I don't find writing too hard to figure out. Once you've figured out the 300 (including kana) or so shapes that you'll reguarly use, it's pretty much a breeze. You know, if you remember which shapes need to be used...

Jarvik7 Wrote:-The upfront learning of many characters is comparable to learning of morphemes in non-kanji/hanzi languages. There is roughly equal effort required but it is at different times

Although I disagree with this even as applied to foreign learners, it especially does not apply to Japanese natives, who already know a good portion of the morphemes by the time they start to learn to read.

(Why did this thread get bumped anyway?)

Quote:There is no real reason why writing needs to transcribe pronunciation and meaning based writing makes it universally compatible with even martian languages that contain phonemes unpronounceable by human tongues.

Writing does transcribe pronunciation, though -- any sentence of Japanese or Chinese writing can be pronounced out loud in those languages. Of course you can know a word without knowing how to pronounce it, but you can do this in roman letter script languages as well.

The problem with the "universally compatible" claim is that Japanese people cannot read a text in Chinese (or vice versa) despite both countries using Chinese characters. (Classical Chinese might be considered an exception but here, this was not an example of two countries reading the same text in their standard vernacular language.)

(On a side note, my support of the roman alphabet is not intended to mean that romanization has an inherent superiority to any other system you could come up with. If one were to posit the complete abandonment of the kanji/kana system, romanization is the obvious alternative because (a) a system for writing Japanese in romanization already exists and is taught to kids in Japanese schools, (b) a large portion of the world uses the script and many technological devices are primarily designed to work with them, and © many Japanese people already make use of romanized Japanese constantly, every time they type Japanese into computers. Of course they use programs to convert the romaji into kanji/kana, but there must be a certain amount of "thinking in romaji" to enable them to type the Japanese into the keyboard in the first place.)

I don't think the intent of the condition was that written text would be mutually intelligible, just that the writing system could be used to transcribe any possible language. That is an impossibility in sound based writing systems with a finite number of characters.

The ideal writing system, by all parameters, is a mixed logographic/phonographic system. Japanese is close but needs refinement, but anything that attempts to remove the visual-semantic icons rather than prioritize/increase them in written language concerns is attempting to impoverish language and literacy with logically inferior systems.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I don't think the intent of the condition was that written text would be mutually intelligible, just that the writing system could be used to transcribe any possible language. That is an impossibility in sound based writing systems with a finite number of characters.

Roman letters are used to transcribe any language, though -- romanization is the primary choice for linguistics; linguistic articles use romanization even when discussing languages with alternate scripts (nowadays the articles usually provide both romanization and the original script). It may be a point of debate whether the romanization is better or worse, but it's clearly not *impossible*.

I didn't want to respond much to the straw-man post that bumped this thread but I did want to address one aspect of it, because it is a common challenge to script change that hasn't really been dealt with in this thread yet:

Quote:Culture is mostly written, not spoken or drawn, so giving up Kanji would already mean abandoning most of traditional Japanese culture (a culture that's older and richer than most)

Anthropologists and sociologists (among others) would disagree that culture is "mostly written". Culture is made up of many things, and writing is only a small part of it. Illiterate people (and whole tribes) still manage to have culture.

But to switch to romanization would not destroy or abandon traditional culture. Most Japanese people are essentially unable to read anything written before about the mid to late-19th century anyway, so they're already cut off from a good portion of their written cultural deposit. Even as recent as pre-WW2, up to the 1940's and even after in some cases, you have things published with old kana usage and old kanji, and sometimes in all katakana and kanji. These are not impossible for modern Japanese people to read, but few people probably read them in their original forms.

Of course there are translations and annotated modern editions that assist this, but the same adaptations could be made for a switch to romanization as well. It is true that switching to romanization would further cut off access to older material that did not get republished in romanized form, but this doesn't really seem to have been a big problem for Korea or Vietnam. I think it would be pretty absurd to say that Korea has abandoned its traditional culture due to their switch to Hangul.

Has anyone pointed out yet when Japanese video game developers use all kana text in a game they tend to put spaces in everywhere they can? Is this because they can't figure out where paticles and such are without spaces to help them?

It's probably done to provide some visual separation between words to make it easier to read; it would not be literally impossible without the spaces but there's a reason why most writing systems have added spacing and punctuation -- it's much easier to read.

I personally find Japanese to be inefficient with technology in comparison to English alphabet letters.

