/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>http://www.japanator.com/

Is this the new Sankaku Complex?

/n/ thread, not /n/, kill yourself.

Drop the kanji, introduce spaces. WIN WIN for everyone.

Welcome to the 20th century.

Oh, wait, it's actually the 21st century. Guess that makes you a slow poke.

>>3704746
You forgot popularize romaji

I doubt we'll be seeing the Japanese giving up kanji anytime soon, but the language is definitely being eroded with English loanwords. But then so are a lot of other languages.

>>3704745
>New Sankaku?

Well I mean the articles don't look completely pointle-
>Queen's Blade mousepad puts shimapan at your disposal

Welp.

I fucking love kanji. You are all fags.

>>3704796
Hanzi was here, kanji is a loser.

So typing things is the end of a language?

Wow, seems like English has been dead for many years then, doesn't it?

>>3704770
Which is pretty ironic, given how rife with loanwords English is.

The only problem with dropping kanji is that the language is going to be even more reliant on context.

Well, if it makes it easier for me to learn, why the hell not.

>>3704835
Depending on who you talk to, yes. At least as far as casual writing is concerned.

>>3704836
That's only ironic if you're a retard.

>>3704843

Writing things by hand's been going out of favour for quite a while, so seeing it happen with the Japanese language really isn't any shock to anyone. Eventually decent handwriting skills will be seen as useless, one would imagine.

I, personally haven't received a handwritten letter at any point other than my birthday, Christmas or other such holidays.

>>3704862
>I, personally haven't received a handwritten letter at any point other than my birthday, Christmas or other such holidays.

Cool comma usage. Stop ruining English.

>>3704862
>handwritten letter at any point other than my birthday

All I got was an email ;_;

>>3704862

and then you go to college with desks too small to put a laptop on, and are stuck with only a notebook and a pen to take notes.

and then you realize your handwriting looks like that of a 12 year old.

>>3704868

Isn't that what this thread's about?

>>3704879
Terrible handwriting is a sign of intelligence anyway.

>>3704888
O_o

>>3704888

Not quite the case, my father's handwriting is terrible and he's quite well educated.

>>3704862
It might partly be because we don't write by hand much anymore, but I'm talking more about the style of our writing. No one writes flowery ten-page letters ending with "Your humble servant" via email, and most people don't know much about proper grammar, including me. Or is that "myself included"?

>>3704796
I bet you're either gook or chink.

>>3704900
Are you saying quite well educated people are unintelligent?

When your population decreases like Japan's is doing now, so do the people who speak your language (durr). With less people, your country is less important, and less foreign people want to learn your language.

So yes, the Japanese language will eventually go the way of Betamax, but it'll be long after we're all dead, and it will take the remaining Japanese people with it.

>>3704874
You people get cards for important events?

>>3704901

I'd blame the education system. I know for a fact that here grammar isn't taught in schools past Primary level.
I recall having half an entire 12th Grade last year attend a grammar workshop due to the terrible state of, well their grammar.

Terrible handwriting has less to do with technology and more to do with public education not giving fuck.

>>3704900
I think that's what he was getting at.

>>3704917

No, I'm not saying he's intelligent because intelligence is subjective.

>>3704902
Nope, I'm a white amerifag.

>>3704727
>>Everyone knows Japanese is a very difficult language to learn

Extremely hilarious reaction image.jpg

>>3704921
At least they tried a little. When I was in high school we were graded for the content of our English papers, but as long as the writing style wasn't a stream of consciousness mess we wouldn't be penalized for bad grammar. Maybe it was just as well, since high school is a little late to hammer that stuff into students' heads.

Japanese is not hard to learn. You just can't be lazy.

>>3704879
I feel you, except my handwriting hasn't changed since I was 7. Feels bad man.

>>3705001
Mines changed, but not for the better. I can't even read it half the time any more.

>>3704965

Its just that the teachers expect students to have grasp of grammatical structure that they haven't been taught.
"Grammar isn't important, now do a postmodern reading of this text, in addition to 4 other readings that you will not be examined on.", if this is the prevalent idea it is obvious why grammar's deteriorated.

