bopomofo is only used in Taiwan, so it's unlikely it would ever be used to write foreign words throughout the sinosphere. So if the majority of loanwords come from the mainland that's probably why no one use bopomofo. Also the kanji aren't necessarily just chosen for their phonetic qualities, so the kanji choice becomes part of the word.

yudantaiteki wrote:

I think yes, it would be impossible, because this could be "John was a strong man" or "John is not a strong man" -- it depends exactly on what you mean by "function words" but I think that usually includes negation, volition, tense, etc.

Yet again I'm confused. In the example sentence in my last post, I was showing what a pair of sentences in a Chinese-like language might look like with each character changed to English one-for-one, not with the function words removed.  There's nothing there to hint that the sentence might be negative.  On top of that, even if there were that uncertainty somehow, the second sentence is already strongly hinting in the direction of the "John is strong" interpretation.

Sort of like how if you knew that 食 meant "eat" but nothing else, you wouldn't know whether a Japanese phrase meant "was eaten", "want to eat", "cannot eat", etc.

Ok, if you plucked the character 食 out of a text and looked at only that one character in isolation, it's true that you'd have no idea what it was being used for, but nobody's talking about a scenario like that.  That's what context is for.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 August 22, 3:09 am)

yudantaiteki wrote:

But if the "context" is also written in the language you don't know, that doesn't help.

The hypothetical situation we've been talking about this whole time is one where the English meanings of all (or most) of the characters is known, but not the grammar.  In that situation, yes the context does help a lot, just like in the sentences I put forth.

yudantaiteki wrote:

But if the "context" is also written in the language you don't know, that doesn't help.

well sometimes it's enough to understand fully, sometimes it's not enough to understand anything at all. Often it'll be somewhere in between.

yudantaiteki wrote:

I was hoping someone would address Tori-kun's question with specifics; one of my constant frustrations at the "grammar is evil" position is that people always seem to talk in vague generalities that are totally opposed to my own experience learning both Japanese and Chinese, and I always hope for more specifics.

I don't think anyone said grammar is evil, just that you can get a lot from word definitions, context and guesswork. Function words also have definitions that can used to figure out what something means. I just think you should try interpreting things as best you can with the data you have on hand, but if some specific thing you don't understand is bothering you for grammatical or other reasons, then you can always look it up at that time. In other words I recommend learning grammar in an informal ad-hoc manner based on necessity rather than attempting to preinstall it using textbooks and drills and things. If such activities are satisfying for you though then go for it.

Fillanzea wrote:

Simple sentences can be interpreted without function words, but there's no guarantee that the interpretation will be correct.

Of course not.  That's why a learner must constantly reevaluate and refine their understanding of what they read.  There's no guarantee that an interpretation will be correct even if you have studied a mountain of grammar. Reading comprehension requires practice and experience, no matter how you cut it.

Think about how many times, on this very board, people have asked questions where they looked up every single word in the sentence but still couldn't understand the sentence as a whole.

Of course there have. Nadiatims already made that point:

well sometimes it's enough to understand fully, sometimes it's not enough to understand anything at all. Often it'll be somewhere in between.

You seem to think I'm claiming that if you know all the words, you can understand any sentence you see right off the bat.  Not remotely true.  It's a cumulative process, starting with more obvious manners of expressions and moving onto more complex ones. It just so happens that the sentences Yudan used as examples were actually pretty easy to decipher.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Not sure what point you're trying to make with this.

Last edited by JimmySeal (2012 August 22, 10:05 am)