I definitely know it's wrong, but whether it's a pure typo, or an overcompensation which my brain somehow converted into typing, I wouldn't know. That's definitely a thing though (hilariously shown in what the fuck france: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ)
- w-m 4y ago
  Ha, of course he would talk about this. But I hadn't seen this one yet, thanks for the link! I've been to his show, my favorite bit was the one about carrelage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls

PurpleRamen 4y ago

TIL Japanese kanjis are like German words, composed to make a new meaning. Quite insightful. Is this also the case for chinese usage of Kanji? I vaguely remember that Japanese language differs from Chinese language because of using sybils or something?

hsn915 4y ago
Japanese inherited this property from Chinese. You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first. Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.
stefncb 4y ago
Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.
tmtvl 4y ago
In Chinese creative hanzi combination happens a lot more than in Japanese, as in Japanese foreign concepts tend to get transliterated into katakana first, though sometimes you do get kanji combinations, like vending machine -> jidouhanbaiki (自動販売機): automatic selling machine.
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999900000999 4y ago

By far the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. In addition to pissing my Korean girlfriend off, it was so difficult I dropped the class after 2 weeks or so. Chinese is much much easier by an order of magnitude. Particularly if your focusing on speech and grammar vs writing. Not that Japanese writing is any easier. Hindsight is 20/20. Shoulda took Spanish...

presentation 4y ago
I’ve learned both and found Chinese harder just because if you lose context then it’s hard to understand anything else being spoken. Japanese has more semantic repetition in the sentence structures. Both are equally logical grammatically though, and Chinese does have a much easier time learning character pronunciations.
- 999900000999 4y ago
  Is English your native language, I find Chinese grammar to be dead simple, at least at an HSK1 level.
- LZ_Khan 4y ago
  Chinese has easier character pronunciations? I find it hard to believe that. The tones are what makes Chinese the hardest language to learn. Most people who learn Chinese will never be able to sound Chinese. To Chinese people they will look like some fool who has learning deficits (I know this is not true, but the lack of empathy in mono-cultural nations is quite high). I don't think there's any language in the top 20 most popular that punishes you as hard for incorrect pronunciation. While in English having an accent is quite common and charming, in Chinese bad pronunciation will make things incomprehensible. For Japanese on the other hand I have multiple friends who after a couple years are indistinguishable from natives. The pronunciation system in Japanese is super easy in my opinion. It's almost a subset of the English language.
  - vertexmachina 4y ago
    In my experience, Chinese people are thrilled when non-Chinese people speak their language (even poorly), probably because it's pretty rare. But yes, the tones are the hard part. The grammar is straight forward and similar to English, and characters are (almost always) pronounced only one way.

aeonik 4y ago

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel. Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now. You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out): In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば). Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいうお). The middle character in "青い魚 (あおいうお)" is い, which is a form of the auxiliary verb "to be". In this case, it indicates that the noun "fish" (魚) is in a state of being "blue" (青い). By using the auxiliary verb "to be", the phrase "blue fish" (青い魚) can refer to any fish that is blue, as opposed to a specific type of fish like mackerel (鯖). This helps to avoid confusion and allows for a clear distinction between different types of fish.

hsn915 4y ago
ChatGPT's response is full of BS. 青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいうお The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix. 青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.
- aeonik 4y ago
  I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea. Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.
  - hsn915 4y ago
    What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together? There's no technique per se. It's just the character size. Example: 好 vs 女子
    - aeonik 4y ago
      Exactly, thanks for the information!
  - fenomas 4y ago

rideontime 4y ago

The AI-generated origins of the shrine image at the foot of the article are extremely obvious, btw.

iraldir 4y ago
I mean, yes... and? It's a pretty image is it not?

teddyh 4y ago

“The bottom line is that Politeness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don't even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.” — So You Want To Learn Japanese http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm

janeerie 4y ago
This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. I used to work for a Japanese company and was surrounded by anime fans who had fantasies of learning the language. I was perfectly happy to work with our translators.

