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3127053 No.3127053 [Reply] [Original]

Firstly, I am not fluent in Japanese yet, but I do plan on going back to school and fully learning Japanese (including Kanji).

What I'd like to know is:
Aside from cultural preservation and space savings in books, what reasons are there to keep the Kanji system? Many of the other asian nations have overhauled their writing systems and seem to have done well.

>> No.3127056

Tradition and pride, two things you know the Japanese have in abundance.

>> No.3127062

>>3127053
>>Many of the other asian nations have overhauled their writing systems and seem to have done well.

Many? How many is many?

>>what reasons are there to keep the Kanji system?

Why fix what isn't broken? I doubt they care if Gaijin complain about it, if anything, it would make them want to keep it more.

>> No.3127065

They're very convenient for a language that has an extremely limited syllabary.

>> No.3127074

Most Japanese actually read text MUCH faster in kanji than you can when it is written just with kana. That's why.

>> No.3127080

The Koreans are losing their kanji equivalent because their phonetic writing system is relatively easy to glance at and convert into words. Japanese text written entirely in kana is just too ambiguous; having kanji saves time trying to decipher it.

>> No.3127094

>>3127062
Don't get so butthurt about the prospect of abolishing Kanji; the Japanese government even considered abolishing it as well at one time.

I wasn't asking whether or not the Japanese care about "gaijins" complaining about the difficulty of learning Kanji. I was asking if there were any legitimate reasons for why Kanji is worth keeping, or whether it even has any benefits. It is a dauntingly large writing system, one which takes up a large portion of Japanese education.

>> No.3127101

>>3127080
Is that due to the way Hiragana and Katakana are written, or the design of the Japanese language itself?

>> No.3127106

>>3127094
>>I was asking if there were any legitimate reasons for why Kanji is worth keeping

Which have been given. Japanese is much easier to read with Kanji. Do you have any legitimate reasons to get rid of it?

Also, you say many other asian nations have overhauled their writing systems. To which nations are you referring? The only relevant ones I can think of are the Koreas and Vietnam, which really isn't that many.

>> No.3127116

>>3127101
My personal belief is that it is mostly because you can't tell just by looking at kana where one word begins and the next ends; spaces in text would help.

That said, kanji is very good for disambiguating words that sound the same but have different meanings, and Japanese has a LOT of words like that.

>> No.3127121

>>3127106
Mainland China simplified their writing system, although they still use ideograms.

>> No.3127126

Thanks to computers, if anything we are going to get even *more* kanjis into the basic table.

>> No.3127129

>>3127121
Simplified sure, but they still use thousands of characters.

>> No.3127131

>>3127116
>That said, kanji is very good for disambiguating words that sound the same but have different meanings, and Japanese has a LOT of words like that.
This. It could make things hell lot more confusing

>> No.3127133

>>3127129
Better than over 40k

>> No.3127137

>>3127106
Maybe I shouldn't have said "many". I'm only aware of Korea and Vietnam.

The Japanese writing system is very large, which takes a lot of time for students to learn and reach proper literacy.

As far as I know (which isn't enough), Kanji isn't very flexible. How do the Japanese handle the issue of new words entering their vocabulary (such as previously unknown objects, technologies, etc)? Are new Kanji invented and added?

>> No.3127143

>>3127126
Kanji like ☀, ☁, ⚡ and ❄, right?

>> No.3127144

>>3127137
a lot of new words are just foreign words written in katakana

>> No.3127145

>>3127137
If it's foreign they can use Katakana, or they can make new words using Kanji、for example 電話 for phone.

>> No.3127146

>Kanji isn't very flexible. How do the Japanese handle the issue of new words entering their vocabulary (such as previously unknown objects, technologies, etc)? Are new Kanji invented and added?

Why would that be necessary? You can easily use existing characters to form new words. Like "computer" is writting using the characters to spell "electric brain", or you just use the loanword "computer" from english, the same way most non-english languages handle new words these days.

