Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.
They don't transpose the strokes, they just forget how to write the character entirely, even if they can read it perfectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something.
Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.
I got it once for a couple of days when I was about 7 years old. Learned how to write an uppercase N, and became unable to write it lowercase (n) for a few days. (it's a super weird feeling, trying to write something and producing a different shape)
What the heck...? It's most definitely a problem in practice! That problem becomes pretty obvious once you get a vocabulary of around 10k ~ 15k words and you read both fiction and non-fiction books. What you find is that every time you encounter an unfamiliar word you only really have a best guess at how to read it and you actually can't be 100% sure. This has repeatedly been my experience. I spent some time thinking about if I could shortcut this process by instead simply learning all the "exceptions to the rule" but what I discovered is that the volume of them is too large for that to be a tractable approach.
The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyone who looks at English and Japanese and finds them to be of equivalent complexity probably isn’t qualified to comment on either.
The existence of furigana alone is a huge admission that Japanese a somewhat unreadable language that has somehow or other been made to work through bolting it on. So, you can imagine that if an orthographic system comes with permanent training wheels for native speakers, then non-native speakers are going to have a pretty brutal time with it.
Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation.
Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning.
It's all tradeoffs.
These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese.
Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me.
But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.
For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them.
It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has little impact in day to day life, and mixing up kanjis is pretty common and people won’t make a fuss about it.
All in all I think Japanese has a very steady learning curve where other languages will have sudden walls to climb, but it’s not more or less complex, difficulty is just more evenly distributed.
Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other.
Furigana are essential for karaoke.
This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji?
Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself.
Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )
There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other common uses. For example, if a robot, alien, child, or non-Japanese is speaking, the words may be written in katakana to indicate the non-fluency of the speaker. Also, many animal names are often written in katakana.
Additionally, there are quite a few pseudo-English words that are written in katakana because they originally arose from English words. Some of my favorites (written in romaji for those who don't read katakana):
- "baabeekaa" : pronounced similar to "baby car", this word means a stroller
- "akogi" : short for acoustic guitar
- "brappi", "jimihen", etc: Brad Pitt, Jimi Hendrix, etc.
- "handoru": pronounced similar to "handle". This is what a steering wheel is called in Japanese, so..
- "handorukeepaa": or handle keeper, refers to a designated driver.
Another interesting thing that occurs in Japanese is referred to as ateji. This is where kanji are used only for the sound they give. In other words, any word can be written by just using a kanji with that sound for each syllable. The meanings of the kanji chosen (there are many with each particular sound) can give additional flavor/wordplay/signifigance to the usage.
Finally, one of the most interesting things I saw in Japanese was a baby soap, called "Arau baby". The first word "arau" is the Japanese infinitive for "to wash" written in romaji, or roman script. Since this is the product name and it is written in roman script, the product label also includes a katakana translation (アラウベビー). So instead of using the kanji for arau, it was treated as a foreign word and then appropriated back into Japanese using katakana. Or something.
There is just absolutely all sorts of fuckery in Japanese on a count of people playing with the language. It's a fun language to play around with.
(I will try to dig out a relevant song lyric.)
That's hilarious.
Traditional examples would be 本気 (honki) -> マジ (maji), 頭文字(kasiramoji) -> イニシアる(initial), 因果(inga) -> カルマ(karma)
I remember a live stream where a comment with "超電磁砲"(choudenjihou) was straight read into "railgun", as at this point the novel/manga/anime just established it as a popular reading.
One good example is from GReeeeN's 愛唄(Aiuta/ Love Song). It's a song about a guy apologising for all the times he's fought with and been a nuisance to his partner, and reaffirming his love for them.
「君の選んだ人生「みち」は僕「ここ」よかったのか？」
Taken as you'd hear it from listening to the song, it means "Are you happy with the road you have chosen?", but reading the lyrics uses different kanji to give it a slightly broader meaning.
人生 is read as jinsei, meaning life, but the furigana is 道（みち）which is a road or a path, note that this can be a literal road or a more figurative pathway through life.
僕(boku) is a male pronoun for "me/myself" but ここ means "this" as in "this road, not that one"
It's not that deep, but it extends the meaning of the lyric to be something like "are you happy to spend the rest of your life with me?" I thought it was kinda clever. There's probably better examples, but this pops into my head often as it's still quite a popular song.
let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in
日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat
so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona)
even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person
As far as jin and nin goes... (source: 漢語からみえる世界と世間)
jin is more about adjectives/nouns - describing yourself, and part of your identity. 日本人、アメリカ人、原始人、現代人 are all じん. 読書人（どくしょじん） is used to describe people who really love reading. Similarly 暇人（ひまじん）.
nin is more of a plain descriptor. 管理人、運搬人、苦労人、被告人 are all にん, as well as 三人.
Why is popularity "plain" and humanity is "identity"?
You just have to memorize ALL of the compounds, there's no other way
Your question about the reading, though, has quite a simple answer. It's pretty obvious how to read all the examples given when you look at them as words, not a single character. Kanji does not exist in a vacuum. 人気 is "ninki" and 大人 is "otona" - no other way around it. Combination of those characters, usually, have one and only reading. To tell the truth, in English, people are unconsciously reading words as a whole, too.
if it's 大人気ない it's probably childish, but if it's not in that context, it's probably very popular
You need to finish reading the whole SENTENCE to be able to pronounce it
大人気なくてもいい means it's okay to be childish
Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡
One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.
Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing.
Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.
Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s
Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services.
One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.
That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?
Kaikeio doesn't support HiDPI / 150 % fractional scaling either, so it looks really weird on my machine.
Recently the maker (Sorimachi) has announced that you can download their newest edition. Too late! They have already sent me the CD.
Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :) (https://qa.sorimachi.co.jp/hc/ja/articles/360054408631-%EF%B...)
I just resort to editing everything in GnuCash and then importing into Kaikeio using a custom sql -> csv script. I hate the idea of my accounting journal being trapped in proprietary software.
Too bad that Japanese lawmakers have further decided to decrease software freedom by prescribing the use of digital time stamping by next year.
Oh dear. I just skimmed that. The bit where it tells you to turn off the beta UTF-8 support made me particularly sad.
(A good part of the blame lies with Microsoft of course - why are these legacy locale and encoding settings still system-wide?)
I agree that it’s very strange that professional services fall under 手数料 instead of 報酬, but taxes are weird in every language.
Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.
The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.
Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man?
The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words.
Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English.
I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.