hikkijp 4y ago

It's no different from english or probably most other languages if you think every character is a primitive. Example: word.new("T", "E", "A") would be equivalent to word.new("牛"). Then word.new(word.new("T", "E", "A"), word.new("S", "P", "O", "O", "N")) would be equivalent to word.new(word.new("牛"), word.new("肉")). Next concept the author mixed is working with the verbs, verb.new(word.new("E", "A", "T")).PastTense() would give you "ate" Just like verb.new(word.new("食", "べ", "る")).Polite().Past() would output "食べました" Then working with sentences, ex: Topic.new("me").toString() would be just "meは"... Put it all together and output everything subject > object > verb, instead of the more familiar subject > verb > object. The author mixed a lot of those grammar concepts, with the words etymology... and it got confusing. "2 kanjis becoming 1" is just the radical. 涙 (tear) 汗 (sweat) 泳ぐ (swim) 沈む (sink) 溺れる (drown), they all share the same radical (氵/sanzui/mizu/water). While it's not a rule, they are likely to have some relation to it. Just like in english waterfall, waterproof, waterspout, watermelon, etc. I like the fact that the author is fascinated by the Japanese language and wants to share his discoveries. I guess everybody learning a seemingly completely new (unrelated to anything you know), experiences a similar phase. In his case he found similarities with a programming language. And I guess we all do that, we connect the things we're learning to the things we already know. Someone learning english would probably be equally amazed by the watermelon. I mean... It's not so surprising if watermelon in your native language is, let's say: Melancia (portuguese). It takes half of the discovery surprise from you, as you already could suppose it's melon related. I can't deny, "Fire + Mountain = Vulcan" was awesome to me as well. Learning that "Vulcan = god of fire in ancient roman mythology" does not hit me the same way, I already expect it to be greek/roman/latin.

amiga386 4y ago
One of the things I like about Japanese are the particles, but I don't know enough about the language to say if they're completely interchangable in any order. e.g. could you say things in these orders in Japanese? You can't in English, it just doesn't sound right. ジェームズはダブリンに車で水曜日に行きました。 James-subject Dublin-to car-using Wednesday-on went. James went to Dublin in a car on Wednesday. ダブリンに水曜日に車でジェームズは行きました。 Dublin-to Wednesday-on car-using James-subject went. To Dublin on Wednesday in a car, James went. In charge of words, Yoda was. 水曜日に車でジェームズはダブリンに行きました。 Wednesday-on car-using James-subject Dublin-to went. On Wednesday, in a car, James went to Dublin. Similarly, specific to English, there is a definite order in which you have to place adjectives. You can pile up adjectives in front of a noun, but unless they're in the right order, they just don't sound right. "The big red balloon" works, "the red big balloon" is just wrong. As far as I know, Japanese does not have such restrictions. So something the author has noticed, and as far as I know is correct, is that Japanese is a significantly more composable language than English.

crosser 4y ago

That was fascinating reading, thank you! I take an issue though with this assertion: > The order [...] is quite different to english but very similar to functional programming. The most widely accepted (imo) order of function composition is right to left: send(makeUrl("http://...")) just like in English "blue fish": transformation stands to the left to the object that is being transformed (*). Whereas "transformation follows the object" is an OO tradition, as shown in your examples. "Take object, apply transformation (method) yielding another object, apply transformation to that new object, etc." (*) In quintessentially functional Haskell, you can compose functions both ways, but right-to-left is more traditional: {- - Find numeric value of the first figure of the decimal representation - of a number: - 1. convert it to a string of decimal characters (show) - 2. take the first character of the string (head) - 3. convert the character to a string containing one charcter (:[]) - 4. convert the string of one decimal character into an integer (read :: Int) -} main = do let firstfigure1 :: Int firstfigure1 = read . (:[]) . head . show $ 413 print firstfigure1 {- - Reverse the order of composition. Define "right-pointing" versions for - (.) and ($) -} let (.>) = flip (.) -- it will become infixl 9 by default ($>) = flip ($) infixr 0 $> -- We need value lower than the above. Use the same as $ firstfigure2 :: Int firstfigure2 = 413 $> show .> head .> (:[]) .> read :: Int print firstfigure2

brthsim 4y ago

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abecedarius 4y ago

Surprised this post didn't mention Forth. https://arcanesentiment.blogspot.com/2011/02/japanese-lisp-forth-and-historical.html https://arcanesentiment.blogspot.com/2011/02/japanese-lisp-f... BTW this toy language came up in my search for the above: https://gist.github.com/typeswitch-dev/ac86d7e32167c1e5bf311c796cedc1a8 https://gist.github.com/typeswitch-dev/ac86d7e32167c1e5bf311...