>> No.3127147

China tried to abolish hanzi altogether and use pinyin for everything. Naturally, it failed, too many homophones and it was awkward to read. So they simplified the characters to make it somewhat easier to write.

>> No.3127148

>>3127137
You don't need new kanji. New words are made by sticking old kanji together.

>> No.3127150

>>3127147
And in the process destroyed a lot of radicals so that the system makes even less sense now.

>> No.3127159

>>3127133
Neither simplified nor traditional Chinese really use 40k Kanji. And even with simplified, your average Chinese would have to know more Kanji than an equivalent Japanese.

>> No.3127161

>>3127150
Why are they called radicals anyway? Kanji doesn't seem very rad...

>> No.3127163

>>3127148
yeah, like with english you don't make new words by inventing new letters

>> No.3127171

>>3127133
IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE THERE ARE ONLY CHINESE CHARACTERS.

>> No.3127173

>>3127145
Katakana can become utterly retarded for particularly long names, they should just use latin alphabet and be done with it. There's not much of a reason to use katakana for foreign names (if native english speakers have no clue what's going on I doubt the japanese are doing any better with their katakana-butchered foreign words) and learning 26 letters can't be hard.

>> No.3127175

Ugh why don't they just speak English.

>> No.3127187

>>3127173
You couldn't just write "John" in the middle of a Japanese sentence; they wouldn't have any idea how to pronounce it. Katakana is used because, while it may not sound like the foreign word, the Japanese will be able to pronounce it.

>> No.3127196

>>3127175
Admiral Perry should have insisted on it, but didn't.

>> No.3127205

>>3127116
I can understand the usefulness of Kanji to help differentiate between meanings, but we've had a similar issue in European languages for a long time with words that have multiple meanings and it hasn't affected us too much.

Wouldn't the addition of punctuation marks (and perhaps spaces) help make Hiragana more wieldy and flexible in a similar way to European languages?

>> No.3127207

>>3127173
More like they need to learn how not to speak in only short syllables. The biggest problem with japanese is that it takes them like 20 syllables to pronounce foreign words, just because they refuse to learn a few extra sounds.

>> No.3127214

>>3127187
Then place the katakana in paranthesis (like other countries do for names that don't obey spelling of the local language) so ridiculous shit no one can decypher like furusuberugu or musuperusuheimu doesn't happen.

>> No.3127215

>>3127205
No you haven't.
http://jisho.org/words?jap=ki&eng=&dict=edict
Euro languages have like 3-5 words that sound the same at worse.

>> No.3127217

>>3127205
Japanese is a lot more limited in terms of sounds than languages like English.

>> No.3127222

>>3127175
English is such a horrible language when spoken.

It's almost magical when written, properly. The transition from letter to sound is terribly inconsistent.

>> No.3127235

>>3127143
was this a joke?

>> No.3127240

>>3127222
This is because its' half Germanic, half Latin, with a bunch of European and Japanese mixed in. It's not English that's inconsistent, just the loan words and their funny foreign pronunciation. Also the fact that loan words tend to keep their native forms instead of adapting to English grammar.

>> No.3127243

>>3127235
No, actually. Those are "emoji" symbols; symbols commonly available on Japanese mobile phones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

>> No.3127250

>>3127240
It's English spelling that is inconsistent with the sounds. For example, Father rhymes with Bother, even though the vowels are different. It has nothing to do with loan words. Sure, rendezvous may sound nothing like it looks, but that's only because we don't spell it phonetically.

>> No.3127253

>>3127243
Those are just faggot smileys. :cockbean:

>> No.3127284

>>3127240
>Japanese mixed in
>English

wat

>> No.3127287

How do the Japanese deal with the different meanings while speaking?

>> No.3127292

Kanji isn't very hard to learn once your mind develope the ground work wirings required for recalling ideograms. Of course brains malleability for learning new language systems generally decrease once you're ten and up.

