Japanese explained to programmers | Hacker News Reader

Japanese explained to programmers

lajili.com

346 pointsiraldir400 comments

“The bottom line is that Politeness Levels are completely beyond your understanding, so don't even try. Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.”

— So You Want To Learn Japanese http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm

This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. I used to work for a Japanese company and was surrounded by anime fans who had fantasies of learning the language. I was perfectly happy to work with our translators.

I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English.

The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English".

The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters.

Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher

[citation needed]

It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.

Hmm I'm not sure you're completely clear on how syllabaries (including katakana, hiragana, kanji, etc) work. You can use them to encode anything as well

Orthographic English is probably the best example to show the inefficiencies alphabets sometimes bring. The English language has ~24 constants which are often well-represented, but then you have things like "ng" or "sh" which is actually a single phoneme that we lack a symbol for. On the flip side, English has an unusually large number of vowel phonemes, around 13 monophthongs and 7 dipthongs. Yet we have only 5 symbols for vowels and often use them in very ambiguous and end up having strange combinations of them leading to ghoti:

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

The point is you only have 26 letters, but now you end up having to memorize a vast array of combinations and how they work in different contexts. You're really not saving yourself any more memory space than if you'd learned a syllabary

Practically, the difference is not that big. There are many sounds English letters can't encode, and for others it cheats by saying "let's pretend th sounds like this, despite it having little to do with t or h, and then zh sounds like that, and ae like this, and so on". You could do the same with a syllabary - and to some measure Japanese does, aided with special marks and other tricks, but as English inevitably misses some sounds, so does Japanese. It's inevitable - look at IPA symbol set to see how many there are needed, and I'm sure even that doesn't cover all the possibilities.

What you lose with syllabary is to be able to encode some patterns - like Czech "strč prst skrz krk" - pretty much no way to encode it in Japanese I think, unless you resort to a lot of cheating like inserting "u" everywhere and then declaring "u is silent" (which is pretty normal for Japanese in general but in this case kinda looks like cheating). But tbh English encoding wouldn't adequately describe how it's pronounced either.

I think they meant the encoding is more efficient, so you can encode more information with fewer characters.

>The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters.

This is pretty cool

It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general.

For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word").

In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).

linguistics FTW!

It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English.

The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.

Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man?

The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words.

Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English.

I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.

I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away.

Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.

> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.

They don't transpose the strokes, they just forget how to write the character entirely, even if they can read it perfectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something.

Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.

> I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language.

I got it once for a couple of days when I was about 7 years old. Learned how to write an uppercase N, and became unable to write it lowercase (n) for a few days. (it's a super weird feeling, trying to write something and producing a different shape)

Mao tried to simplify Chinese and frankly Mao didn't go far enough.

They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.

I love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅

In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

Character amnesia isn't a problem because we have IMEs, but they're also a problem _because_ of IMEs. In the pre-digital world, character amnesia was likely a rarer thing.

Sure but now you're going to transpose strokes, I bet.

>The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.

What the heck...? It's most definitely a problem in practice! That problem becomes pretty obvious once you get a vocabulary of around 10k ~ 15k words and you read both fiction and non-fiction books. What you find is that every time you encounter an unfamiliar word you only really have a best guess at how to read it and you actually can't be 100% sure. This has repeatedly been my experience. I spent some time thinking about if I could shortcut this process by instead simply learning all the "exceptions to the rule" but what I discovered is that the volume of them is too large for that to be a tractable approach.

Precisely.

The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyone who looks at English and Japanese and finds them to be of equivalent complexity probably isn’t qualified to comment on either.

Isn't it common in English, too? Just to mention "vague", "awe", "sigh". There are many others. I see those words and pronunciation is far from obvious to me.

It is, but in Japanese it's on a whole other level. One key thing a lot of people don't really account for is the fact that native speakers of a language are already fluent in their language before they learn to read, and in many cases (certainly not all) have the added benefit of having heard the word before and the task is just to create a mapping between the sound and it's visual representation (for words already in their vocabulary). When you're a non-native speaker, you don't have this advantage and the difference it makes can be quite large. So, it's natural for anyone non-native speaker to struggle with this. The difference is in frequency, severity and duration. You can get a pretty good hint at how much insanely harder it is for non-native Japanese speakers learning to read Japanese by comparing how much native speakers both kids and adults struggle to read unfamiliar words. I can't really ever recall struggling to read unfamiliar words much in English, and I compare that with my wife who is Japanese and how many times we have played a guessing game at how to read an unfamiliar Japanese word in a book she was reading. It took me a long time to realise that even for Japanese people there's just this level of insurmountableness to it that is part and parcel of how the orthographic system is structured. Going back to how kids learn to read unfamiliar words, books in Japanese have furigana in them which are a phonetic guide on how to read words that the author assumes the intended audience has a high chance f not being able to read. Even general purpose books aimed at adults have quite a lot of this. The younger the intended audience, the more furigana tends to be present as it's simply not possible to read without it when you're much younger. What you often see, though not always, is for a difficult word to have furigana the first time it appears and then subsequent appearances of the word don't have it. This is one way you learn to read more over time. For certain words, no matter how many times it appears, if it's obscure enough it may always appear with furigana.