int_19h 4y ago
What makes Forth really distinctive is LIFO, not merely being postfix. You can have stack-based LIFO human languages, too, but it's very hard for humans to parse things that correspond to non-trivial nested constructs in them because of the need to maintain said mental stack. Fith is/was a conlang built on that idea: http://web.archive.org/web/20110610231636/http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20110610231636/http://www.langmak...
- abecedarius 4y ago
  Nice find! It may be interesting to compare Shallow Fith to Japanese grammar -- I don't know Japanese, but I have played with variations on Forth to try for better readability. While Forth has little point nowadays, RPN still is worth keeping in mind for combining direct manipulation with programmability in UIs.

laurieg 4y ago

Here's my take on explaining Japanese as a programming language. Verbs are functions. In English, arguments are positional. SUBJECT verb OBJECT. I eat pizza. But in Japanese they are named arguments with small helper words called particles. The subject uses 'wa' and the object used 'wo'. The convention is postfix in contrast to English's prefix notation. Watashi-wa pizza-wo taberu. With other verbs English uses named arguments too: I go to the bank by car. Japanese uses "e" and "de" for the arguments to this verb. Car is kuruma so "by car" becomes "kuruma-de". Watashi-wa kuruma-de ginko-e iku Obviously this is a massive simplification but I always found thinking about verbs as functions and the other words as named arguments to be very easy to understand. (Edited for clarity)

lighttower 4y ago
did you misspell "ha" instead of "wa"¿
- laurieg 4y ago
  Yes, but with good reason. It's pronounced "was" but always written and typed as "ha".

antiterra 4y ago

I recognize that one can’t expect English speakers to consistently pluralize foreign words in ways that match the origin language, and that it is not objectively incorrect when people just add an s. However, in my opinion, an article purporting to inform about Japanese in a programmatic way really should avoid using “hiraganas,” “kanjis” and “katakanas” as pluralization of thise terms.

karaokeyoga 4y ago
Maybe a refactor is in order.
midoridensha 4y ago
Those are just plain wrong. It's like talking about "English alphabets". There's only one. What they mean is "hiragana characters", etc.
- antiterra 4y ago
  It looks like it’s been edited and is far more agreeable to the idea that ‘hiragana’ et al are already plural.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    It's not plural at all; it doesn't even make sense. This is like debating whether the word "happiness" is singular or plural. There's no such thing as "a hiragana".
    - antiterra 4y ago
      In regular usage there definitely is, it’s easy to find something like this on a Japanese website: “どの漢字がどのひらがなになったの？” That means “Which kanji became which hiragana?” If there’s no such thing as ‘a hiragana’ that wouldn’t make sense. As for kanji, “この漢字” also shows up all the time when referring to a specific character. References to specific amount of kanji are everywhere too, eg the “100 Kanji” here. https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-08-EK-1085796 https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/f/dsg-08-EK-1085796

philsnow 4y ago

The author has discovered (linguistic) morphology. The `setRole` function he describes compiles to various morphemes in Japanese like は, を, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics) We have this in English too except remarkably little of it actually comes out. Pluralization and possession being marked with -(e)s and -'s suffixes, and "subject-verb agreement" (one wouldn't say "the birds eats the food" but rather "the birds eat the food") are examples of morphology in action in English. Several folks think that the capacity for language in general is common to all humans, and that we have some proto-language hidden away deep in our brains, inaccessible, where our conception of the world bubbles up through layers of our brain/consciousness, until thoughts-as-words eventually fall out of our mouths or onto paper, and then the reverse process happens as well. (Incidentally I think the particle は marks the "topic" of the sentence, not the subject. The subject of the verb is marked with が, and Japanese speakers elide/omit a lot of parts of sentences, so there's tons of sentences where there is no explicit subject but there is a topic. Please correct me here, this is all from faint memory.)

