@jajaaan You need to relax. Smile, be happy.

nest0r wrote:

@skellyfish Good luck with your finals. First JLPT1 then this? You're quite mad.

Very true - time will tell if it was a mistake to do both...

There have been a few gems:

When in doubt, follow K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid).

[/u/] is always pronounced with rounded lips (i.e. like you would position your lips for a kiss).

Good thing that technical jargon wasn't left undefined.

jajaan wrote:

some people are bluffing their way through technical language they clearly have not mastered

…words of similar entomology…

oops

How did this thread get so far from the original topic?  Pronunciation isn't writing.

er…the OP’s post is about pronunciation and writing.

…retarded …pseudo-intellectual airs… with you people… full of contradictions, pedantry and flagrant Japanophilism…. Agreed? Good!... derailed for the most retarded ******* reason…I've yet to find a single coherent theme… didn't we all know this already?  … you're preaching to the choir… constantly reiterating opinions....what’s the main point?

Are people trying to change something that's wrong with the world?

Are you trying to change something wrong with us people - and control the discussion? 

Today again I ran into a barrier imposed by kanji in the research I'm doing, reading a 17th century Genji commentary.  It says 宗紙云、此巻を帚木を号する事は...  This 宗紙 appears to be either a person or commentary, but being a name, it's impossible to know the reading and so I can't look it up with any accuracy in the Koujien (it's probably not in there; it's not in the Daijirin).  This means that just to determine how to read this name I'm going to have to make a trip to the library and consult several books -- looking up names like this is especially annoying because what you typically have to do is first look up 宗, then just go through all the entries starting with 宗 until you come across the right one.  I've spent literally an hour just finding the reading of a name.  There are a lot of references to obscure people and old writings in this commentary, and at least if they were written in a phonetic system I would be able to immediately know how to read them.  (Even with an inefficient alphabetic system like English, even if you don't actually know how to accurately say the word or name, you can look it up without any additional steps.  This would even be true if you were studying older periods of the language.)

This same thing came up when I was doing some work last summer in the library, cataloguing a collection of microfiches of Meiji-era publications.  90%, at least, of the time I spent on that job was looking up the reading of names and titles.  This project was being worked on by 4 people and they were hoping to have it done within several years.  The only reason it was going to take anywhere near that long was the amount of time it took to look up the reading of names.  Sometimes you would spend over an hour looking for it and eventually just have to give up and guess.

I don't think this kind of thing occurs in any other language, except maybe Chinese, and even there I think the readings are more predictable.  Obviously this is not directly a problem with Chinese characters but more a problem with the way Japan has used them, but still, when I compare these daily annoyances with the supposed stylistic benefits, perhaps it's more understandable why I grow to dislike them more and more.  For my purposes, it's not simply a theoretical question whether kanji are more difficult, they clearly are.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 December 19, 2:45 pm)

Well, that's kind of an extreme reaction.  I was just trying to contribute concrete examples of the continuing difficulty of kanji even to someone who is fairly advanced in their studies, rather than just continue in purely theoretical terms.

Yudan, thanks for sharing this. It does give a concrete example of the problems that kanji can create. Japanese names are kind of a particular case. I've always found it a bit ridiculous that Japanese often can't read each other's names.