The fact that I have to increase the size of the text on the screen is a purely technological issue based on the fact that computers and the Internet have been designed significantly for the English language and with the alphabet in mind... syntax becomes a huge issue because of this... it is a pain for me to read Japanese websites a lot of the time because I cannot even distinguish Kanji. And before you jump in on me and say it's just because I'm terrible and I should 'stop pushing away our dearly beloved kanjis you dumb gaijin', my mother has the same issue with Chinese hanzi and she was born in Taiwan and is native in Mandarin. She (and I) often have to increase page/font size in order to properly see a lot of websites...

I think Kanji is an interesting and debatable topic, but so far my experience with them on websites has been a big pain in the ass.

Haha, I misread the subject for

"Next time someone tells you are too stupid to learn..."

zachandhobbes Wrote:The fact that I have to increase the size of the text on the screen

I am curious, do some of you guys read japanese websites without increasing size or squinting?

I read just fine without increasing the size. It's a little hard to read it on some old video games like NES or SNES era, but that's more of a pixel limitation than anything (Harder to save space with low res and do curved lines.) Also I keep my resolution high at 1680x1050 so the text should be super tiny compared to something like 1280x800 or some other normal resolution. This is also with my bad eyes, and I have no glasses on right now, making me pretty much half blind and on top of all that, I still don't have much of a problem discerning regular use kanji. When you can recognize 鸞 without expanding the text, you pretty much got it down pat. I believe pretty much any Japanese website is sensible with their font size so it's all good.

jubei Wrote:

zachandhobbes Wrote:The fact that I have to increase the size of the text on the screen

I am curious, do some of you guys read japanese websites without increasing size or squinting?

I don't increase the size of Japanese websites any more than English ones (I do both from time to time).

yudantaiteki Wrote:

jubei Wrote:

zachandhobbes Wrote:The fact that I have to increase the size of the text on the screen

I am curious, do some of you guys read japanese websites without increasing size or squinting?

I don't increase the size of Japanese websites any more than English ones (I do both from time to time).

I have to increase English ones if I'm reading for a long time without glasses (they're in the mail.)

I've never had a problem with text size personally. Even playing some games on the DS or FF7 in Japanese all the pixelated text is still plenty easy to read.

I really don't think romanization would be a good idea. Especially when people can't seem to decide how exactly things should be romanized. Romaji is in general difficult to read. However I don't think Hiragana with spaces is all that difficult to read. Like the pokemon games before black/white all were in pure kana and they were pretty easy. However some games (like the translation of Banjo Kazooie) used all kana, but no spaces. That just sucked.

If they were to abolish Kanji then I think keeping their mix between hiragana/katakana and just adding spaces would be a much better alternative to romanization. Or do like Korea did and just trash the entire writing system and make a new one better tailored to the language. However I think the current writing system is better with Kanji than if it were to be dropped.

There's no reason for a language to be efficient, since native speakers get so much practice that they can even learn very inefficient systems. In purely academic languages, like mathematics or programming languages, efficiency is important. It's not important in communicative languages.

So whether or not the Japanese writing system is inefficient is not important. Whether or not it is difficult for foreigners is also irrelevant when it comes to native speakers deciding what they should do with their language.

At any rate, usually language evolves as it does. I don't even know why people feel the need to talk about this.

Well, my screen is 1920x1200 pixels and 24". I just can't read some of those small kanji. especially on news sites.

Japanese has this tendency to become hugely cluttered.

zachandhobbes Wrote:Well, my screen is 1920x1200 pixels and 24". I just can't read some of those small kanji. especially on news sites.

Japanese has this tendency to become hugely cluttered.

My screen is 1920 x 1080 @ 24". so *shrug*

I agree that it can look cluttered, but I've still never had a problem reading it. Even though Kanji gets shrunk and distorted it still jumps out to me as obvious. There are many times when playing games on DS screens and whatnot where You can see that the Kanji is clearly not being rendered properly due to pixelation. Often times something like 目 (when used as a radical for another kanji) will look more like 日 or even 口 because of how shrunk down it is. But it is still obvious that the intention is 目. I see this a lot with kanji like 着.

arch9443 Wrote:If they were to abolish Kanji then I think keeping their mix between hiragana/katakana and just adding spaces would be a much better alternative to romanization. Or do like Korea did and just trash the entire writing system and make a new one better tailored to the language.

In what ways is kana worse tailored to Japanese than hangul to Korean?

@arch - that is what I am talking about.

When the kanji get so small that you literally cannot tell one from another. It's particularly bad on this forum because the kanji shrink down a LOT

vonPeterhof Wrote:

arch9443 Wrote:If they were to abolish Kanji then I think keeping their mix between hiragana/katakana and just adding spaces would be a much better alternative to romanization. Or do like Korea did and just trash the entire writing system and make a new one better tailored to the language.