The existence of furigana alone is a huge admission that Japanese a somewhat unreadable language that has somehow or other been made to work through bolting it on. So, you can imagine that if an orthographic system comes with permanent training wheels for native speakers, then non-native speakers are going to have a pretty brutal time with it.

This was the point I made at the top of this thread: that Japanese manages to combine the complexity of written Chinese with the inconsistency of English spelling. Does any other language expect quite so much of its users?

For such cases I find that the pronunciation _doesn't matter_. The meaning still comes across.

I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background.

Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation.

Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning.

It's all tradeoffs.

These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese.

Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me.

But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.

Names and particularly place names are on a whole other level. Especially stuff that's written in a font other than the standard, nicely formatted text you're used to reading.

While I can sometimes guess the meaning of a novel word based on context of the sentence and the meaning of Kanji alone, the vast majority of the time I can't. So... I disagree.

Aren't you just pointing out that fluent speakers don't often have a problem communicating? Surely that's true for any language, almost tautologically (they would have changed the language, even unintentionally, if there were major problems).

I think parent’s use of ”logical” instead of “complex” better fits the bill.

For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them.

It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has little impact in day to day life, and mixing up kanjis is pretty common and people won’t make a fuss about it.

All in all I think Japanese has a very steady learning curve where other languages will have sudden walls to climb, but it’s not more or less complex, difficulty is just more evenly distributed.

> there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them.

Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other.

Furigana are essential for karaoke.

> Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other.

This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji?

Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself.

Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )

I'm not familiar with many Japanese song lyrics, so not familiar with the phenomenon mentioned. I'd also be interested in examples.

There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other common uses. For example, if a robot, alien, child, or non-Japanese is speaking, the words may be written in katakana to indicate the non-fluency of the speaker. Also, many animal names are often written in katakana.

Additionally, there are quite a few pseudo-English words that are written in katakana because they originally arose from English words. Some of my favorites (written in romaji for those who don't read katakana):

- "baabeekaa" : pronounced similar to "baby car", this word means a stroller

- "akogi" : short for acoustic guitar

- "brappi", "jimihen", etc: Brad Pitt, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

- "handoru": pronounced similar to "handle". This is what a steering wheel is called in Japanese, so..

- "handorukeepaa": or handle keeper, refers to a designated driver.

Another interesting thing that occurs in Japanese is referred to as ateji. This is where kanji are used only for the sound they give. In other words, any word can be written by just using a kanji with that sound for each syllable. The meanings of the kanji chosen (there are many with each particular sound) can give additional flavor/wordplay/signifigance to the usage.

Finally, one of the most interesting things I saw in Japanese was a baby soap, called "Arau baby". The first word "arau" is the Japanese infinitive for "to wash" written in romaji, or roman script. Since this is the product name and it is written in roman script, the product label also includes a katakana translation (アラウベビー). So instead of using the kanji for arau, it was treated as a foreign word and then appropriated back into Japanese using katakana. Or something.

I can't think of any examples of the top of my head, but I have definitely seen this many times. One form it comes in is writing the meaning in kanji but then using an English word in Katakana as the Furigana for it. One example I can remember in that form, though it's not song lyrics, is "とある科学の超電磁砲" where 超電磁砲 has the Furigana レールガン (rail gun). Another form it takes is doing the same thing but using a different Japanese word instead of an English one.

There is just absolutely all sorts of fuckery in Japanese on a count of people playing with the language. It's a fun language to play around with.

Yes, this is quite common in subtitles. I seem to remember that in GoldenEye, Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ。

(I will try to dig out a relevant song lyric.)

It's a pretty broad mechanism, also widely used in drama/anime/manga where you can basically stick any reading to any word as long as people accept it.

Traditional examples would be 本気 (honki) -> マジ (maji), 頭文字(kasiramoji) -> イニシアる(initial), 因果(inga) -> カルマ(karma)

I remember a live stream where a comment with "超電磁砲"(choudenjihou) was straight read into "railgun", as at this point the novel/manga/anime just established it as a popular reading.

Yes, you understand this correctly.

One good example is from GReeeeN's 愛唄(Aiuta/ Love Song). It's a song about a guy apologising for all the times he's fought with and been a nuisance to his partner, and reaffirming his love for them.

「君の選んだ人生「みち」は僕「ここ」よかったのか？」

Taken as you'd hear it from listening to the song, it means "Are you happy with the road you have chosen?", but reading the lyrics uses different kanji to give it a slightly broader meaning.

人生 is read as jinsei, meaning life, but the furigana is 道（みち）which is a road or a path, note that this can be a literal road or a more figurative pathway through life.

