/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17216538]

It's amazing they were able to produce any literature at all.

[Anonymous No.17216559]

>kanji takes 11 strokes to make
>"saliva" takes 10
>"sputum" takes 12
hmm... it's almost as if... logographs work just fine for writing... which is why every time writing has been invented, by the chinese, by the europeans, by the mesoamericans, by the sumerians, by the africans... it has been logographs... hm... really makes you think...

[Anonymous No.17216566]

>>17216538
how much would a person need to hate themselves to learn japanese?

[Anonymous No.17216654]

>>17216559
Japanese students study the kanji intensively for many hours a day from first grade until their senior year of university (not high school - not college - UNIVERSITY) and many educated adults are unable to write the kanji for many everyday words, and are unable to even read a considerable number of the more obscure or specialist kanji despite knowing the words. English students study the alphabet for three years in elementary school.

[Anonymous No.17216655]

>>17216559
yeah, and there's a reason why almost every language adopts a much easier alphabet or otherwise greatly simplifies its written form, you sped.

[Anonymous No.17216664]

>>17216654
>Japanese students study the kanji intensively for many hours a day from first grade until their senior year of university (not high school - not college - UNIVERSITY) and many educated adults are unable to write the kanji for many everyday words, and are unable to even read a considerable number of the more obscure or specialist kanji despite knowing the words
Based

[Anonymous No.17216684]

>>17216654
and is it bad?

[Anonymous No.17216693]

>>17216654
>>17216664
As far as I remember, they learn about 100-150 kanji a year? Or something like that. As a weeb, it's a common sight to see hiragana (or katakana?) spelling out kanji- but I thought that was just because they're "for children".
>>17216684
Knowing that even adults can't write and read your their own language is kind of a big hint that its shit. That's what it's there for.

[Anonymous No.17216712]

>>17216693
Why should adults know their language fully? Do you know every single word in your language?

[Anonymous No.17216723]

>>17216712
Obviously not, but if I see a word I don't know, I can read it without needing it translated, and once I've read it, I can write it down.

[Anonymous No.17216727]

>>17216723
Do you want a medal now?

[Anonymous No.17216731]

>>17216655
>>17216654
so... different writing systems... have different bonuses and maluses... and the japanese system... has tradeoffs... for the good things it can do... woah... that's deep man...

[Anonymous No.17216733]

>>17216727
he has a point. no need to get defensive lmao

[Anonymous No.17216738]

>>17216727
>>17216731

[Anonymous No.17216740]

>>17216655
>every language adopts a much easier alphabet or otherwise greatly simplifies its written
source, please.
only peoples who didn't invented an alphabet themselves use simplified forms because importing the complex logograms would be stupid (see japanese double readings fore kanji, but even they have the simplified hiragana and katakana).
the egyptians stayed with hieroglyphs, the sumerians with cuneiform, the mayans with mayan, the indus valley people with the hindus script and the chinese with chinese, but only the latter culture still exists.
every one else just copied one of them. everything else emerged from grammar requirements (see, again, japanese: hiragana is mostly used in pure japanese grammar absent in chinese. katakana is just autism, but makes some sense).

[Anonymous No.17216752]

>>17216693
>even adults can't write
sorry, I come frome a pretty low literacy country, I'm not impressed.

[Anonymous No.17216755]

>>17216733
What point?

[Anonymous No.17216764]

>>17216538
non european languages are ugly and stupid. prove me wrong: pro tip, you can't.

[Anonymous No.17216769]

>>17216755
that the writing system is awkward and inefficient as fuck. kanji are the stupidest shit ever, seriously.

[Anonymous No.17216772]

>>17216740
korean

[Anonymous No.17216779]

>>17216740
>egyptians stayed with hieroglyphs, the sumerians with cuneiform, the mayans with mayan, the indus valley people with the hindus script and the chinese with chinese
>but only the latter culture still exists
Egypt is still a place, the Middle East is still a place- you think Ancient Egypt and Sumeria were just obliterated and that's why nobody uses hieroglyphs and cuneiform anymore? No, of course not. Their written language just changed and adapted over time, to be simpler and easier to implement.