In what ways is kana worse tailored to Japanese than hangul to Korean?

I'm not trying to say it is. I have zero knowledge of korean so I wouldn't even try and compare the two. I like kana a lot myself, and I'm just saying either kana OR creating a new writing system would be fine. Just don't romanize it.

I just worded that poorly. When I said "make a new one better tailored to the language" I really just meant that Korea did that. And maybe there are potential ways to improve the Kana. The Kana are fine to me, but I'm just a language learner, not a language expert.

zachandhobbes Wrote:@arch - that is what I am talking about.

When the kanji get so small that you literally cannot tell one from another. It's particularly bad on this forum because the kanji shrink down a LOT

Yeah the Kanji do get distorted. But it's just never hampered readability to me. It always seems obvious what Kanji it is supposed to be. Sure a few radicals get screwed up, but the options of what it could be are (usually) extremely limited. So much so that I've rarely had to think about it.

I'm certainly not trying to say my Japanese skills are better than yours (they probably aren't), but I've just never the problem where I can't tell one from another.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:TASK:
1-It needs to be quickly learnable.
2-It needs to be easy to integrate with a high number of existing technologies.
3-It needs to be easily legible even small sizes and low resolutions.

Please describe your suggested system and explain why you made those choices.

Your premise is flawed from the start because of #1, and many of the other conditions are just a roundabout way of describing Latin/Cyrillic.
There should be no requirement to master the entire writing system in a short time. That is a fallacy caused by being raised on a western writing system where characters have no meaning. Putting complexity in the writing system is not inherently inferior to putting complexity into the morphology.

The biggest flaw of kanji is the difficulty of writing them, but that is both caused by and made increasingly insignificant by technology. Then again, many English natives have trouble spelling correctly, which is the exact same issue.

Personally I think that Japanese writing is pretty close to the ideal for the Japanese language. I think katakana should go away and loan words should just use Latin letters though. Kanji could be somewhat simplified (or rather, made more consistent.. PRC style kanji would make me sick) as well.

..but to answer your question, IPA fills most of the conditions, but it would have to be extended to an infinite number of characters to cover all possible phonemes in alien languages, making it worse than meaning-based writing like kanji/hanzi in practice. So my answer is hanzi. There is no real reason why writing needs to transcribe pronunciation and meaning based writing makes it universally compatible with even martian languages that contain phonemes unpronounceable by human tongues.

Obviously it loses out on the aspects such as visual complexity per character (for machine readability etc), but that is an issue for technology to solve.

Are you serious that you don't think there is benefit in learning the writing system quickly? It facilitates literacy. Even for a language as messed up as English, if you just learn the pronunciation of the 26 letters of the alphabet and get a little basic training in reading you can start sounding out words with some degree of accuracy, and if you're native you can make guesses as to which words they are spelling out. If you're non-native or young and have a low vocabulary you can start making reasonably accurate guesses as to how words sound and use this as a point of first contact on the road to acquiring those words. I remember reading Lord of the Rings when I was nine and I remember it being quite difficult at the time. There would certainly have been a lot of words I didn't know but nevertheless I could read it sans dictionary and without help. The same would be true for newspapers. I likely wouldn't understand a lot of what I was reading but I would still be able to read it aloud with reasonably accurate pronunciation. I don't think the same can be said of Japanese kids reading texts that aren't heavy in furigana, and that means a japanese kid (or beginner) is limited in their reading material or needs to use a dictionary. And Japanese kids spend a lot more time on Kanji at school and Juku than the average English speaker spends getting literate in English. I was done learning how to write and spell by the end of primary (elemantary) school. If you've ever looked in a Japanese Junior high school library, everything is full of furigana or uses limited kanji. I wonder if the average 12 y.o japanese kid could read japanese wikipedia as well as the average english kid can read the english version assuming the same quality of education.

Regarding IPA. The writing system doesn't have to 100% accurately describe the sound of the language, indeed this would likely be impossible. I think the level of phonetic accuracy afforded by using IPA is overkill for anything other than phonemic analysis. There isn't any reason why one letter couldn't be used to transcribe different sounds in different languages, some degree of consistency could be useful but not strictly necessary. For example you could arbitrarily assign any letter of the latin alphabet to the japanese ら行 and just accept it's pronounced differently than in English. Or you could add additional letters for different languages as dictated by necessity. German for example has that special S character and french has a special C with a little curl at the bottom. If the text transcribes the sound of words closely enough that we can easily recognise it then that is enough. The advantage of a purely phonetic system compared to a purely semantic one, (noting that kanji are not purely semantic and that the latin alphabet stops being purely phonetic the moment a person starts learning phonemes and words with associated meaning) is that it makes reading immediately accessible with minimal training to anyone with a degree of listening comprehension. I think there is some evidence that people generally remember words first and foremost by their sound, so I don't see any need for visual semantic cues. When you see the word apple or りんご or 林檎 most people are going to hear the word in their head and understand its meaning via the auditory part of brain before the visual.

jarvik7 Wrote:Obviously it loses out on the aspects such as visual complexity per character (for machine readability etc), but that is an issue for technology to solve.

