Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

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I am currently memorizing Hiragana (~100% done) and Katagana (~10% done), before venturing into learning some basic Japanese. It's incredibly and unnecessarily complicated, from the perspective of a "westerner" (Italian roots, fluent in English, some Spanish, bits of French). I'm still fascinated by it, and still want to learn some, primarily because I like visiting Japan and I plan to spend several weeks per year there. Kyoto is my favorite city. Last year I was fortunate enough to spend 3 months there, at the beginning of the pandemic (March to June 2020).

It would be great if languages could be "upgraded" to remove the hardest parts, both for native speakers and for foreigners willing to learn.

I remember reading that a famous poet/literate (can't remember who) tried to propose that for the Spanish language, decades ago.

Otherwise, it would be nice to have a universal language that everyone can learn and speak. Obviously, English is now occupying that spot, but I'd bet that English is certainly not the easiest, nor the most complete, language we could use.

Attempts such as Esperanto and others were never carried out with enough skills or resources. I'm wondering if it could be possible to do so today.

Coincidentally, I wrote a novel ~20 years ago, in which the protagonist is a language professor that invents a new universal language, called Galatico, and "open sources" it for the benefit of humanity. I even ventured as far as designing the basic concepts of this artificial language. It was really fun. Without knowing it, I used an alphabet system (base 64, in my case) similar to the one used in the Cistercian numerals [0]. I discovered this just two months ago, when visiting a Cistercian monastery in Italy, and then reading more about these monks.

Truly fascinating, for me.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals

> Attempts such as Esperanto and others were never carried out with enough skills or resources.

That is a dubious claim. The truth of the matter is that there is no economic benefit in learning Esperanto over learning English as a second language, and (comparatively) very little cultural benefit. Learning English unlocks a vast world of literature, media, and communication in addition to the basic marketable skill its proficiency entails. Esperanto? Not so much.

The only way to force the use of Esperanto or any artificial language is to force children to learn it worldwide. That's something you might expect in North Korea (if they were so inclined), but most people would rightly dismiss it as a mostly pointless exercise.

It’s worth noting that esperanto predates the era of English as an international language. Back when Zamenhof designed esperanto, French was the closest thing to an international language that unlocked the vast world of literature, media, culture, etc.

It's even harder to learn a universal language if you can always turn to Google Translate.

You can't. Gtranslate is absolute rubbish for Japanese and Korean, in my experience. It only really works on simple sentences, converted to English.

It does not generate formality levels correctly or consistently at all, so if you translate multiple sentences it can go from non-formal and non-polite to very formal and polite.

English is more or less a universal language, and esperanto will never achieve anything other than being a toy language for nerds. It's neat, but that's all it is. You would be better served learning Mandarin, English, Spanish, or German.

Just because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated.

It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"

Well, you can actually make a pretty good objective case for Japanese writing being the most complicated writing system on the planet, since no other language that I'm aware of regularly mixes 4 scripts, where basically entirety of Chinese forms just one of those scripts. Except that whereas in Chinese it's rare for a character to have more than one or two readings, in Japanese there are characters with over 70：

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

It's telling that there is what's effectively a reading test for Japanese people, where it requires 12 years of schooling to take a stab at Level 2 (covering only the "daily use" kanji!), and Level 1 requires years of additional study on top of that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei

You're presenting this very misleadingly. Kanken 2 is basically comparable to something like an SAT; it covers what people are expected to have mastered by the end of high school (reading and writing, incidentally). As such it's odd to say it "requires 12 years of schooling" as if that proved something about the language.

Kanken levels beyond 2 are a different matter; they cover words that aren't in common use, and are more akin to learning trivia for the sake of learning trivia.

Most kids learn to read & write the alphabet in grade 1, although mastering the idiosyncrasies of English spelling takes a bit longer. By comparison, Japanese kids are still grinding their way through the jōyō kanji all the way to grade 12. So, yes, I think this tells you a lot about the complexity of the writing system.

Japanese kids learn to write hiragana and katakana at similar age which is comparable to the Latin Alphabet. By comparison, most English speakers still participate in stuff like spelling bees and have to actively learn to spell individual words (remember, English is not a regular phonetic language) well into adulthood.

Again: kanji tests are vocabulary tests, not just orthography tests, so Kanken is not comparable to first-graders learning the alphabet. If you're familiar with Japanese you must already know this, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.

It could be argued that Chinese has a lot more characters to learn if you're including the Nanori (Readings used in Names) for 生.

If you take a language like English, it's still arguable that you'd need 12 years worth of schooling to do an advanced test.

Kanji Kentei seems to ask esoteric things at level 2. So it's a test of fluency of not only the Kanji but the language.

How would an English learner fare with Shakespeare or reading a book like Finnegans Wake?

I don't know if there's any data about this. But I think what would be a good study is the level of native proficiency in languages around the world.

Does languages considered simpler result in a greater mastery by the general population?

The Kanji Kentei is not a language test, but specifically a test about kanji, and the fact that you need to be familiar with Chinese poetry etc to ace it showcases how complex the writing system is. About the closest English gets is asking obscure loanwords in spelling bees.