I call semi-bullshit, here.
Japanese is not "very difficult" to learn. It has its quirks but it's nowhere as difficult as, say, French (MILLION EXCEPTIONS, OBJECTS HAVE GENDERS, WHEE) or Chinese (SAME WORD HAS SIX MEANINGS DEPENDING ON HOW YOU SING IT, WHEE).
It's true that English is taking over, but it's taking over a lot of languages nowadays, not just Japanese. English itself has been influenced a lot (scary high number of French words), so it's nothing new.
I can see why people would avoid "calligraphy" when they just want to communicate efficiently, but that doesn't mean the language is disappearing.
Don't panic. Japanese is changing, but it's not "ending".

I have nothing against kanji, in fact I love them.
I wish I could get away with writing like ZUN and putting as many of them in my writing as possible. When typing it's easy. They really help make the language more legible I think.
If I could I would write in every 有　之 and even resurrect　耶. and I would want to bring back　ゐ and ゑ because they look cool.

The same goes for English, why did we ever get rid of Þ? a nice simple rune that replaces "th".

>>3705019
Your post makes me very sad.

>>3705134
The Japanese *spoken* language is not hard. But the written language is quite hard, due not only to kanji being logograms rather than phonograms, but also due to their inconsistent pronunciations in compound words (a result of importing Chinese characters to represent Japanese words).

Personally, I'd love to see the Japanese abandon kanji and add spaces between words. Even if Japanese has more homophones than does English, context would necessarily still be enough to differentiate between them since that's what you have to do in spoken Japanese anyway.

>>3705466
I find it harder to read kana with spaces.

>>3705244

It makes me sad too.

>>3705466

If you know enough grammar its not really difficult to know where one word stops and another starts.

>>3705466

Everybody suggesting this hasn't studied Japanese for more than a semester.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwegzhXAqaQ

>>3705474
It's not that hard most of the time, but it adds completely unnecessary difficulty to the language. HaveyouevertriedreadingEnglishwithnospaces? Latin used to be written that way, in fact, and it's a bitch to read without spaces.

>>3705019

To think that in the past as one of the main classical subjects, you could major in Grammar.

If the Japanese language gets killed it won't because of loan words.

It'll be because of fat anime convention attending,pocky eating,Panda Express loitering,Barnes & Noble sitting on the floor of the manga section bending pages and leaving sweat stains on the rugging weeaboos who butcher the language.

>>3705487

Its not really the same principle. English needs it, due to the lack of connectors between words, Japanese has more connecting particles.

>>3705479
Uh, no. I studied Japanese for two years in college and have continued my studies off-and-on since then. You're just so used to the language that you can no longer see the things that make it unnecessarily difficult to learn.

>>3705487
That's because you're not used to it.
There are also a lot more kana and kanji in Japanese than there are letters in our alphabet, which makes it a lot easier to differentiate words.

>>3705487
There is a reason why English doesn't work with no spaces, and why Japanese does.

>Everyone knows Japanese is a very difficult language to learn

>>3705504

Are you implying that Japanese is an easy language to learn?

>>3705508
It's not especially hard.

>>3705498
No one is suggesting that Japanese doesn't work without spaces, obviously. I concede the point that space-less Japanese is easier to read than (say) space-less Latin, but that doesn't mean there would be no benefit to adding spaces.

>>3705508
I wouldn't say it's completely simple, but I'm having an easier time with it than I did with German.

>>3705508

At least for me it was.

>>3705514
But spaceless Japanese is easier to read than with spaces.

>>3705493

I heard you say Panda.

>>3705523
Only because you're used to it!

>>3705521
>>3705519
>>3705511

Well then maybe I'm just stupid.

>>3705524
Panda?

>>3705531
But I never had a problem to begin with! Japanese without spaces is only difficult to read if the entire thing is kana.

>>3705523
The other thing is that if you drop kanji as I was suggesting, then spaceless Japanese becomes a lot harder to read.