[Anonymous No.17216780]

>>17216764
Based languages : Italian, French, most Slavic ones, German, Swedish, Japanese

Cringe languages: English, Serbian, Turkish, Korean, Greek

Basinge languages : Chinese

[Anonymous No.17216789]

>>17216769
>inefficient
"Efficience" is Jew bullshit

[Anonymous No.17216793]

>>17216789
this is just getting fucking weird now

[Anonymous No.17216794]

>>17216764
Sanskrit and Persian are based but I guess you meant Indo-European language anyway.

[Anonymous No.17216798]

>>17216654
You have to remember the Chinese writing system was designed specifically to maintain a class divide and prevent social mobility. It was to be hard enough to learn that only literati from rich family could master it.

[Anonymous No.17216801]

>>17216793
If they simplify their writing system, they'll get flooded with hordes of low IQ niggers and white sexpats who'll destroy their society.
The language barrier keeps darkies, globoschlomos and roundeyes at bay. Besides, Japs are the most efficient people anyway

[Anonymous No.17216809]

>>17216740
>thinks ancient Egyptians stuck with hieroglyphs
>doesn't know about Demotic Egyptian

[Anonymous No.17216814]

>>17216801
Yeah, but the more humans are divided the easier it is for the reptilian illuminati to control us.

[Anonymous No.17216820]

>>17216789
>goyim, make sure to convey more information when speaking and writing, allow more linguistic creation, and structure it to be able to write on serious matters
Wtf they were our greatest allies all along.

[Anonymous No.17216829]

tfw when linguistics student with french and japanese and have no time to learn about actual linguistics or anything else because kanji test from 25 kanji (~130 words) every week and you need to be able to write all of them by hand and after 3 years you don't even know half the kanji needed to read newspapers comfortably

[Anonymous No.17216836]

>>17216820
>to convey more information when speaking and writing, allow more linguistic creation, and structure it to be able to write on serious matters
All of that describes Japanese better than English. English is good for selling things, it's a salesman's language.

[Anonymous No.17216840]

>>17216836
cope

[Anonymous No.17216863]

>>17216829
that sounds like hell. my condolences.

[Anonymous No.17216878]

>>17216772
they didn't invent the alphabet. it was a simplification made after they already had an alphabet. if it resembles the old one or not, it's irrelevant.

>>17216779
but they speak Arabic. or do they still build pyramids and pray to rah?
>written language just changed and adapted over time
by other cultures that came after them and had needs that required stuff that wasn't in the original script, that's my whole point. you could go more complex, but few have done so because that's dumb (see japanese).

>>17216809
but they still used hieroglyphs to the end.

[Anonymous No.17216882]

>>17216840
English is a language of tics, memes, verbal sleights-of-hand and advertising. It completely depends on soundbites and references to references.
>Tally-ho, thou pipsqueak of yore and top of the ye olde mornin' to ya! Say nigger, have you heard the newest wojak meme does what Nintendon't? Oddly enough my super soaker power shield mismatcher went defunct when I stopped fusing and playing quidditch in Kwik-e-Mart as the clocks struck thirteen and Olive Oil left Popeye.
This schizo shit is impossible in the highly autistic Asian languages.

[Anonymous No.17216883]

>>17216836
Analysis of information rates show the opposite. Japanese is one of the least efficient on the major languages, with English on top and Latin languages not far behind.
>http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%20appear_language.pdf
The non-grammar of Japanese is one of the reasons for them never to have written much philosophy, and they often preferred to write in foreign languages in scientific matters.

[Anonymous No.17216892]

>>17216829
japanese learners are autistic as fuck. the anki decks for learning kanji are like nothing ive seen elsewhere. there are tons of resources out there...get on /djt/ buddy

[Anonymous No.17216898]

>>17216829
god forbid a wannabe linguist actually learn another language, Chomsky would be rolling over in his grave

[Anonymous No.17216904]

>>17216882
Look, having nuclear - riverrun; is that an Italian?? AAH, I'M CONSOOMING!! Indeed, the pot is in the pan, in the entire history of the universe, kind sir and scholar. And the rivers ran red and deep and reep and ded and steep, for I shepherd the Lord in the Valley of the Dead, amen and pass the Pringles.

[Anonymous No.17216905]

>>17216883
I wonder how Latin would fare compared to English. You can be very brief with Latin, even more so with Greek, like with the sentence "morituri te salutant". You need a relative clause to express what Latin can express with a simple participle. (the) men, who are about to die, salute you.