So like reading the original unadapted Don Quixote in Spanish. Not bad as Shakespeare, but some words had a different meaning back in the day, with inusual metaphors impossible to know unless you were an expert on Middle Ages.

For example, "La negra" would mean "the sword", and "duelos y quebrantos" wouldn't mean "mournings and breakdowns", but some kind of dish made by mixing scrambled eggs, chorizo and bacon.

Japan definitely has one of the most complicated writing systems in the world, but you can get pretty complicated with alphabets if you just go too long without spelling reform. Look at the split between Tibetan as written and Tibetan as pronounced, or basically anything to do with English and our complete lack of spelling integrity.

As someone who has studied Korean and some Japanese, Japanese is definitely much more complex. If someone saw English had two syllabaries for the same exact sounds (like katakana and hiragana) they would probably also say it's unnecessarily complex. From a foreign perspective, lowercase and uppercase could be seen as arbitrarily complex.

I would guess they're talking about kanji though, which really isn't very complex. It's moreso just annoying to have glyphs that you can't pronounce if you don't already know an onyomi/kunyomi reading...

That's a very simplistic view of the criticism, and I completely disagree with it. Just because I think Japanese is complicated (not "unnecessarily", that of course doesn't make sense when talking about a natural language) doesn't mean I think it should be simplified, nor that I can't back my claims.

Take hiragana for instance, it consists of 46 characters (versus 26 for the latin alphabet). The latin alphabet is way more efficient than hiragana because we compose sounds instead of syllables: ta is t+a, whereas in hiragana あ doesn't appear in た. Then you add katakana and kanji, and it just becomes impossible to think of Japanese writing as not complicated.

That does not mean it's not complicated either.

When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn.

Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange.

It most likely helped the leaders there to stay in control. Without native Japanese translators foreigners are unable to get very far.

WE USE THREE SYLLABLE SCRIPTS ALL THE TIME IN ENGLISH. lowercase and uppercase are two divergent evolutions of the roman alphabet that got shoved together for no particular reason. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝕬𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖒𝖔𝖗𝖊.

>SYLLABE

Ahem. Not even syllabes.

Also, Gothic letters are just a representation, such as cursive, which in the end are the same letter.

You have the Sans/Serif versions of the CJK characters, too.

Are you an Engul user? Syllabic scripts for English are rare. Usually people use letters.

False. Uppercase and lowercase are spelt identically, so do the italics.

LOL. You've been reading Roman letters for so long you've forgotten that A and a don't look even remotely alike.

Uppercase and lowercase are not spelt identically any more than katakana and hiragana are. q-Q, e-E, r-R, a-A, b-B and most of the rest are all completely different characters. Even m and M are not as straightforwardly connected as someone who learned a latin-character based language as their first language would think.

q-Q, e-E, a-A and b-B don't diverge a lot.

Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.

Thinking that e or a look anything like E or A is entirely down to your first language using the Latin alphabet (I'm making an assumption but I can't think of any other way they would look similar).

I've done language conversation exchanges with Japanese English learners and the characters really are completely different to someone learning them for the first time.

へ is virtually identical to ヘ visually. Most of the katakana and hiragana pairs derive from the same kanji and share visual similarities, especially if you’re familiar with Chinese calligraphy. So what?

What you've said is nonsensical.

A good example of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing"

The language is structured around those two syllable letters.

Well, I haven't made that up myself - I got the idea from linguistics books - and from people that lived there for a long time. And those linguists were very clear that the language came first and then syllable script was bolted on.

What you already knows determines what you consider "easy".

When you learn English, Italian, Spanish and French you are not learning really 4 different languages as those languages overlap each other, they are from the same family(English is part of the germanic[anglo-saxon] but also the Latin family[normand]).

If you are native English speaker, you will learn French easily as most of english vocabulary(more than 60% of adjectives, and adverbs for example) comes from French.

As a native Spanish speaker, I understand most Italian and Portuguese with little effort, and French only problem is pronunciation, reading it is very easy.

For a Chinese native(Mandarin or Cantonese), learning written Japanese is easy, almost trivial.

I find Hiragana and Katakana easy to learn, not different from a vocabulary. It is kanji what is harder.

You may see the merit of it in a year or so. Spelling and pronunciation is unambiguous (at least for kana where there’s no chance to misread). It’s really hard to read pure kana because you have to process a lot of homophones although I guess that’s surmountable because it mostly works for spoken language. You do however see even native speakers explain which word they mean by signing the kanji, from time to time. And it’s a nice feature to see a new word for the first time and know how to read it (you can guess based on the radicals pretty accurately) and an approximation of its meaning.

Absolute peak language for puns and dad jokes, too.

> Spelling and pronunciation is unambiguous (at least for kana where there’s no chance to misread).

Even kana have exceptions where spelling and pronunciation are ambiguous. E.g. は/へ, which canonically represent [ha̠]/[he̞] but are also used for particles pronounced [ɰᵝa̠]/[e̞], which would usually be written わ/え. And こうし pronounced either [ko̞ːɕi] when it means 格子 (grid) or [ko̞ɯ̟ᵝɕi] when it means 子牛 (calf). Then there are aspects of the pronunciation like pitch accent and devoiced vowels that can't be expressed using kana at all...

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