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I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to
by cedws 2y ago
I'm studying Japanese at the moment and what struck me is how important context is, particularly in reading. You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way.
I think digital is a big crutch for Japanese/Chinese because you have input methods that help you write what you want to say, so you don't actually need to remember how to write kanji as much in daily life.
- ReverseCold 2y ago> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way Are you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- sorokod 2y agoshure!
- DiscourseFan 2y agoreads like it would be pronounced with an aspirated -s- not sh.
- Izkata 2y agoPosted up above, here's a collection of English pronunciation rules that English speakers have internalized so well they can't generally explain them: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html https://www.zompist.com/spell.html "Ghoti" is mentioned a few times there, but basically "fish" is a nonsensical pronunciation that breaks several rules. There's a reason (well, a few reasons) why if you ask English speakers how to pronounce "ghoti" and they've never seen it before, they'll probably all guess some variation of "go-tee" or "go-tie".
- Suppafly 2y agoThat's such a dumb example because it claims to follow english rules for those letters while ignoring the actual rules. It makes a somewhat humorous joke, but people pretending that it means anything linguistically are either ignorant or intentionally trying to confuse people.
- Terr_ 2y ago> You need to know where to read 1-3 letters ahead to read a word and interpret it. That's not really a thing in English It happens in a English too, where you see a chunk of letters and mis-predict which word they represent in a way which affects its meaning [0], and sometimes that will also affect pronunciation. [1] An example from the link: > "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families." A reader linearly scanning along doesn't know whether "complex" is an adjective or a noun, and then whether "houses" is a noun or a verb. I'm pretty sure all human languages have similar problems where a certain amount of look-ahead or backtracking is necessary. For another example to highlight pronunciation changes, consider the ambiguity of: "I saw the rhino live in the zoo." That could mean that the rhino was doing the verb of living, in which it rhymes with "give", or it could also mean that the speaker was seeing it in-person, in which case it rhymes with "drive". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
- joe_the_user 2y ago"I saw the rhino live in the zoo" Might also mean; "Noted native-American zoologist 'I Saw The Rhino' lives at the zoo"
- jibal 2y agoNo it couldn't.
- wkearney99 2y agoGiven shenanigans like "thee stallion" as part of a name... sure it could.
- jibal 2y agoCompletely irrelevant. It couldn't because "live" and "lives" are different words.
- 2y ago
- yongjik 2y agoI agree that Chinese/Japanese has it worse, but any language where "Spelling Bee" is a thing cannot be considered phonetic in a conventional sense.
- zoky 2y agoAnd yet, given the definition and language of origin, most high-level spelling bee participants can make a pretty good guess at spelling a word they may have never seen before. English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
- brigandish 2y ago"ough" has at least 9 different possible pronunciations, how is that phonetic?
- Suppafly 2y ago>"ough" has at least 9 different possible pronunciations, how is that phonetic? Does a language stop being phonetic when you have to include other information provided by the rest of the word? I'm not a linguist by any means, but "ough" being pronounced a couple different ways depending how it's used doesn't seem like it'd preclude the language from being considered phonetic in general.
- brigandish 2y ago9 is not a couple, unless you're in a very open relationship - which English words might be - but a language stops being phonetic at the point that the mappings between symbols and sounds are no longer clear and reliable. The most phonetic languages have one-to-one mappings with very few exceptions e.g. Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Finnish. English, on the other hand, has silent letters, inconsistent mappings even within the same word, exceptions, irregularities, and sounds that are represented by multiple letters and spellings. English is not a phonetic language except in the sense that it does have mappings between sounds and characters, which would make sense if one were to compare it to a wholly written language like Python, but not any human language.
- grisBeik 2y ago> in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way Some context-dependent examples: "read": /ɹid/ vs. /ɹɛd/; "lead": /lid/ vs. /lɛd/ (plumbum); "desert": /ˈdɛz.ɚt/ vs. /dɪˈzɝt/.
- Terr_ 2y agoFor more examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)
- thfuran 2y ago>That's not really a thing in English - a word is a word, and the individual letters that it's composed of are almost always pronounced the same way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoFruit flies like a banana. English has its own ambiguity, so it isn’t really that different. I can only write Chinese via an IME these days. For one, I’m left handed so writing characters was always a struggle since stroke order worked against me, but it’s mostly how I only use Chinese anyways. I told my wife our kid should learn to write via an IME as well and she was just horrified about that, though. None of the teaching material really supports it.