[Anonymous No.17216912]

why must the barrier to learning japanese of all things be so high? Why aren't the germans or even french the ones to make lns, vns, etc? Grinding anki is such a pain

[Anonymous No.17216917]

>>17216883
It does convey more information because of the pictorial writing system. This is why haiku poems often get lost in translation

[Anonymous No.17216924]

>>17216898
i literally wrote an e-mail to him asking if it's worth it

[Anonymous No.17216927]

>>17216912
what is the reward for your labor? normies think you're a weirdo if you say you're learning japanese (justifiably) and the japanese will never respect a wannabe gaijan white piggu trying to learn their language.

[Anonymous No.17216937]

>>17216927
>normies think you're a weirdo
Oh no, not the normies!!!

[Anonymous No.17216940]

>>17216789
remember that almost all so called "simplified" and "efficient" alphabets nowadays derive from phoenician:
>semitic
>merchants
beware alphabet fans!

[Anonymous No.17216944]

>>17216912
Japanese's inscrutibiltiy is a positive feature. It keeps outsiders out. After the US Occupation of Japan, there was a big push by NGOs and Israeli thinktanks to just outright eliminate Japanese. Not "simplify the writing system" just outright replace it with English entirely, precisely to prevent what we see today: A weird island with its own culture that is largely unaffected by outside trends, except by repurposing them for its own (culturally) sovereign wants.

>>17216905
Analytic languages beat all. Mandarin is second in information density studies.

>>17216779
This is completely wrong. The Egyptians invented two alternate scripts to write with because Heiroglyphics were too ornate, but Sumerian never "simplified", it used Cuneiform up until its extinction when the Roman Empire made all religions sans Christianity and Judaism illegal. Other languages (such as Hittite) adopted modified forms of cuneiform that were simpler, yes.

Languages do not "simplify", by which you actually mean "get more analytic". Finnish, for example, is becoming more agglutinative.

[Anonymous No.17216955]

>>17216940
They took this from you white man...

[Anonymous No.17216965]

South India is where the poo stuff is concentrated.

[Anonymous No.17216967]

>>17216905
Latin would probably rank very high, with its successors. Whether or not it would surpass English I don't know. It is less dense per syllable but you can speak/read it almost as fast as Japanese.

[Anonymous No.17216971]

>>17216927
who cares what normies think; I like the media and culture and dislike having to hope for even a shitty translation of the stuff I want to read/watch. Also, while I hate the daily grind, the writing system (especially kanji) looks more appealing to more than most others and I'm not planning on living there anyway.

[Anonymous No.17217019]

>>17216971
i respect that. good luck with all your japanese learning endeavors

[Anonymous No.17217024]

>>17216740
>>17216878
tl;dr my point was:
scripts don't simplify because people are lazy and decide to do so, they simplify when other peoples try to adopt a given script and adapt it to their own language. of course a phonetic alphabet that just requires a few diacritics is way easier to adopt than a complex grammar-dependent logogram.
Darwinian natural selection, that's all

(and, as >>17216944 said, in mesopotamia they frequently adopted cuneiform to completely unrelated languages, as cumbersome as it was. even the koreans used chinese for centuries until they found out the indians (or tibetans, I'm not sure) had a more versatile script and decided to created their own)

[Anonymous No.17217027]

>>17216538
Keep in mind that the nips need to know about 2000 kanji to be able to read the newspaper while the anglosphere has to know about 20,000 words to read theirs. Both languages have pros and cons.

[Anonymous No.17217041]

>>17217027
Kanji≠vocab
>>17217019
thanks

[Anonymous No.17217065]

>>17217027
An English word is closer to a Chinese Character than a German word, as written English is not phonetic but etymological.

[Anonymous No.17217097]

>>17217065
How is that possible when German and English share much of the same etymology. i.e. 'world' from 'welt'

[Anonymous No.17217139]

>>17216655
>almost every language
this literally isn't true at all lmao

[Anonymous No.17217159]

>>17217097
English is a frankenstein hodgepodge smorgasbord of multiple languages. You can't just pronounce every English word by the way of German. You have to know how each word is spelled because there aren't any consistent transcription rules unlike German.
So, this makes English more similar to Chinese than German; it's inefficient.