>>3705545
see
>>3705548

>>3705548
But dropping kanji is a silly idea that's usually only proposed by those who are struggling to learn the language.

>>3705570
Please stop with the ad hominem attacks ("hurr it's only because you're having a hard time learning Japanese durr"). Phonetic writing systems are simply superior to logographic ones.

>>3705588
Not with Japanese. Their pathetic language doesn't have enough different sounds to cope.

>>3705599
Really? Then how do people speak Japanese? Do they draw kanji in the air as they speak?

>>3705588
Phonetic writing can only really work for small languages, for bigger languages the changes are usually too fast and make written words only strenuously related to spoken words. Which in turn make it just as hard to learn as logographic writing.

>>3705588
What are you talking about? Japanese learning kanji is the same as us learning how to spell words in English.

>>3705608
You're overestimating the number of exceptions that most phonetic writing systems contain. When I started learning French, for example, I already knew the Roman alphabet, but I knew virtually no French words. Yet with just a handful of spelling rules, I could spell nearly any new French word on my first try. Try doing that with Japanese.

>>3705588
>Phonetic writing systems are simply superior to logographic ones.
Too bad we don't have one of those, considering most letters can be pronounced in many different ways.
And even if it was somehow demonstrable that they were inherently superior, NOTHING would change.

>>3705611
The number of spelling rules in English plus the random exceptions among common words is nowhere near the number of kanji in common use in Japanese.

>>3705611
>Japanese learning kanji is the same as us learning how to spell words in English.
most american children can spell by the time they get to 2nd or 3rd grade. japanese students are still learning how to read their stupid moon language in high school.

the koreans adopted a modern language 400 years ago. even the chinese simplified their runes. it's no wonder japanese is falling by the wayside when they're still using a stone age system in the 21st century.

>>3705683

Make a 2nd or 3rd grader spell disestablishmentarianism or proletariat.

>>3704746
>spaces
/laughs

>>3705692
The difference is that those words are obscure and almost never heard in discussion outside of talking about "the longest word in English" or some such shit.

In High School, Japanese students are still learning their language insofar as they are learning to READ, they're not learning scarcely used words nobody's ever heard of.

Let's be real, the Japanese language is backwards.

>>3705683
The average US high school graduate can barely write a complete sentence. English grammar is so complicated that we have to study it well into university, and even still most people can't write to save their lives. I'm not even going to start on spelling.

It may take longer to learn the characters of Japanese than English, but Japanese students graduate with a substantially better grasp of their own language.

>>3705707

Maybe I'm just talking to nerds, but I hear bourgeoisie and proletariat all the time.

>>3705699
对鬼佬来说汉字真的那么难学吗？

I don't dislike kanji.
Seeing a kanji is like having a whole word or concept thrown at your brain instantly. It makes reading quite efficient once you're used to it.
I remember at some point I was absentmindedly reading furigana because I thought it'd be easier, and stumbled upon a word I didn't understand. A few seconds later I looked at the kanji under it and went "Oooooooooh". I didn't even *need* to know the word... the context alone gave the kanji a very specific meaning.

>>3705716
that's because japanese students aren't lazy inner city niggers with lazy underpaid teachers

>>3705716
The issue of grammar is totally separate from the writing system. People have just as much trouble with grammar while speaking as they do while writing; it's just that most people are more forgiving of bad grammar in speech than they are in writing.

>>3705683

You don't even need spaces, just use the same concept as western languages and use kana to separate words.
カっこいモのたがちアにき
Is it that fucking hard ?

>>3705769 カっこいモのたがちアにき
what is this I don't even

>>3705773
... don't mind it, I was just trying to make an example...

Japanese already has the kana, it doesn't need another phonetic writing system, you faggots.

>>3705730
You missed my point. Of course grammar is totally independent of the writing system. My point was that Japanese has a difficult writing system but English has nonsense grammar, so ultimately it's a wash. On top of that, the people I most often hear bitch about kanji are those who don't actually speak or read any Japanese. They're not that difficult.