You average chinese school kid learn enough hanzi by the 4th grade than they can read epics like Journey to the West in their original middle chinese text.

I would know, I was also able to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms when I was out of the fourth grade

>> No.3127318

I can't really sat that a written language that basically takes half a life time to "master" is a good one.
If we disregard the efficiency of the written the language, the average time it takes to learn it even for natives is too long, if you ask me.

If you go to a Japanese bookstore, you will see that they have difficulty rankings on their books so that you don't buy a book that you would have trouble reading.
The harder books are books were they recommend you to be over 30 years old, and that is if you are a native speaker.
You shouldn't have to be 30 years old to read a book in your native language even if it is a "difficult book" to read.

It could be the most useful written language there is for all I care, but a language that take that long to learn on average isn't a good one if you ask me.

>> No.3127331

>>3127318
>I can't really sat that a written language that basically takes half a life time to "master" is a good one.

Have fun with your newspeek.

>> No.3127328

>>3127292
>You average chinese school kid learn...
chinese != japanese

>> No.3127339

>>3127328
Your average chinese can probably understand more kanji than your average japanese, though he won't be able to pronounce them in japanese.

>> No.3127341

>>3127287
facial expressions

>> No.3127350

>>3127287
>>How do the Japanese deal with the different meanings while speaking?

If they are distant words, it's obvious from the context.
As for not-so-distant words, they tend to have different pitch outlines so fluent speakers can easily tell them apart.

>> No.3127351

When I needed to ask direction in Japan, I just take out a notepad and write the name in hanzi instead of trying to remember the kana.

People see my 秋叶原 and they can guess correctly what I mean

>> No.3127382

>>3127284
Honcho, tsunami, tycoon, karaoke, anime, sushi, kudzu, samurai, ninja, soy, tofu, ramen, umami, lots from videogames (gaiden, taisen, monogatari), most martial arts terms, lots and lots of business terms, and a ton of electronics, in case you don't think you use any.

>> No.3127397

>>3127250
>For example, Father rhymes with Bother
PROTIP: One of those isn't an english word.

>> No.3127420

>>3127397
They're both English words, I'm not sure what you mean.

>> No.3127441

>>3127053
homonym problem is serious. Korea showed Japan that giving up kanji make people stupid. It is easy for Korean learn Japanese. The more Korean become intelligent, the more they know giving up kanji is stupid behavior.
I know that some English disease names are loan words. and some stupid native English speaker can't spell them and It is difficult for them to know what is it. The same things happen to Korean in many ways. They remember their Korean words like loan words, Because they give up kanji.

>> No.3127453

>>3127420
Dictionaries say bother is from Irish. Show me where anything says it's from English.

>> No.3127456

why dont asians just start using the roman alphabet? its wasy to write, and theres only 26 letters. fucking retards

>> No.3127461

>>3127456
retard is you. see
>>3127441

>> No.3127466

>>3127456
Why don't westerners just use ideograms? You convey the same meaning in much fewer characters, so you can write way faster

>> No.3127468

Some intelligent Korean who learn Japanese or Chinese "discover" many Korean words are made by combinations of kanji.
4chan anon know the word manga and manhwa, right? 漫画, manga is a word made by Japanese. Chinese did not have that word. manhwa is just reading kanji in korean way. Korean give up kanji, so it is almost impossible for korean to make new words like this.

>> No.3127478

>>3127453
Merriam-Webster says the origin is unknown. Either way, it's still been used as an English word for a few hundred years, and it still is relevant to what I was saying.

>> No.3127495

>>3127466
why memorize thousands of characters when you only need to know 26?

>> No.3127505

>>3127495
why memorize thousands of spelling combinations?

>> No.3127509

>>3127505
Why memorize thousands of characters and thousands of spelling combinations?