The implementation of which is just more burdensome extra work for humankind.

Kanji actually helps people become literate faster, due to the iconicity for memorization and the meaningful relations with vocabulary, and reading with visual-semantic icons alongside phonographs is superior to reading without them because it takes advantage of more cognitive faculties for communicating information. That's why kanij/kana is a good system that, if streamlined, would be represent the best type of system.

zigmonty Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:Since the only reasons why people suggest getting rid of Kanji is to simplify and "integrate better" with the world by helping communication, I don't see how that suggestion is significantly different from just throwing away the language. The only difference is in the degree of the change.

I believe that's known as a "straw man argument". Because they're not willing to abandon language all together and communicate by banging two sticks together, they shouldn't change it at all?

Well that's a straw man argument. You're misrepresenting my argument and then attacking your version of it. I didn't say anything about banging sticks together.

My argument wasn't a straw man. It was an analogy though. I think it was a valid analogy. But I could be wrong, I'm nowhere near fully informed (I'm still learning Japanese). If it isn't a valid analogy, then it's a fallacy called a weak analogy. Weak analogies can be easily identified, all you have to do is point out an essential, relevant difference between the two lines of reasoning I was equating (switching to a Roman alphabet for the sake of simplification and better communication vs. just switching to English for the same reason).

nest0r Wrote:It's not really a straw man argument. Essentially that's what people promoting the abolishment of kanji are doing. Going for an unworkable, illogical, and inferior top-down extreme based on principles derived from delusions of alphabetical/phonocentric Western linguistic superiority that follows the logic, as ironically paraphrased by Jun Yamada decades ago: “If pigs had feathers, and wings, and claws, and walked on 2 feet, etc., then there would be no difference between pigs and chickens.”

Damn, that's a a short and sweet (and quite smart) way to describe it.

Stansfield123 Wrote:My argument wasn't a straw man. It was an analogy though. I think it was a valid analogy. But I could be wrong, I'm nowhere near fully informed (I'm still learning Japanese). If it isn't a valid analogy, then it's a fallacy called a weak analogy. Weak analogies can be easily identified, all you have to do is point out an essential, relevant difference between the two lines of reasoning I was equating (switching to a Roman alphabet for the sake of simplification and better communication vs. just switching to English for the same reason).

The reason it's not valid is that changing a writing system and changing a language are very different things. Because people learn language automatically as children, there's a practical limit to what can be done by force. A government, if sufficiently motivated, is able to force certain changes to language as long as those aspects are things that would be taught in school rather than learned automatically, provided many people go to school. The only successful attempts at actually changing the language people speak that I am aware of have to do with eradication of minority languages, which is different from an entire country switching languages. I don't think it would be possible for Japan to "switch to English" even if the government wanted to, for some reason. I guess I can envision theoretically possible ways to do it, but it would take an enormous amount of work -- they can't even get everyone to learn English, much less switch over.

Writing, on the other hand, is something that virtually everyone has to consciously learn, and the majority of people learn it in school. This makes it much easier for the government to make changes. There are many examples throughout history, even in recent history, of governments making changes to their writing systems both relatively minor (character simplification, post-WW2 kana usage) and major (Vietnam's switch to romanization, Korea's abandonment of Chinese characters).

However, it's no coincidence that virtually every change to a writing system comes with government change or wartime chaos. Vietnam's romanization switch came with the rise of the Communists to power. Japan simplified their kanji and kana usage post-WW2. China simplified their characters after Mao took power. Therefore, even if it were an objective fact that roman letters were superior to kanji/kana, it's still unlikely that Japan would switch any time soon. Changing to romaji would definitely be difficult, but changing to English is several orders of magnitude more difficult.

Are you saying the only reason why Japan shouldn't just switch to English is because it would be difficult? That other than that, it would be a perfectly good idea? Because if that were true, then my analogy, while still not weak, would definitely be pointless. Its sole purpose was to offer a more obviously horrible extreme to the 'switching to romaji' suggestion.