>>3705729
Funny that, I went to a fairly nice public school in an upper-middle class US suburb and most of my peer never learned to spell or write properly. I'm not talking about minor grammar mistakes, I'm talking about a total inability to communicate above the text-messaging level. There were no niggers present. Sure, it's primarily an issue with shitty American education, but I find it funny when a group of Americans criticizes a country with substantially higher high school test scores and literacy rates for having a language that is too difficult to learn. Clearly something is amiss.

>>3705603
Spoken communication has all sorts of non-verbal cues, as well as backchannel communication, that help to convey meaning. That's one of the reasons why grammar is much less important in spoken language than in written.

You can write Japanese in roman letters or one of the Japanese phonetic scripts, but it's much more difficult to read. It also takes up a lot more space and removes an entire historical/sociocultural aspect from the language.

I forgot to mention, Japan has already experimented with an all-phonetic writing system. In the Heian period, women generally wrote in hiragana only, so many of the great classics of Japanese literature were originally written exclusively in kana. They are also hard as hell to read, which is why they have been translated into modern Japanese with kanji. In many cases, there are passages that are ambiguous or disputed to this day because of the proliferation of homophones in Japanese.

Why don't we just force a certain level on english in all the schools ( not the half assed shit they do nowadays ) and in 50 or years totally switch over it ?
Seriously why must humanity have a shiton of languanges ?
I'm not saying english is the best one, but it's the most widespread among civilized nations, just enforce a certain level of it in every school and eventually let all the native language die slowly forgotten.

>>3705822
Double-plus good idea

anyone who thinks egyptian is hard has obviously never studied it. I can look at crocodile-ibis-wavy lines and immediately understand the meaning. it's far more effective than having to look at a bunch of letters.

>>3705811
>>3705783
the problem is that the phonetic alphabets that they have blow ass. the koreans manage to read just fine.

>>3705864
egyptian do use letters...

>>3705858
You fucking nativist.

>>3705864
Retuuuurn the slaaab - or suffer my cuuuuurse.

>>3705864
heiroglyphs would probably be easy as hell to learn if we actually had accurate translations and grammar rules for everything.
seriously, its pictures. far easier than kanji

>>3705683

Yes, but those 2nd and 3rd graders don't read the same way more "fluently" literate English speakers do. Once you get past a certain point in reading fluency in English or any other language with a similar writing system, with the exception of words with which you're not immediately familiar, you're reading by sight not phonetically. Essentially, this is exactly the same way kanji functions in Japanese script. Really the only difference is that there is no way (baring furigana of course) to "sound out" a kanji (assuming complete unfamiliarity with a character not I-know-the-kanji-but-not-how-you-read-this-compound).

Before the whole concept of teaching children to read English through phonics was developed, children were taught to read English words much like kanji--through sight reading/rote memorization.

Yes, the idea of reading English phonetically is actually somewhat of a recent invention. My grandparents were both taught to read by the sight method and have a fair bit of difficulty (moreso than someone raised on the phonics method) reading unfamiliar words and very few people raised under that system were competent at reading until a fair bit later in their education as a result.

tl;dr Chances are, you're reading all the words in this sentence just like a native Japanese speaker would be reading kanji. When you see a word like "word" you aren't sounding it out in your head "w-o-r-d," you see "word" and immediately recognize it as "word." Much the same way a native Japanese speaker of similar age/education reads kanji.

>>3705930

Seconded

>>3705930
>there is no way (baring furigana of course) to "sound out" a kanji
congradufuckinglations you discovered the advantage of a phonetic alphabet. also you're forgetting that a 4th grader is supposed to be able to read the newspaper just as well as the person who wrote it. how many 4th grade japs can read the newspaper?

>>3705956
Are you really saying that a 9 year old American kid can read the New York Times just as well as the journalists who wrote it?

>>3705974
I don't know about the times but the washington post is supposedly written at a 4th grade level.