[Anonymous No.17217186]

>>17217097
A Chinese character is made up of radicals, which are symbols with no distinct phonological component. However, through simple familiarity, a speaker of Chinese can memorize groups of rules to tease out a general approximation of what a character will sound like (characters with 中 tend to end in "-ong", for example). So, while Chinese is technically non-phonetic, there are clusters of characters where it is actually phonetic.

English, similarly, has no explicit phonology. A word's spelling is totally divorced from its pronunciation. The French like to make fun of the fact that "ghoti" can be used to spell "fish". However, this is done by taking the pronunciation of words loaned into English from French. English has several phonological schemes (Anglo-Saxon, Germanic derived words in Modern English, French, Greek, Latin, Romance coming from Middle English, Greco-Roman coming from Middle English), such that clusters of words follow rough rules. There is no reason that "dictionary" has to be pronounced "dick-shun-air-ee". It could be pronounced "tis-tee-o-neer-ee". One just has to memorize it. One can, however, apply several patterns to the radicals (the letters) to achieve several possible pronunciations.

Compare this to German, which does actually have a phonetic writing system, such that a word's spelling will match its pronunciation (and if we reject the linguistic prescriptivism of Hochdeutch, this applies to accents and dialects as well; this is where the "Trump = Drumpf" thing comes from).

[Anonymous No.17217190]

>>17217159
>English is a frankenstein hodgepodge smorgasbord of multiple languages
and that's a good thing.

[Anonymous No.17217191]

>>17217159
True, but if you know your latin roots you'll be able to pronounce/spell out 90% of the language, so it's not a huge barrier. I can't see how that's comparable to a system where one character can represent dozens of concepts.

[Anonymous No.17217196]

>>17217186
>Hochdeutch
Hochdeutsch*, excuse me.

[Anonymous No.17217210]

>>17217191
In most instances that isn't the case, and is only a result of Westerners trying to cram definitions onto a word instead of just using it. The Chinese don't have twelve definitions of 道, 道 is just 道. You can do the same thing with any language. You could come up with forty very obtuse definitions of "dog" if you were writing out the wiktionary article for "dog" in Mandarin.

[Anonymous No.17217223]

>>17217186
>English, similarly, has no explicit phonology. A word's spelling is totally divorced from its pronunciation
It *explicitly* does
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology

[Anonymous No.17217230]

>>17217065
Where the fuck does nonsense like this come from? Who taught you these words?

[Anonymous No.17217240]

>>17217190
I mean it fits the racial makeup of Muttmerica fairly well

[Anonymous No.17217258]

>>17216944
>Japanese's inscrutibiltiy is a positive feature. It keeps outsiders out. After the US Occupation of Japan, there was a big push by NGOs and Israeli thinktanks to just outright eliminate Japanese. Not "simplify the writing system" just outright replace it with English entirely, precisely to prevent what we see today: A weird island with its own culture that is largely unaffected by outside trends, except by repurposing them for its own (culturally) sovereign wants.
Lmaoo, you're in for a huge awakening if you ever visit Japan and interact with the youth.

[Anonymous No.17217260]

>>17217223
Yes, SPOKEN English has a phonology. Because it is spoken. A Phonology is how a language is spoken. Written English does not, because it does not have an explicit phonological system attached to it. There is no reason that "rendezvous" is not in fact pronounced "ren-dez-vo-us", or "reendeez-vaws" or "fart". There is no connection between an English word's spelling and it's pronunciation, there are just rough patterns that can be hashed out from memorizing what certain words sound like.

[Anonymous No.17217271]

>>17217186
This is not the meaningful distinction you think it is. English preserving the spelling of loan words as a convenience does not "ackshully" make it more similar to Chinese then one of it's own parent languages.

[Anonymous No.17217276]

>>17217258
>t. animePRO
lol

[Anonymous No.17217293]

>>17217258
They're still safer from globohomo than the rest of us because they're completely submerged into Japanese (they even have their own Internet, so to speak); there are many English loanwords but barely anybody speaks English.
Katakana is a good bulwark from Anglo-Jewry because it demarks foreign terms as the intrinsic Other. Anglospeak and animal sounds are both represented with katakana.

