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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither.

Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings.

Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful.

已 vs 己

This puzzles many Chinese people...

Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time (stopped) 己 is self

So 自己 is me/self, while 已經 means already.

There is also 巳, which is ancient Chinese clock means 9-11am I believe.

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I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

I said in handwritings if not careful.

I think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.

No educated Chinese-writer will write those in a single stroke AFAIK

I think you will be amazed at what can be written in a single stroke when you are in a hurry.

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side.

I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.

They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History

As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese.

Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g.

か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese

A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.

"And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going."

Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway.

Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns.

Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.

Probably goes without saying that there are as many ways to learn Japanese as there are students. The only really hard-and-fast rule is that whatever you're doing, you need to do a lot more of it than you think.

That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class...

The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...

There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them.

(Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)

And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.

Wellll...I don't know Chinese and have never studied in China, so I can't speculate in that domain. But I wouldn't be so quick to infer specific techniques from their memorization speed -- they're fluent in a very similar written language, and it's much faster to learn things (in any language) when you're fluent. They also grew up in a...well, let's call it a memorization-intensive learning environment.

The only things I can say with confidence are:

  * focus on words
  * learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency
  * learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do

That's really my complete set of advice on the subject.

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese.

Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the Japanese heard them, and they often have different shades of meaning.

Chinese, on the other hand, uses only one writing system in any given body of text, uses the Latin alphabet with tone markings for phonetic spelling for learners, and is much less reliant on garbled loanwords.

If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation.

Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not.

Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. And the Japanese use Latin characters to mark pronunciations also, minus the tone markings. (Let me introduce you to -- bopomofo)

I'm talking about the Chinese loanwords; I agree, the English and generally European loanwords are written phonetically and are pronounced consistently.

English loanwords are only a tiny part of either language. The parent was pointing out that in Chinese 生 is always sheng, while in Japanese it can be any of sei, shou, san, nama, ikiru, ikeru, ikasu, umu and 50-odd more readings depending on context.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible.

That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"):

I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni.

Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store

> Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters.

This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice".

米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)

IIRC 米国 (mi guo / "rice country") is used in Taiwan as well. The other Chinese word for America (美国 / mei guo / "beautiful country") is also a phonetic thing.

(I used to think 美国 was descriptive since it didn't sound phonetic, until I came across 米国 and was confused as to why anyone would describe the US as "rice country", and then I learned that both were phonetic, but for the "me" in "america")

You call it a misconception and then post an example that's extremely easy to understand? I'm confused.

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible.

Bit of a stretch IMO - the pronunciation and usage can still often be different enough to trip you up, especially when you consider there are non-English loanwords on occasion (e.g. playing Persona 5, it took me far too long to realise that ルブラン, which I naively transliterated as ruburan, was actually the French "Le Blanc").

There are many things about Chinese which are very easy, in particular the grammar and the fact that many words are constructed by logical combinations of smaller semantic units. There's nothing easy about Japanese IMO, it has extremely complex grammar with standard and non-standard inflections, it uses a mix of two different alphabets and Chinese characters, and the Chinese characters often have multiple different readings. Chinese has a big learning curve because of the role of tones and context, but once you get over the hump it's a pretty simple language.

The Japanese grammar is way more consistent (almost without exceptions) then all western languages. And in Chinese you get multiple pronunciations for the same character all the time!

Yeah except for counters.

Those god forsaken counters.

You can't just say five pencils. You have to say

5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil

Go hon enpitsu

The pattern for which is

Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc.

They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count apples. Or demigods the same way they count flat objects.

Small round objects and military brigades would obviously be counted the same way though. Obviously.

There's also a unique counter specifically for armed naval vessels and slices of fish on top of balls of rice.

And one just for straw mats.

And one for graves, CPUs, wreaths, and dams.

And while small animals and arthropods have one counter, and large animals have another counter, you count butterflies using the counter for large animals.

Oh and the first 10, 14th, 20th and 24th days of the month essentially have unique names.

I knew a native Japanese guy who spent 4 years mostly away from Japan, and he started to have trouble remembering the days of the month.

Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker.

At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more readily snap into place. More useful than memorizing generic masc./feminine/neuter for most Indo-European languages.

Oh that's cool- so if they are talking about CERN and say "one particle accelerator" the counter might help you figure that out?

(Assuming it isn't just like.. "parutikkuru akuseroreta" or something)

This seems to be true in Chinese as well. I know perhaps 10 measure words, but folks seem to be ok with it when I default to 个.

(Chinese is also much simpler when it comes to measure words)

The "internal sense" is that they are both derived from kanji:

Hiragana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana...

Katakana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana...

Kanji isn't that hard if you are realistic about how large of a task it is. Japanese children spend 10 years learning kanji at school and that is their native language.

