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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 nothin

by 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.
  - dayvid 4y ago
    I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe. I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity). Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.
    - sosborn 4y ago
      > Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Live in Japan close to 10 years. Went there speaking basically nothing, left speaking fluently. In my experience, bars are 100% the best way to learn. If bars aren't your thing, social situations are good, but a little bit of booze has a great way of making you not care about making mistakes.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily limited to video games. Japan simply has so many strong otaku (original meaning) subcultures to nerd on, anime/manga/game being the obvious ones (to be more accurate, manga in Japan isn't really a "sub"-culture, but the otaku portion of it is big enough on its own). The only things I can think of that are comparable in the Western world are Star Wars or Sci-Fi in general, and Superhero comics. But I'm not super familiar with Western cultures.
    - fomine3 4y ago
      Disney is a big one
StuffMaster 4y ago
> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology. Do explain!
- davidmurdoch 4y ago
  Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s
  - brozaman 4y ago
    I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      I think you have to go to English vernacular, "as she is spoke" to express especially anger. An angry Dubliner or someone from the midlands for example :-)
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        The Glaswegians would like a word…
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      > I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger. Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.
franciscop 4y ago
Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advantage of Japanese and more programming-like is the combination of kanjis to make up new words but even then the pronunciation might totally change. For example in Spanish: "I eat beef" = "Yo como ternera" = subject + verb + object. Both in Japanese and Spanish, but not in English, you can omit the subject "yo"/"watashi". But this is so syntetic that people wouldn't use normally, I might instead want to say how good cow meat is and say "¡me encanta la ternera!" "Gyuniku ga suge ski!" (transliterated), in Japanese effectively eating up some random letters there.
- wst_ 4y ago
  > [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.
  - b4je7d7wb 4y ago
    He even goes on to give an example of everyday Japanese as something nobody outside of a manga would say.
  - franciscop 4y ago
    You misquoted me :) I said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Combination of kanji to create new words is a feature of Chinese, which Japanese inherits. It’s the same way we (used to) coin words in European languages by reaching for Latin and Greek.
presentation 4y ago
Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    Blame it on the Chinese - Japanese didn't have that many "counter words" until Chinese influence increased that by an order of magnitude or more. As for why you need them, Wikipedia points out that because there's no concept of singular or plural (in general, excepting words like "私たち" for "we"), you may consider all Japanese nouns mass nouns. And with mass nouns in English you usually have to use something similar: ".. loaf of bread" ".. grain of salt". The "solution" is not the same in English as in Japanese (you still use "one, two, three.." in English), but still, you can't just remove it. For Japanese there are other ambiguities which are resolved by the counter system as well. But yes, the counters.. that's one of the bigger stumbling blocks I ran into early on. Learned the numbers, yay! Then learned that I can't use the numbers when I want to say how many there are of something.. I limited myself to the few where I can, as in the counter for flat thin items like e.g. tickets. "にまいください"
SkyBelow 4y ago
At a simple level, the use of particles feels somewhat programming-ish. As one's knowledge expands, the exceptions and idiosyncrasies end up destroying that picture, but I get where it comes from. I would assume it is similar to introducing a programmer to sentence diagramming in English. You start to see patterns and those patterns start feeling like a more formal system. Yet it always ends up crashing down and being too illogical to keep building upon. One aspect that is likely at play is that learning a new language tends to be more formalized than one's understanding of their native language (outside of a sentence diagramming class or similar). When you learn a specific piece of grammar in a new language, you want to understand it formally. That means finding equivalent examples in a native language if they exist, or otherwise formally explaining the distinction between what grammar exists in a native language and the new grammar structure. I think this sort of pattern goes away when one approached fluency (unless they specialize in studying grammar itself in both their native and new language). The eventual goal is for grammar in the new language to feel as natural and yet illogical as grammar in the native language.
Ghoyome 4y ago
My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.
- Agingcoder 4y ago
  No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots. I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written. Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!
  - hsn915 4y ago
    Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it. I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading). Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.
gomibako 4y ago
I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly
- franciscop 4y ago
  I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing. But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try. In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all. And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech. Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.
singlow 4y ago
I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the most common constructions. As a result I often hear people say things like, "this language has pure vowels," or, "this language has very consistent word order," but in fact it is mostly because some teacher emphasized the most regular forms, or the places where it contrasted from their native language. I am not suggesting that all languages are equally irregular, or illogical. But I do think that many times the differences are exaggerated.
- raincom 4y ago
  The best way to teach: start teaching ireggularities first; then teach patterns that cover the whole.
  - jagaerglad 4y ago
    Actual best way to teach: just have conversations about lots of different topics, a lot
- outworlder 4y ago
  That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.
  - panda88888 4y ago
    Sounds a lot like how chatgpt learns :)
  - Groxx 4y ago
    As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity). So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is communicating with you is ignoring that because their personal dialect doesn't have those pauses and you kinda just have to deal with that when it happens. Every other rule-set I've heard has to be accompanied by so many exceptions, and has so many competing schools that disagree, that they're just dogma, not description. And they're extremely hard to remember. So they're more about socially signaling that you're part of the well-educated upper-crust than they are about communication. And yes, I'm an Oxford Comma user. It reduces ambiguity.
hintymad 4y ago
Yeah. Putting the hat of a product manager, I have to ask: what value does this programming analogy offer? Japanese is a pretty structured language that is quite easy to understand. You use particles to "glue" phrases to sentences, and you use conjugations of verbs, for lack of better words, to modify the meaning of a sentence. Of course, there are exceptions and nuances and advanced concepts in Japanese, but it's damn easy to start learning Japanese and I fail to see the utility of using a programming analogy (not that it's not fun, mind you). Or are we saying that programmers are so one-dimensional that have to square any concepts into the round hole of programming?
- suction 4y ago
  [dead]
moomoo11 4y ago
Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.
- hsn915 4y ago
  Learn the hiragana and Katakana on your own, then use JapanesePod101.com material. This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years. But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner. The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange meetups, but if you can find online ways to do it, that should work too. The great thing about podcasts is you can listen to it while walking/commuting/etc. To be quite honest it can be quite an overwhelming endavour, and it's very easy to think "f this I give up I don't care about this anymore". Physiucal language exchange events help give you an "anchor" so that your learning has a purpose: you're meeting people and having positive social experiences with them.
  - moomoo11 4y ago
    thansk so much
    - Tor3 4y ago
      Yes, learn Hiragana and Katakana first. It doesn't take that long. Young people can do it in days or a week, I took about a month or so. But, unlike what I did, and many others do, I recommend learning Hiragana and Katakana at the same time. Most people learn Hiragana first and Katakana second, and will run into trouble with the latter, which also sometimes confuses the Hiragana they have already learned. Imagine learning the alphabet: Do you think it's better to first learn "ABCDEFGH.." and so on and then, after mastering that, start learning "abcdefgh.." Or wouldn't it be better to learn "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh.. " right from the start. I'm now a firm believer that the last method is better, and as you can think of Katakana as the cursive version of Hiragana (which is why it's used for loan words and also in literature for naming e.g. plant species, "Belladonna"), it makes sense to learn them at the same time. Faster, and avoids later confusion.