>> No.3127521

>>3127505
because its easier

>> No.3127528

>>3127495
>>3127505
>>3127509

I wonder, let's say we get an english version of the bible stored in ASCII vs a chinese version stored in Unicode, which will take up more storage?

>> No.3127535

I don't really think it's that different.

Throughout school, English speaking people have to memorise spelling of words, and Japanese have to memorise Kanji. There are adults whose Kanji probably isn't very good, just like there are adults whose English isn't very good.

>> No.3127541

>>3127478
Dictionary wanking aside, since I could go on a bit, but you could just take more than 5 seconds in google or open a real dictionary and see that even though it's unsure, most say probably from irish;

>Either way, it's still been used as an English word for a few hundred years, and it still is relevant to what I was saying.

No it's not. Father is a centuries older term that's been in more than one form of English, including the one that went to America. Bother is a newfag word, but that's not the point either.

A non-English word is a non-English word. Its not going to become English because it's been around for a while. If that were the case, we'd have much less foreign words as they would have been changed to english spelling/pronunciation.

For that matter, Japan would have made it's own form of Kanji (not kana) tailored to its language and use only that.

So yes, it's pronounced in a non-standard way because it is a non-standard word. English is fine. It's foreign culture fucking it up.

>> No.3127537

>>3127521
No it's not, there's no fucking pattern, shit is stupid

I'm Chinese, learning to spell your foreign devil's words was painful, I imagine this is what it's like for you guys to remember kanji

>> No.3127540

Kanji is like their latin. We make new things here or find a new species of animal and we use latin root words to give it a name. They use kanji that describe it to create its name.
That why they can use a system from over 1000 years ago to describe things like the telephone.

>> No.3127575

>>3127541
What kind of logic is that? So what if it may have been borrowed from Irish? If you're going to be like that, you might as well say most English words, really just originated from Indo-European languages and aren't really English at all.

It's not like English spelling was standardised back when the word came into use, they didn't have to spell it a certain way simply because it was Irish in origin.

>> No.3127598

>>3127318
This.
Have you ever been in a japanese bookstore?
The shelves are sorted after difficulty because it is basically only older people who can read the more difficult books.

>> No.3127600

>I am not fluent in Japanese yet [...] what reasons are there to keep the Kanji system?

You really don't need to be even close to fluent to understand why abolishing kanji would be a terrible idea. Every time /jp/ has this thread (or this discussion as part of the daily "learning Japanese" threads) I can't help but wonder why so many people who evidently have never studied Japanese beyond the kana are taking part in these discussions.

>> No.3127607

>>3127537
might be painful, but you can now learn any latin language with relative ease

>> No.3127615

>>3127607
Well same goes for hanzi/kanji/hanja, learn hanzi and you learn them all

>> No.3127622

>>3127615
but why would i want to talk to asians?

>> No.3127624

>>3127598
What sort of marking is this? (Just figured out that novels are organized by kana last month, hurr durr.)

>> No.3127626

>>3127600
I haven't studied much beyond a little kana/grammar and I know it's a terrible idea.

>> No.3127656

Why do we use language at all when it'd be so much simpler to just beam our thoughts directly to the intended recipient? Because we can't do telepathy.

All language is a kludge in lieu of true communication. Kanji, alphabet, pictogram, hieroglyphic, it's all an attempt to work around the basic problem that none of us can actually communicate. It all sucks, but we can't do better.

>> No.3127678

>>3127094
if it's that hard, you're doing it wrong. they are harder to learn to write than they are to learn to recognize. once you learn radicals, it's relatively easy to get a rough meaning of even characters you do not know at all.

>> No.3127683

Just for the sake of discussion, what would make the Japanese language more efficient, easier to learn, and adaptable for the future? Think as if the Japanese government has just ordered an overhaul of the language, what do you think would make it better (all cultural preservation, pride, etc aside)?