- pfooti 2y agoTime flies. I can't they're too fast.
- wyager 2y agoI've been (very) casually learning Japanese for a couple years, and almost every time I think I find something "weird" that Japanese does, I almost immediately think of a very similar example in English. The alphabet is a pretty awesome invention (alphabet > kana-style syllabary > kanji-style logography) but English writing is at least as complex as JP writing, just in different dimensions. JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's, but they do a good job making up for it by having a few thousand Kanji.
- BeretEnjoyer 2y ago> JP's phonetics, for example, are dead simple compared to English's I'm not so sure about that. Do you know about pitch accent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent
- BalinKing 2y agoIs that any more complicated than English stress, though? And regardless, Japanese has a very small number of phonemes (compared to English) and extremely restricted phonotactics.
- wyager 2y agoYeah, but I don't expect this to be substantively harder than learning most regional accents (could be wrong), and afaik it's also not critical for legibility.
- Tor3 2y agoI'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really know why, or if, there's a problem for native English speakers to learn or "get" pitch accent. For speakers of many other European languages Japanese pitch accent is not tricky. You listen, and then you speak. Just as you would listen to English, and repeat it the same way. Japanese, despite being extremely logical and so beautiful in so many ways, is still hard to learn for me, and of course learning the writing system is not done in the blink of an eye (unlike the Latin-based writing system we use), but pitch accent isn't really the problem here.
- maianhvu 2y agoNot so much in terms of meaning but in terms of pronunciation, sometimes you also need to read ahead in English to know how a certain word is pronounced. For example: "I read a book yesterday." and "I read a book every night." Depending on the context that follows, "read" is pronounced differently. The same thing happens for "present" and "record". Admittedly, these are exceptions to the rule.
- heavyset_go 2y agoWhen teaching reading and English, learning about context clues is one of the ways students are taught to figure out the meaning of words.
- xanderlewis 2y agoI think you’ll find all of those things are true of English too.
- mmarq 2y agoIn English you have to know a word in order to pronounce it. The “ou” diphthong in “hound” and “double” or “would” is pronounced differently. Or “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu”. Or “oo” in “poor” vs “root” Or “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry” I could go on forever. There’s no other western language I know of that behaves like that.
- lsaferite 2y ago> “ieu” in “lieutenant” vs “lieu” > “berry” in “berry” vs “strawberry” Am I misunderstanding the point you are making or is my pronunciation just off? I would pronounce both parts of both examples the same.
- wkat4242 2y agoStrawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Sou the 'e' becomes silent. And Lieutenant as Lutenant (or leftenant in Britain)
- Suppafly 2y ago>Strawberry is often pronounced as Strawbry. Only in some dialects, not in the standard form.
- mhandley 2y agoThat's mostly an British English vs American English distinction: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieutenant https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/lieut... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/strawberry https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/straw...
- cameronh90 2y agoEnglish is a quasi-phonetic language in that most words can be mostly pronounced how they're written, but in some cases it inherits the pronunciation of the language the word came from. I'd imagine many English speakers would consider this an undesirable quirk, though. Indeed, there has been a tendency over the centuries, particularly in the US, to move towards writing words how they sound or pronouncing words how they're written. Lieutenant is an interesting example, since in the UK we pronounce that "lef-tenant" traditionally, but the US moved to the (IMO superior) "lieu-tenant". Nowadays, most young people would probably use the US pronunciation. I do take some slight umbrage with the implication that some people seem to be making in this thread that language features can't be criticised or that one language can't be better than another. I'm don't see why this would necessarily be true. Even with spoken languages. There are a ton of annoying aspects to English that simply aren't issues in other languages, and I think it's fair to criticise other languages for their failings too. This is especially true of writing systems, which are human inventions rather than something we learn intuitively. Logographic/logo-syllabic orthographies are harder to learn and remain proficient at than alphabets/abjads, for native speakers and second language learners alike. Alphabets are an innovation that improved on ancient orthographies and enabled a wider range of people to be able to communicate as easily by writing as they do by speaking. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, the writing systems in China/Japan are associated with other issues we rarely see here. Even dictionaries are a non-obvious challenge with logographic languages, which has resulted in several competing ways to sort words.