[Anonymous No.17217298]

>>17217271
Yes, it explicitly does. There is an obvious genetic relation between the English word "blade" and it's Anglo-Saxon parent blæd. But that doesn't change the fact that how an English language word works is more similar to how a Chinese character works than how a German (or Anglo-Saxon) word works.

Don't like it? Go find me the English language regulator's specific pronunciation guidelines. Oh, wait... There is none. So, ackshuallly, you'll have to go found one, as for now, an English word's spelling has no correlation to its pronunciation.

[Anonymous No.17217300]

>>17217260
I fail to see how some words being based on the latin is some kind of extreme factor in whether a written language has phonology. Ph = F isn't a huge barrier by any stretch of the imagination. Your example is bizarre because "rendezvous" is a French loan word.

[Anonymous No.17217318]

college freshman majoring in philosophy here, I'm enrolled in a japanese course as a minor and the amount of workload is absolutely ridiculous. They gave us 2 weeks to learn hiragana and katakana from scratch, that includes not only being able to read them but also know how to write them (there's a specific pattern for each letter that you have to memorize). In the same time you also have to learn the grammar (which is fairly simple desu) and vocabulary. You're expected to read hiragana and katana fluently and then they hit you with fucking kanji.
Needless to say I gave up after those two weeks because it took so much more time than my major. I only took the course because A) the good courses were already full and B) I was semi-interested in japanese writing. I'm definitely switching to political science or something else next semester.

[Anonymous No.17217371]

>>17217300
Because English isn't just words from Anglo-Saxon origin and Latin origin, it's words from
>OE origin that have survived to MoE
>Latin words introduced to OE that survived to MoE
>Latin words introduced to MiE that survived to MoE
>Those two for Greek
>Those two for Latin
>(We can also throw in Norse and German here, but those are close enough to OE that I'd say we can fold them in).
So, at minimum, seven patterns.

[Anonymous No.17217392]

>>17217371
The second "those two" should be for French.

[Anonymous No.17217398]

>>17217293
>They're still safer from globohomo
https://youtu.be/TjSBaDNJfeA
https://youtu.be/5Akk9a_HQRE
https://youtu.be/-p0tYGNw-s0
They're not 'safe' from anything, modern japanese youth closely resembles american millennials. Their political presence might not be as fervent, but their personal opinions are still closer to modern western values than traditional japanese values. You're describing a very naive and idealized view of Japan.

[Anonymous No.17217407]

>>17217318
>They gave us 2 weeks to learn hiragana and katakana from scratch
I learned and memorized hiragana in one day...

[Anonymous No.17217414]

>>17217407
liar you're a LIAR

[Anonymous No.17217433]

>>17217318
Kana is easy, you're just a brainlet

[Anonymous No.17217435]

>>17217318
>hiragana and katakana
If you put your mind to it you should been able to write them completely from memory in an afternoon (it took me around 1.5 days and I'm a retard that only half assed it). If you expose yourself to enough text you should be able to read them semi-fluently within two weeks (took me around a month until fluency desu). Still, I don't think I would be able to keep on learning it while having something like philosophy as my major; way too much work in the long run.

[Anonymous No.17217440]

>>17217318
It sounds like your Japanese course made the assumption that you're not a midwit. You were, quite literally, filtered.

[Anonymous No.17217441]

>>17217398
so what if they're okay with fags, they're still not okay with nigs
>inb4 you post some Asian Boss video where Jap passerbies are ok with nigs
Cherrypicked

[Anonymous No.17217444]

>>17217371
Yeah, no shit. But "rendezvous" isn't an actual English word, it hasn't been anglicized. It's literally a foreign word that just happens to be somewhat popular in English, similar to 'fjord' or 'schadenfreude'.

[Anonymous No.17217452]

>>17217441
>they're still not okay with nigs
Well, obviously. What's wrong with that?

[Anonymous No.17217457]

>>17217414
Hiragana is very easy man, I really took me just a day to memorize everything. As for katakana I still mess up somethings to this day, but that's mostly because I didn't study it as much as I did with hiragana.

[Anonymous No.17217478]

>>17217441
By 'nigs' you only mean black people or immigrants in general? Either way, I think you shouldn't be posting here for now, you're too dumb (no offense).

