Hacker News Reader

Comment by GolDDranks | Hacker News Reader

I did a MA of East Asian Studies at Helsinki University, and our professor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_Janhunen ) used the word sinogram as the standard terminology for the characters. I think this served two functions: 1) to disentangle the concept from a "character used in Chinese language", as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. 2) to create a parallel with words like "logograms" and "phonograms", as sinograms are not purely either, but contain features from both.

View on HN

> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam

While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

Honestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -> meaning in our brains, where a more ideographic language goes symbol -> meaning directly thus cutting out a lot of the processing time. Given that any given text is going to be read thousands of times more than it is written, the extra complexity in writing seems well worth the trade-off.

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

I don't see the book on Amazon, but it was a pretty basic Kanji book that made a point of sorting them out by radicals so you could see how things were built, nothing too special.

I think the key was I bought tons of manga for children, the ones where all the kanji have the hiragana above them so you can get lots of vocabulary and kanji reenforcement from those.

I'm not the parent comment but I used an Anki deck from Nihongo Shark. It sorted the kanji by radicals. I did this for 2-3 months before burning out, but it made learning kanji much easier since I could see the radicals that they were composed of.

I did that as well. That deck is basically (with a few differences) an Anki version of Helsig's "Remembering the Kanji". I started with the book, and continued with the Nihongo Shark Anki deck later. The system works incredibly well for the first few hundred Kanji at least, after that it gets harder and harder to come up with the mnemonic devices the method is based on. But by that time it also starts to get easier to remember new kanji by traditional methods (in my experience at least). Even with my still incomplete number of kanji it does help tremendously with reading. It's faster and takes much less effort than trying to read just Hiragana (which I learned to read many years ago - it's still hard to read text written only in Hiragana). And with just kana you'll run into the homonym problem all the time too, unlike with kanji, and that doesn't make it easier either. Oh, and knowing the kanji can also sort out the (probable) meaning of a sentence even if I have not learned the actual word yet..

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja.

While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0]

From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day:

- Korean names. For the most part, given names will have hanja chosen by the parents/grandparents/family. However recently it's becoming more common to have pure hangeul names, or english/foreign names, with no associated hanja.

- To disambiguate homographs/homonyms. This is common on Korean tv shows.

- To represent countries, politicians, and surnames on news articles. For example, 朴 (surname Pak/Park) and 美 (USA). Here is a random article example. [1] and a list of common hanja that pops up. [2] Side note, it's humorous to me that the hanja used for USA is also the hanja for 'beauty' (미).

- For days of the week and months, I saw hanja being used somewhat commonly.

- To guess the meaning of unknown words. If you know a certain hanja reading like 비 or 경 then it makes figuring out words a bit easier.

[0]: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/entry/koen/27ed7d6b4161442885572...

[1]: https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2021/03/25/...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/km01fv/short_list_o...

edit: clarified about modern Korean naming practices.

> - Korean names. Unless they're into trendy foreign names, both the given name and surname will have hanja chosen.

Not necessarily true anymore. My wife has a completely made up given name that has nothing foreign: just two plain hangul characters without meaning on their own.

Ah right, I blanked on that.

Some of the most memorable people I ran into in Korea were named 하늘 and 보라. I also met someone with a single character name, but I can't remember which character... I think 강?

English doesn't use a syllabary.

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/engul.htm

You're right, I misunderstood that term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com