>>3705956

how many 4th grade kids want to read the newspaper?

>>3705956
I was able to read Journey to the West cover to cover in the original Ming text back when I was in 4th grade.

If japanese have trouble with kanji, it's to do with their schooling.

>>3705956

congradufuckinglations you missed the point entirely. Yes, you can't sound out kanji, but no one who can read English fluently sounds out words regularly. Like I attempted to explain, it's called sight reading. The same concept applies to kanji, there's just a steeper learning curve because (again, assuming no furigana) there is nothing to fall back on with unfamiliar words (for those you have to, you know, look them up in a dictionary), but once some level of fluency is achieved, the functionality of kanji vs. phonetic alphabets is more or less identical. Now while the learning curve is steeper with kanji, kanji has the advantage of being able to encode more information than a phonetic alphabet can. You get not just the word, but the meaning--for example, generally, if you're familiar with two kanji and you see them in a compound you can guess the meaning of the compound with a fairly decent accuracy rate even if you might not be able to pronounce it. English on the other hand allows you to pronounce unfamiliar words yet not have the faintest idea what they mean.

>there is nothing to fall back on with unfamiliar words
Yes there is, radicals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)

>>3706039

They're not really that helpful most of the time in Japanese in my experience, outside of generating mnemonics for kanji.

>>3706025
you're the one whose missing the point you stupid fucking weeaboo. being easier to learn how to read is why phonetic alphabets are better than shitty moon runes. it's why the koreans invented hangul and why I'm not typing this post out in cuneiform.

>>3706053
It's roughly about as useful as "sounding out unknown words in english". With radicals, not only do you get a clue to the pronunciation, you often also get a hint at the meanings as well.

>>3706058

Once again the idea of teaching children to read English phonetically is really quite new--it was taught much like Japanese is until somewhere in the last half century or so. I'm not arguing for the superiority of one writing system over the other, but simply pointing out that each has their advantages and disadvantages. Considering how superior you think English is, I would hope you'd at least have the courtesy to use it properly, but clearly you weren't educated terribly well in the ways of punctuation and capitalization.

>Is the English language going to die out? Well, I wouldn't be so rash, but some people are worried. Everyone knows English is a very difficult language to learn (as many Europeans have probably found out the hard way). Even native English speakers can have trouble with the language, as shown when President Barak Obama screwed up giving a fluent unrehearsed speech.

>But with the onset of technology and so many Western influences going on, the English language is seeing some new turns. European words are increasingly becoming part of the language, and people are typing letters instead of writing them out in beautiful calligraphy. The New York Times itself got involved with this in a recent article, prompted by Solomon Hezekiah's article "The Decline and Fall of the English Language."

>While part of the article told about email taking over calligraphy, it also quotes some people who are fine with the changes. Writer Solomon Hezekiah, in fact, is quoted saying language is a living thing and therefore will change. And just because some of these changes are happening, it doesn't mean calligraphy is dead. Still, I can completely understand the other side's point-of-view. It's like how I have to capitalize and spell things right while texting, no matter how much my friends roll their eyes at me.

>>3706074
>hurr durr I'm so smart
periods are for women, faggot

>>3704727
> Prime Minister Taro Aso

I thought Rozen Aso lost the election?

>>3706164
Yes, but there is a period of time in the past when he was Prime Minister of Japan and at some point in that period he fucked up his kanji in public.

nuke-ya-lur

>>3706025
>English on the other hand allows you to pronounce unfamiliar words yet not have the faintest idea what they mean.

This is because English doesn't have as many compound words as, say, German. Which is stupid.

>>3706275
is it stupid that german has compound words or that english doesn't?

>>3704727
Rozen Taro is dyslexic. The Japanese language has nothing to do with his dyslexia.

>>3705822
Because the people who actually decide about stuff like that want every country to have their own language(s).

I always smirk when dumb westerners who don't bother learning the language come to complain "HURR DURR KANJI ARE HARD, JAPAN'S GOTTA CHANGE THEM!"

