.....

the idea is interesting but that study feels incredibly shitty from a statistical viewpoint. A total of 17 news texts, and all from　朝日?? No wonder the results they get are worthless.

On a side note, does anyone else feel really uncomfortable reading these texts that romanize everthing? It makes sense for it to be readable for someone who can't read Japanese but still..

Yeah, shouldn't there be readily available corpus analysis tools for these kind of things?

How could anyone draw any conclusions on such an horrible paper?! It's 2016, we have computers... 30% of 17 articles... spanning over 17 years?!!!

And those graphs are (unsurprisingly) screaming "NOISE"

Here's a fascinating study someone should do:

If you post something on a "forum", what percentage of responses will be negative bile?  I don't know...maybe posting a negative response makes people feel intelligent (or something).

Or maybe, the study is worthless?
It's an interesting question, but with such a poor sample size, that link is nothing more than a conversation starter.

I would like to see the conversation though; really didn't expect this lack of response when I saw this thread. Of course, the reason I haven't posted until now (which is inadvisable in itself, as I'm sleep deprived) is because I have nothing to say on the subject; perhaps it's the same with everyone else, so only the astonishment at the paper's lack of significant data showed up.

sholum Wrote:Or maybe, the study is worthless?

I scrolled through and took one look at the graphs and did not feel the need to read further.

john555 Wrote:I don't know...maybe posting a negative response makes people feel intelligent (or something).

In 1951, 70% of 和語 verbs were written using 漢字, but by 1958 the proportion had plummeted to a mere 4%.
Was this due to:
(a) a radical cultural shift in the use of 漢字; or
(b) pisspoor research based on a tiny sample?

[Zgarbas]

(2016-01-23, 6:19 am)john555 Wrote: Here's a fascinating study someone should do:

If you post something on a "forum", what percentage of responses will be negative bile?  I don't know...maybe posting a negative response makes people feel intelligent (or something).

To be fair, you do have an impressive capacity to find resources that are either dated or based on strange/poor methodology.
The sample would be considered too small in any decade, but ignoring Big Data in this day and age is simply wont to cancel out the chances of your study being taken seriously.

You also chose to cite the introduction, but in the results the author states that his research does not confirm Tanaka's hypothesis. And even then, he's stretching it to make his paper seem more positive, even though his data does *not* show any pattern of increase. If word processors would increase the use of kanji then there would be more kanjis now that everyone is using a computer, not fewer as seen in the data.

Leaving aside the study, anecdotally and from people one has met (and common sense), I think it is safe to say that most Japanese people know most non-obscure kanji by recognition but cannot write some of them correctly by hand. With electronic devices therefore they are able to write more kanji than without them. It would seem likely that this might result in their using at least a few more.

Incidentally I sometimes write 良い for いい not because that is my express choice (I would normally write いい) but because my computer produces it automatically and there doesn't seem much reason to change it.

The OP reminds me of a paper which is often cited in (lay) discussions of language efficiency.

The paper claims to overturn (or at least qualify) the hypothesis that there is a tradeoff between information content per syllable vs spoken syllables per second via analysis in which English comes out as by far the best and Japanese comes out as by far the worst, to the absurd extent that it would take nearly 50% longer to say things in Japanese than in English (see Table 1).

To save time zip straight to page 15, which presents a sample of the translations on which the preceding verbiage is based.

Exercises for the reader:
(1) See if you can spot which was obviously the original language even without knowing any of the others (and despite the claim that the original was in Vietnamese), and identify a couple of advantages it gained from that fact alone.
(2) Identify factors that may have influenced the efficiency of the French translation.
(3) Spot 2 typos in the Japanese and decide how likely it is that they were included in the Japanese syllable count.
(4) Decide how likely it is that the Japanese translator was asked to be as economical as possible, and identify ways in which the translation is needlessly wasteful of precious syllables.
(5) Identify a detail entirely omitted from the conspicuously short Spanish translation obvious even without knowing a word of Spanish.

In any case can one really directly compare a mora-based language with a syllable-based language? How does one define a "syllable" in Japanese? In predictably Eurocentric fashion the "syllable" is used as the criterion.

It rather reminds me of the way people say "Japan is non religious" which translates to "If you define 'religion' as something that is practised in the same way as Euro-American Judeo-Christianity, that isn't what Japanese people do".