That’s also true of common characters used in English depending on font and other things. Context generally makes things pretty clear, which I would guess is also the case with these glyphs in other languages.

Capital I, lowercase l, numeral 1

Numeral 0 and uppercase O

Yeah, but they are side by side here, and not in handwriting.. If you're not careful in handwriting it'd be real hard to tell the difference.

> > Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither.

> Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings

The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference whether the diagonal dash touches the part to the left? Seems very hard to notice.

And probably why no one cares, especially when Unicode was limited to 16-bit.

I l 1

O 0

We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same.

Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on.

In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise.

I think that this particular pair is confusing because in Japanese orientation is not supposed to be important, but is, in that case.

I and l looking exactly the same in some fonts is a different problem, really. You're not being asked to pick out a two pixel difference in slope (seriously, two pixels using pretty standard resolution). You use grammatical rules to tell the difference, which is annoying but not visually difficult. And numbers aren't getting freely mixed with letters in text.

They were originally drawn with brushes, and the stroke direction was obvious. In handwriting, you're also supposed to use the same stroke order and direction. A font doesn't have that, so some fonts use differences in shape and thickness of the line to indicate the stroke direction.

So I'd say that the difference is mostly how your font chose to indicate the proper stroke direction.

Chinese has a lot of tricky ones.

荼 vs 茶

日 vs 曰

已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴

士 vs 土

水 vs 氺

人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几

干 vs 千 vs 于

天 vs 夫

... the list goes on.

Here's some more. I made these mistakes when typing using Pingtype, and then checking my results with my teacher.

https://pingtype.github.io

給耠

辦辛力辛

重量

困因

痕㾗

眉㞒

部卶

蓑䒾

任仼

挑狣

推猚

䒷苦

阿冋

共芖

休你

衡𧗾

一 –

幹龫

幸辛

我找

As in homographs in other languages, context is often sufficient to disambiguate.

>> 荼 vs 茶

Also 苶 looks similar.

> How can you NOT see the difference?

I saw the difference, because it reminded me of the difference between ン and ソ in katakana, but if you aren't Chinese I can see how you could assume they are the same. You can draw the same character differently in English without changing the meaning (e.g. 9 straight or curved, 7 with or without a bar through it, looped k or f), so overlooking the difference between 𠮟 and 叱 seems easy enough.

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.

This hits you hard when you read children's books for the first time as an adult.

Early video games didn't have enough resolution to display Kanji, which is why all text was Kana-only. With spaces as word separators and sentence context homonyms are no more of a problem than in other languages.

What do video games have to do with it? Pong didn't have the resolution to display Shakespeare, but we didn't stop using words because of it. Video games provide a visual context that reading alone does not. Also, early video games, especially consoles like the NES Famicom, were geared towards kids who don't understand many kanji. The same is true of books aimed at children in Japan. They don't use kanji and they provide visual context in the form of illustrations.

Ask any Japanese person why they use kanji and not just hiragana, katakana, or romaji and they'll tell you the same thing: Because it is hard to determine the meaning. They don't say it is impossible, just that it is difficult, which it is.

For a contrived example, if I write はしをさがしてる。What am I looking for, a chopstick, a bridge, or the side of something? There is no way to discern from the sentence alone. However, if I use this kanji for hashi, 箸, then it is obvious I'm talking about chopsticks. There is no ambiguity.

This doesn't always help. Sometimes the homonyms use the same kanji. 青山, for instance, can be read あおやま, which is a surname, or it can be read せいざん, which means a lush, green mountain. Most of the time though, kanji provides meaning and clarity where hiragana, katakana, and romaji do not.

Spoken language doesn't have kanji and people can communicate just fine.

Spoken language has accent.

In mandarin people tend to add lots of little "particles" (not sure about the proper linguistic term) when they speak, which seems to be a way of adapting to homophones.

@HumanDrivenDev - Right, because in spoken conversation the listener can ask for clarification when the speaker's commentary is ambiguous, which happens all the time. You cannot do that when you're reading a book.

The hardest part for me is not the characters (I type using Pinyin, which is Romanised).

What Chinese lacks is spaces between words.

Even Korean has spaces. It makes reading a large block of text so much easier, and it helps me to identify vocabulary that I recognise.

Adding spaces and Pinyin are just a couple of the many features of Pingtype.

https://pingtype.github.io

One thing I've noticed whilst trying to learn Japanese is that reading long stretches of romaji/kana is just tedious. There's certainly overhead to learning kanji (especially as a non-native speaker), but I'm not sure romanisation alone would make for a better language.

You've been down-voted, but it's something I often think about as well. Chinese speakers - even those who speak chinese languages that aren't usually written - seem to have a deep attachment to characters. But the attachment is not free.

also 戊戌戍

And their friend 戉.

At least these are all in the BMP...

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