>>3706053
That's not true at all. While there are certainly exceptions, the radical very often indicates how the character will be read in compounds. Then it's just a matter of comparing the one or two possible readings of the character against the spoken words you already know, and you can often figure out the compound.

>>3705983
Perhaps an average 4th grader can sound out all of the words in a Washington Post article, but I find it exceedingly doubtful that the average 4th grader can actually understand enough of it to be worthwhile. That's another trick of phonetic writing systems, we equate being able to decipher the pronunciations with being able to read. Reading requires comprehension as well.

>>3705822
Because the world would be an even more boring and stupid place if everybody everywhere did the same thing.

Anybody who thinks phonetic writing systems are not inherently superior is just in denial. HAY GAIS I SEE NO ADVANTAGE WHATSOEVER IN WORDS BEING WRITTEN THE SAME WAY THEY ARE SPOKEN.

>>3706025

You don't need any sort of "hints" to the meaning of a compound word other than the meanings of the words it's made of. If you see the word "windmill", you immediately know it's a mill that has something to do with wind.

>If you see the word "cockroach", you immediately know it's a roach that has something to do with cocks.

>>3706555
>dumb westerners

Let me summarize: phonetic languages are easier to learn because there is less extra, arbitrary information to memorize in addition to the spoken language before one can read and write. Does anyone seriously dispute this?

And yes, English has many spelling irregularities, but:
(a) Learning all of the common spelling rules and exceptions is still easier than learning all the common kanji.
(b) Even if you don't know the exact spelling of a word, you can still read it and probably write it well enough for others to understand you.
(c) There's no reason to assume all-hiragana Japanese would develop as many spelling irregularities as English, anyway.

HOW ABOUT WE JUST CONQUER THEM AGAIN AND FORCE THEM TO USE ENGLISH?

FUCKING ANIMALS, STOP USING YOUR SHITTY THIRD WORLD WRITING SYSTEM! GROW UP LIKE A REAL COUNTRY AND STOP BEING SAVAGES!

As long as little men are running away from little helicopters, then I'll be happy.

>http://www.japanator.com
Is this like a new sankaku complex or something?

ITT angry nationalistic white nerds

I believe post WWII Japan did try to reform their language/writing system in the past but it proved too problematic given how many homophones it has so they decided to stick with Kanji to differentiate the meanings.

I find it rather pathetic really, it other words they can't reform their language even if they want to because of their small syllabary. The Koreans did reform their language very successfully because they had a large syllabary.

Sup /lang/. None of the following is to say I believe America/Anywhere has a superior situation. Attempting that kind of comparison would be much more involved.

The Japanese language isn't going to "die" in any proper sense for a few hundred years, if at all, for obvious reasons. Traditional vocabulary may be supplanted in a much more immediate timeframe by English loanwords. I freaked out when I was told that the best way to communicate a "list" was to just use リスト. It's not as fulfilling of a language to learn when you already know half of the words and as convenient as it has been for me, I lament the eventuality. Using アラームクロック instead of 目覚まし時計 just doesn't flow as well in the middle of an otherwise-Japanese sentence.

As for purely dropping Kanji and adopting spaces: I can't say it wouldn't be functional, but I can say it wouldn't be as smooth as English. English combines multiple letters to make a single syllable and thus two vowels and three consonants "t e s n o" can combine to make a words that may differ marginally in spelling but differ more in syllable count and groupings of letters into syllables. To approximate these, you need a much larger number of kana (て、と、ね、の、せ、そ、え、お、ん) and while they'll still stack up pretty evenly on combinations at this level of 5v9 comparison, they'll have more syllables on average. Once you start expanding the source set of letters/kana and comparing the uniqueness, Japanese ends up with more homophones.

(Yes, a second post. Yes, I am a huge faggot. Please rape my face.)