[Anonymous No.17217512]

>>17217440
I guess I were lol. My guide was to just sit down and learn all letters at once and it worked for the moment but the next day I could only remember like half of it. Anytime I tried to read something I had to look up the letters again. I guess it's just not for me

[Anonymous No.17217539]

>>17217478
nig hands typed this post

[Anonymous No.17217564]

>>17217512
you should have gone row by row, writing each letter out until you're able to write it without looking it up and make yourself write the rows you've already gone through after each completed row. It sounds tedious, but you should be able to still remember them the day afterwards (you've still got to write all out once a day for a day or two, but afterwards you won't forget them for a couple weeks at least).

[Anonymous No.17217592]

>>17217318
>gave us 2 weeks to learn hiragana and katakana from scratch
perfectly reasonable. stop whining or just give up.

[Anonymous No.17217650]

>>17216654
>Japanese students study the kanji intensively for many hours a day
They don't do that.
>until their senior year of university
The standard jouyou kanji are finished in high school. There is of course still a lot of language beyond that, but it's not as if English students stop learning new words in college. Also, an adult can easily learn the jouyou kanji in a year by learning five a day.
>many educated adults are unable to write the kanji
Many educated adults cannot spell a lot of words either, you would be surprised. In those videos where random people on the street are unable to write the kanji properly, the kanji being used are purposefully tricky ones for the most part. Its also evident that everyone in those videos would be able to instantly recognize them and simply does not have the need to write them by hand. Reproduction and recognition are two very different skills.
>are unable to even read a considerable number of the more obscure or specialist kanji despite knowing the words
They can break down the information in a word via radical components without knowing it's pronunciation whereas an English person might be able to pronounce a complicated word without knowing anything about its roots or meaning. Try asking the average English person if they know what fibromyalgia is (they might know), if they know how to spell it, and if they know what the latin roots are (they won't know).
>English students study the alphabet for three years in elementary school
Japanese students learn the hiragana and katakana very quickly as well. English students will still have to spend a long time learning the many spellings and readings of English words, and they will continue to pick up new vocabulary for the rest of their life. Your mistake is in thinking that a kanji is equivalent to a single letter, when really it is the whole word. Learning the stroke order of a specific kanji isn't different from learning a words spelling.

[Anonymous No.17217879]

>>17216538
Your post seems to be predicated on the assumption that a writing system should be easy to learn and that literacy should be widespread. If anything, it's amazing that western cultures have continued to produce literature of any value in recent times.

[Anonymous No.17217915]

>>17216731
No, there are no bonuses and maluses. Pictographic is objectively worse in every way

[Anonymous No.17217945]

>>17217915
But it has SOVL

[Anonymous No.17217947]

>>17216693
>Knowing that even adults can't write and read your their own language is kind of a big hint that its shit. That's what it's there for.
No. Written language and by extension literature are best produced and passed down by a select scholarly class. Making the written forms difficult to learn, ensures that these scholar have a sufficient level of mental fortitude.

[Anonymous No.17217966]

>>17216693
>>17216654
>he thinks the plebs should be taught to read
>he thinks literal retards should "have access" to culture

personally I admire the written Chinese language because it's a massive pleb filter. I don't want morons to be able to write down their gay little thoughts on art and literature. I don't want them to be able to experience any literature whatsoever without having to respectfully beg an intelligent person to read it aloud to them.

[Anonymous No.17217984]

>>17217966
Based

[Anonymous No.17218096]

>>17217915
Kanji are not pictographs.

[Anonymous No.17218154]

>>17217966
based

[Anonymous No.17218469]

I like that Japanese takes effort to learn. Keeps the low IQ niggers away.

[Anonymous No.17218555]

>>17216654
This is a good thing. The Western World was better when only educated people knew how to write.

[Anonymous No.17218597]

>>17217966
>>17218555
Yes, I also love being ruled over by a class of gay autistic scholars and being repeatedly overrun by a bunch of barbarians after failing to get an industrial revolution up and going for the better part of a millenium.

[Anonymous No.17218877]

>>17218597
Nothing wrong with that?
At least everybody gets laid one way or another

[Anonymous No.17218988]

>>17216927
>what is the reward for your labor?