philsnow 4y ago
To abuse the idea in the article, you could imagine the layers I mentioned in the brain are various stages of a thought compiler, and English is one front-end. In this analogy, C/Java/whatever are the "thought" and linked executables / bytecode bundles are the "words". Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind). One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.
Ferret7446 4y ago
I would hazard a guess that Japanese is the second natural language the author has learned. When you learn your second language, you see the aspects of a language that you never explicitly learned with your first language, and additionally are able to connect that knowledge back to your first language.

javier_e06 4y ago

I once heard that Rails the aggregate object for Person is People. I went like, wow. In Spanish you say: "Baraja la baraja" .. shuffle the deck. Which makes sense (the object changes itself but the verb is the same as the noun" Is like Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

jacobmartin 4y ago
The rhetorical device here is called polyptoton. It have noticed it usually sounds clunky in English, though it was a favorite of Latin and Greek authors. For instance, "Et lux perpetua luceat eis," is usually translated, "And may perpetual light shine upon them." But in Latin, the same root is in the subject and the verb. "And may perpetual light light them," is grammatical and (mostly) semantically equivalent in English. But it sounds clunky and looks like a typo :P My uninformed supposition would be that it sounds clunky in English because English has less variation in word morphology, so the words are too similar when they have the same root.

greybox 4y ago

I can see where the author is comming from . . . although its a bit of romanticism. Japanese is extremely regular, which makes the grammar easier to learn though it is completely different to any language with indo-european roots. For valuable insights into Japanese grammar I recommend 'Making Sense of Japanese' by Jay Ruben (he translated works of Murukami including Norwegian Wood into English). Also a youtube channel Cure Dolly https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Who sadly died a few years ago, but who's insights nonetheless are very helpful (if you can get past the modified voice audio) It was a coincidence that I had just finished some reviews on wanikani just before reading this. I find it very helpful along with using the Core 2k/6k Anki deck for learning Vocabulary.

katsura 4y ago

What's most interesting to me about Japanese is that if you look at the Wikipedia page for most spoken languages [0], all of the top 15 show more than 10 million people who speak the language as a second language, except Japanese, there only 0.1 million (100k) is shown. This means that either there is no good way to track this, or barely anybody gets to a level in Japanese where they would end up in the statistics. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

DennisP 4y ago

Back in the early 2000s I saw a wonderful 3-part series explaining Japanese as a context-free grammar. It was on kuro5hin, which later shut down and everything disappeared. At one point I was able to find two of those posts archived, but never the whole thing. For a moment the title got my hopes up.

praveen9920 4y ago

I wonder if there is any "natural" language which has the precision of programming language, Perhaps there are efforts to create one? I believe a language like that could be truly globalised without any cultural aspects

0xmarcin 4y ago

For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example). Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I see that Japanese culture is based on much more ancient and broad Chinese culture. I also see a pick up in interests to learn Mandarin among my friends/coworkers. I watched a few Chinese movies and I have to say they bring a breath of fresh air. I think whenever we want it or not we will see more Chinese media in the future, simply because they are different from what a typical person is used too. That makes them more interesting at least in the beginning.

MrOwnPut 4y ago
> For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). It's popular among all types, very much so in the states and France due to anime. But they export A LOT of culture. and they are very good at streamlining that export. Fashion, video games, anime, food, etc. It's really no surprise it's popular. If you end up consuming the culture (as many of us did as kids) you will be attracted to the origins of it as it contains many elements of the culture you consumed. But yes, there's a lot of cross over between "nerds" or "otaku" and Japanese culture exports. I assume because they didn't fit into their home culture fully, so they found escape in another foreign one that was adapted for them, and thus found a community to share common interests with, which reinforces that "obsession". tldr: you can nerd/otaku out on anything, but Japan makes some good stuff to nerd out on, so you get hardcore fans.

terrorOf 4y ago

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janniks 4y ago

Great stuff!! If there were a whole course in this style, I would pay good money for it!