The move to kana is happening anyway with all borrowed words anyway, so it's only a matter of time before Kanji is relegated to official paperwork like it is in Korea. No need to fight for it, just let it happen. Spaces are another problem... My bank here shit a brick about me always using my middle name when I opened the account, but then when they fucked up the division between my last, middle and first names, I started putting [last],[first][middle] to avoid confusion. Then they proceeded to shit a brick over the comma and I couldn't make any transfers into the account for a month.
The grammar and spoken language isn't likely to change, though, even if/when the written does. That should also be obvious.

Also, anyone proposing to move away from Kanji who does not at least know a thousand has a very limited idea what they're proposing. While I hate to say "ignore [x]" in any open discussion, you really need to grasp what you're dealing with before espousing such a radical position.

>>3705930
Anyone who argues against Kanji, whether you know it or not, and ignores this point does so to their own detriment.

>>3705134
>French (MILLION EXCEPTIONS, OBJECTS HAVE GENDERS, WHEE)
Agreed. What the hell is with gendered inanimate objects? Someone who speaks one of these languages please provide justification if you can, as I would like to understand.
>Chinese (SAME WORD HAS SIX MEANINGS DEPENDING ON HOW YOU SING IT, WHEE)
This really isn't as bad as you might think, at least in Mandarin. Four isn't hard to keep track of, even though the untrained ear might get 2nd and 3rd mixed up at first. Cantonese (six or nine depending if you're a linguist or average person) starts to get a little ridiculous at times. Newscasts in Cantonese are at once frightening and hilarious in a purely phonological sense.

>>3708098
>I find it rather pathetic really, it other words they can't reform their language even if they want to because of their small syllabary. The Koreans did reform their language very successfully because they had a large syllabary.
It is a shame. Also fuck yeah Hangul! That makes so much sense I wouldn't mind it for English, even.

IIE ANATA!

>>3705692
The difference is, is that at least the Elementary school child can sound out the word and know what it is if they've heard it. The Japanese child will take a look at the kanji and be unable to read it unless they already know it.

>>3708585
Languages like that tend to have helpful pronunciation guides written alongside problem words when used for schoolchildren. In Japanese, it's furigana.

>>3708261 Also, anyone proposing to move away from Kanji who does not at least know a thousand has a very limited idea what they're proposing. While I hate to say "ignore [x]" in any open discussion, you really need to grasp what you're dealing with before espousing such a radical position.

Again with the ad hominems. I'll make this really clear: it is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT how many kanji anyone here knows. The participants in this argument could be people who know no kanji whatsoever, or literary masters who know every kanji in existence, and it wouldn't change the validity of any of the arguments given here.

>>3708268 Anyone who argues against Kanji, whether you know it or not, and ignores this point does so to their own detriment.

How people read once they've already mastered the written language is irrelevant, since the whole argument against kanji is that they're HARD TO LEARN.

For the record, I think Kanji are inefficient as an overall concept, so I'm not attempting to "attack", only make people consider things. I feel simply that some of the backlash against it is less objective than it ought to be. Specifically:

>it wouldn't change the validity of any of the arguments given here.
>How people read once they've already mastered the written language is irrelevant, since the whole argument against kanji is that they're HARD TO LEARN.
If the arguments given here were of a researched-backed linguistic manner, or perhaps something like developmental psychology, this would be very true. However, this thread is far from that and is mostly comprised of people's opinions formed via experiences and perceptions.

Of course, I recognize that the "non-scientific" comment applies to my own comments as well.

>>3708820
Once again, it does not matter how any of the participants here arrived at a particular position. What matter are the arguments they put forth in support of those positions. If you can't defeat your opponents' arguments logically, then you lose, even if you have a hundred times more experience than they do.

>>3708868
>If you can't defeat your opponents' arguments logically, then you lose, even if you have a hundred times more experience than they do.
As I stated, I believe that Kanji will fade out of use in Japanese eventually. I'm not trying to defeat anyone, I was just bored and rambling. My comments about knowing or not knowing Kanji are related to my personal opinion and how I perceive comments made by people who do not understand the subject matter about which they speak. Perhaps I should more clearly differentiate which parts of my posts are purely opinion and which are not, but I feel I'm already long-winded enough as it is!