by hsn915 4y ago

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.
- dayvid 4y ago
  I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe. I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity). Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.
  - sosborn 4y ago
    > Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Live in Japan close to 10 years. Went there speaking basically nothing, left speaking fluently. In my experience, bars are 100% the best way to learn. If bars aren't your thing, social situations are good, but a little bit of booze has a great way of making you not care about making mistakes.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily limited to video games. Japan simply has so many strong otaku (original meaning) subcultures to nerd on, anime/manga/game being the obvious ones (to be more accurate, manga in Japan isn't really a "sub"-culture, but the otaku portion of it is big enough on its own). The only things I can think of that are comparable in the Western world are Star Wars or Sci-Fi in general, and Superhero comics. But I'm not super familiar with Western cultures.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Disney is a big one

StuffMaster 4y ago

> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology. Do explain!

davidmurdoch 4y ago
Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s
- brozaman 4y ago
  I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty. I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis. On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    I think you have to go to English vernacular, "as she is spoke" to express especially anger. An angry Dubliner or someone from the midlands for example :-)
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      The Glaswegians would like a word…
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    > I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger. Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.

franciscop 4y ago

Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga. You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advantage of Japanese and more programming-like is the combination of kanjis to make up new words but even then the pronunciation might totally change. For example in Spanish: "I eat beef" = "Yo como ternera" = subject + verb + object. Both in Japanese and Spanish, but not in English, you can omit the subject "yo"/"watashi". But this is so syntetic that people wouldn't use normally, I might instead want to say how good cow meat is and say "¡me encanta la ternera!" "Gyuniku ga suge ski!" (transliterated), in Japanese effectively eating up some random letters there.

wst_ 4y ago
> [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.
- b4je7d7wb 4y ago
  He even goes on to give an example of everyday Japanese as something nobody outside of a manga would say.
- franciscop 4y ago
  You misquoted me :) I said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.
ickoonite 4y ago
Combination of kanji to create new words is a feature of Chinese, which Japanese inherits. It’s the same way we (used to) coin words in European languages by reaching for Latin and Greek.