Adding new sounds into their language? Adding western (or western-like) punctuation marks? Replacing Kanji with a new ideogram system not related to Chinese?

>> No.3127716

>>3127683
>Adding new sounds into their language?
in Japanese history, sounds keep decreasing.

>Adding western (or western-like) punctuation marks?
Homonym is really serious problem. for example, "koushou" has more than 60 meanigs, it is stupid to create more 60 ways of marks.

>Replacing Kanji with a new ideogram system not related to Chinese?
why? Japanese don't care if Chinese are proud of inventing kanji.

>> No.3127741

ITT faggots who can't be bothered to learn a language and whine about its inferiority.

>> No.3127813

>>3127716
>in Japanese history, sounds keep decreasing.

That doesn't mean the language has been improving.

>Homonym is really serious problem. for example, "koushou" has more than 60 meanigs, it is stupid to create more 60 ways of marks.

I'm talking about adding spaces, commas, periods, etc to break up Japanese characters.

>why? Japanese don't care if Chinese are proud of inventing kanji.

Neither do I. However, the Chinese writing (including Kanji) evolved over a very long period of time and isn't perfect (like any natural language). Replacing Kanji with a newly developed writing system would be able to offer more order and efficiency because it would be planned out. This means characters could be easier to memorize and likely visually have more in common with characters of related meanings. It would also be able to allow for the orderly creation of new characters if needed.

Natural languages are inferior to Artificial/constructed languages in most regards.

>> No.3127893

>>3127813
>That doesn't mean the language has been improving.
I don't know what you want to say. but it is true that Japanese sounds keep decreasing. and Japanese do not think it is wrong.

>I'm talking about adding spaces, commas, periods, etc to break up Japanese characters.
lol what?

>Replacing Kanji with a newly developed writing system would be able to offer more order and efficiency because it would be planned out. This means characters could be easier to memorize and likely visually have more in common with characters of related meanings. It would also be able to allow for the orderly creation of new characters if needed.
please make it short. I personally think making kanji simple is not bad idea.

>> No.3127895

>>3127813
>I'm talking about adding spaces, commas, periods, etc to break up Japanese characters.
Would work terribly.

>> No.3127985

>>3127813
>Replacing Kanji with a newly developed writing system would be able to offer more order and efficiency because it would be planned out. This means characters could be easier to memorize and likely visually have more in common with characters of related meanings. It would also be able to allow for the orderly creation of new characters if needed.
You mean almost like kanji?

>> No.3128034

>>Natural languages are inferior to Artificial/constructed languages in most regards.
As a student in linguistics, I'm going to have to tell you that you're fucking stupid.

>> No.3128034,1 [INTERNAL] 

>>3127813
I'm not a student in linguistics and even I can say you're fucking stupid.

How many constructed languages do you know that can adapt new vocabulary and concepts? Rapidly expand to describe new experiences and knowledge? Maybe 1 or 2 that more than 2 people speak but I think you miss the point of a language: Communication. What value is an enlightened and efficient grammatical system if it cannot be used?

Also, about the korean abolishing hanja, all it means is that in addition to using archaic characters to create new words, a new method of creating new words was introduced: Combining letters however the fuck you want. Last I recall, korea has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Also, from a computing perspective, chinese characters store information at a higher density but the software required is of a much higher complexity. To all the fags that say that all the chinese characters would take massive amounts of dataspace to store, consider that the average chinese word can be stored in 4 bytes compared to 6 bytes. By no means a small difference.

>> No.3128034,2 [INTERNAL] 

>>3128034,1
your gay

>> No.3128034,3 [INTERNAL] 

>>3128034,2
What about my gay?

>> No.3128034,4 [INTERNAL] 

>>3127600
You answered your own question. It seems like the people inexperienced with Japanese are about the only ones who think getting rid of kanji would be a good idea, so they're the ones who start these topics. Like you said, once you start learning the language it quickly becomes obvious that kanji is necessary.

>>
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