>>3706058
Children read via phonetics for a few years, then the brain switches to reading words. Kanji are like words, except they get processed faster because they refer to a fairly specific meaning. You can also fit more text into the same amount of space.
A language based on phonetics is easier to learn, yes. Is that really worth the decreased reading ease/speed and larger amount of space required to express the same thing?
I used to hate kanji, but now I see it as an investment.

>>3704868
Isn't what he wrote correct? He listed some stuff, and separated the first from the second with a comma and the second from the third with 'or'.

"Ease/speed" of reading is not a believable argument - you will spend more time staring at each individual symbol. The only solid advantage of kanji is that they pack information in a smaller space. "Text message books" could not exist in English.

>>3709320
I'll admit the speed difference will be quite small given that eye movement is not a hugely significant factor in reading speed. Ease is not going to be all that big either, but using the kanji as "landmarks" should still make it easier for your eyes to position themselves (compared against a line of uniform letters).
You're right, the one big advantage is having more space. I wonder how much additional space you get on average... seems like it'd be a lot.

How do you ask about a word you don't know?
You can't pronounce it, and you can't type it on a computer.

HAY HAY HAY

SMOKE KANJI EVERY DAY

Why are people with autism allowed to have an internet connection?

>>3708268
>What the hell is with gendered inanimate objects? Someone who speaks one of these languages please provide justification if you can, as I would like to understand.

I'm not the french but it is the same in slovak language, few examples (all 12 noun patterns from slovak language):

chlap - man - he
hrdina - hero - he
dub - oak - he
stroj - machine - he

mesto - city - it
srdce - heart - it
vysvedčenie - grades list - it
dievča - girl - it

žena - woman - she
ulica - street - she
dlaň - palm - she
kosť - bone - she

>>3709777
>dievča - girl - it

This is wonderful.

>>3709782
My gaylarm just went off.

>>3709777
And it's the same in german.
In fact, it's the same in most languages.
English is shit.

>>3709786
Right, of course some people on 4chan have a problem with little girls being considered essentially asexual.

>>3709727
Yeah why is the entire Touhou fanbase allowed to have internet connections?

>>3709791
>implying gendered nouns make any sense or have any kind of logic to them

>>3709812
No, you see, in English, which is the language I speak, the "it" pronoun is used for non-humans. It's funny to me that girls, in slovak, seem to be things when this chart is interpreted the way an English-speaking child might interpret it.

Of course, now I've explained why I thought it was amusing, so it's not funny anymore. Thanks, /jp/.

>>3709824
Not my problem if you need everything to be dumbed down for you.
The genders are given following a logic but I'm not going to bother explaining the details.

>>3709824
Hell no.
They're just there to make it easier to recognize filthy gaijin.

>>3709382
>>3709320
I'm not so sure about Japanese being more compact. For one thing, kanji require more space to be legible than do letters. Do you know of any studies on this subject?

Also, what is a "text message book"? A book written in text message style?

>>3709835
>dumbing down

>german
>three definite articles
>memorizing which of the three article goes with each word
>they all inflect in three entirely different ways

>logic

>implying implications of implorb

>>3709924
>forgetting the reaction image

>>3709915
>>Also, what is a "text message book"? A book written in text message style?

A book written as an actual text message that you download and read with your cell phone. They have some popularity in Japan.

They wouldn't even be possible in English because you simply couldn't fit enough words on a cell phone screen.

>>3709835
Object genders are *not* given following any sort of logic, you retard. They're entirely arbitrary.

>>3709940
People actually read books like that? My eyes ache just thinking about it.

I certainly could read books in English on my iPhone if I wanted, though. Are you talking about non-smartphones?

>>3708773

A lot of kanji appear in compound words with different readings than normal, so you don't have to know EVERY kanji 100% fluently to read a lot of stuff.

Just keep grinding AJATT and you'll catch up. Read and listen and watch and practice as much as possible.

Don't bitch about difficulty, otherwise you are GOING TO FAIL.