presentation 4y ago

Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.
- Tor3 4y ago
  Blame it on the Chinese - Japanese didn't have that many "counter words" until Chinese influence increased that by an order of magnitude or more. As for why you need them, Wikipedia points out that because there's no concept of singular or plural (in general, excepting words like "私たち" for "we"), you may consider all Japanese nouns mass nouns. And with mass nouns in English you usually have to use something similar: ".. loaf of bread" ".. grain of salt". The "solution" is not the same in English as in Japanese (you still use "one, two, three.." in English), but still, you can't just remove it. For Japanese there are other ambiguities which are resolved by the counter system as well. But yes, the counters.. that's one of the bigger stumbling blocks I ran into early on. Learned the numbers, yay! Then learned that I can't use the numbers when I want to say how many there are of something.. I limited myself to the few where I can, as in the counter for flat thin items like e.g. tickets. "にまいください"

SkyBelow 4y ago

At a simple level, the use of particles feels somewhat programming-ish. As one's knowledge expands, the exceptions and idiosyncrasies end up destroying that picture, but I get where it comes from. I would assume it is similar to introducing a programmer to sentence diagramming in English. You start to see patterns and those patterns start feeling like a more formal system. Yet it always ends up crashing down and being too illogical to keep building upon. One aspect that is likely at play is that learning a new language tends to be more formalized than one's understanding of their native language (outside of a sentence diagramming class or similar). When you learn a specific piece of grammar in a new language, you want to understand it formally. That means finding equivalent examples in a native language if they exist, or otherwise formally explaining the distinction between what grammar exists in a native language and the new grammar structure. I think this sort of pattern goes away when one approached fluency (unless they specialize in studying grammar itself in both their native and new language). The eventual goal is for grammar in the new language to feel as natural and yet illogical as grammar in the native language.

Ghoyome 4y ago

My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.

Agingcoder 4y ago
No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots. I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written. Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!
- hsn915 4y ago
  Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it. I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading). Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.

gomibako 4y ago

I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly

franciscop 4y ago
I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
- filoleg 4y ago
  Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing. But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try. In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all. And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech. Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.

singlow 4y ago

I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the most common constructions. As a result I often hear people say things like, "this language has pure vowels," or, "this language has very consistent word order," but in fact it is mostly because some teacher emphasized the most regular forms, or the places where it contrasted from their native language. I am not suggesting that all languages are equally irregular, or illogical. But I do think that many times the differences are exaggerated.

raincom 4y ago
The best way to teach: start teaching ireggularities first; then teach patterns that cover the whole.
- jagaerglad 4y ago
  Actual best way to teach: just have conversations about lots of different topics, a lot
outworlder 4y ago
That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.
- panda88888 4y ago
  Sounds a lot like how chatgpt learns :)
- Groxx 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity). So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is communicating with you is ignoring that because their personal dialect doesn't have those pauses and you kinda just have to deal with that when it happens. Every other rule-set I've heard has to be accompanied by so many exceptions, and has so many competing schools that disagree, that they're just dogma, not description. And they're extremely hard to remember. So they're more about socially signaling that you're part of the well-educated upper-crust than they are about communication. And yes, I'm an Oxford Comma user. It reduces ambiguity.

hintymad 4y ago

Yeah. Putting the hat of a product manager, I have to ask: what value does this programming analogy offer? Japanese is a pretty structured language that is quite easy to understand. You use particles to "glue" phrases to sentences, and you use conjugations of verbs, for lack of better words, to modify the meaning of a sentence. Of course, there are exceptions and nuances and advanced concepts in Japanese, but it's damn easy to start learning Japanese and I fail to see the utility of using a programming analogy (not that it's not fun, mind you). Or are we saying that programmers are so one-dimensional that have to square any concepts into the round hole of programming?

suction 4y ago
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moomoo11 4y ago

Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.

hsn915 4y ago
Learn the hiragana and Katakana on your own, then use JapanesePod101.com material. This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years. But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner. The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange meetups, but if you can find online ways to do it, that should work too. The great thing about podcasts is you can listen to it while walking/commuting/etc. To be quite honest it can be quite an overwhelming endavour, and it's very easy to think "f this I give up I don't care about this anymore". Physiucal language exchange events help give you an "anchor" so that your learning has a purpose: you're meeting people and having positive social experiences with them.
- moomoo11 4y ago
  thansk so much
  - Tor3 4y ago
    Yes, learn Hiragana and Katakana first. It doesn't take that long. Young people can do it in days or a week, I took about a month or so. But, unlike what I did, and many others do, I recommend learning Hiragana and Katakana at the same time. Most people learn Hiragana first and Katakana second, and will run into trouble with the latter, which also sometimes confuses the Hiragana they have already learned. Imagine learning the alphabet: Do you think it's better to first learn "ABCDEFGH.." and so on and then, after mastering that, start learning "abcdefgh.." Or wouldn't it be better to learn "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh.. " right from the start. I'm now a firm believer that the last method is better, and as you can think of Katakana as the cursive version of Hiragana (which is why it's used for loan words and also in literature for naming e.g. plant species, "Belladonna"), it makes sense to learn them at the same time. Faster, and avoids later confusion.