僕(boku) is a male pronoun for "me/myself" but ここ means "this" as in "this road, not that one"

It's not that deep, but it extends the meaning of the lyric to be something like "are you happy to spend the rest of your life with me?" I thought it was kinda clever. There's probably better examples, but this pops into my head often as it's still quite a popular song.

I've seen そら (sky) written as 宇宙 in song lyrics a few times.

This is just not true

let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in

日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good 三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations 二人 - futari, huh? 一人 - hitori, wat

so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona)

even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person

You basically have to memorise them, like with any other language (e.g. the rules and exceptions of English spelling and pronunciation). Usually it's the most common words that have weird exceptions, because we use them enough to remember them. All the words you mention are beginner words. (There's also 人気=ひとけ, just for fun).

As far as jin and nin goes... (source: 漢語からみえる世界と世間)

jin is more about adjectives/nouns - describing yourself, and part of your identity. 日本人、アメリカ人、原始人、現代人 are all じん. 読書人（どくしょじん） is used to describe people who really love reading. Similarly 暇人（ひまじん）.

nin is more of a plain descriptor. 管理人、運搬人、苦労人、被告人 are all にん, as well as 三人.

Based on your rules, you would not be able to predict 人気 ninki, 人類 jinrui

Why is popularity "plain" and humanity is "identity"?

You just have to memorize ALL of the compounds, there's no other way

I think taking sides in this debate is pointless. Languages are always as difficult as far they are from your mother tongue or other languages you know.

Your question about the reading, though, has quite a simple answer. It's pretty obvious how to read all the examples given when you look at them as words, not a single character. Kanji does not exist in a vacuum. 人気 is "ninki" and 大人 is "otona" - no other way around it. Combination of those characters, usually, have one and only reading. To tell the truth, in English, people are unconsciously reading words as a whole, too.

Great, so what is 大人気?

if it's 大人気ない it's probably childish, but if it's not in that context, it's probably very popular

You need to finish reading the whole SENTENCE to be able to pronounce it

Not sure I agree with that. It's not difficult to notice one has "nai", other don't. Also when you read it in actual sentence you can immediately notice that something is wrong when you choose the wrong reading. Subsequent words don't add up. I am not saying confusion doesn't occur. I'm just saying it's not as big as people are painting it.

It's not always the case it's followed by nai

大人気なくてもいい means it's okay to be childish

Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto).

Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡

One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.

I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to understand what I was trying to communicate? Prepare for people being too polite to point out mistakes.

Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing.

Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.

読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.

Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;)

Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s

Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services.

One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.

支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”.

That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?

When you consider that alternatives like freee are still quite clunky in the browser, you don't have a lot of choice. I haven't tried Yayoi yet, but I don't expect much.

Kaikeio doesn't support HiDPI / 150 % fractional scaling either, so it looks really weird on my machine.

Recently the maker (Sorimachi) has announced that you can download their newest edition. Too late! They have already sent me the CD.

Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :) (https://qa.sorimachi.co.jp/hc/ja/articles/360054408631-%EF%B...)

I just resort to editing everything in GnuCash and then importing into Kaikeio using a custom sql -> csv script. I hate the idea of my accounting journal being trapped in proprietary software.

Too bad that Japanese lawmakers have further decided to decrease software freedom by prescribing the use of digital time stamping by next year.

支払手数料 is “fees paid” rather than “payment fees” - compare 支払利息 and 支払報酬. I’ve never noticed the ambiguity but your confusion is natural.

I agree that it’s very strange that professional services fall under 手数料 instead of 報酬, but taxes are weird in every language.

Hey! A fellow accountant :)

> It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English

Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.

I’m not sure how to measure complexity but after a long time with both languages I have found Japanese has a lot of gaps where there is no word matching an English word and fewer in the other direction. I thought I was bad at Japanese but then I heard things like “get suru” or “stay shita”.

English people very much have trouble with spelling, pronunciation and grammar as well. The spelling and pronunciation rules are at least as complex as kanji. (At least we don't have to write kanji, though...)

Japanese is vastly more difficult than English.

You are now talking about the written Japanese language, with all the (real) problems with Kanji, an imported writing system. True enough, but that has little to do with the Japanese language.

If you look at verbs, and ignore the rubbish written in most textbooks about "conjugations" (which for the most part aren't conjugations), you'll find one of the most logical and consistent systems on the planet. There are only two exceptions. How many exceptions are there in English?

EditAdd:

What English does have is a lot of redundancy, which can cover up tons of grammatical mistakes and still deliver the meaning. This makes it an excellent language, in many ways, for international communication. If you try to speak someone else's language, and that person knows just a little bit of English, that person can make a lot of mistakes and the meaning is still clear enough, particularly if you're a little practiced in listening to non-native English. Whereas you may make a small little mistake when trying to speak that person's language, and suddenly the sentence totally changes. Heck, even Italian.. use the wrong verb form and instead of saying what you meant "Ah, I'm stupid" you're saying "Ah, you're stupid". But it's hard to mess up English that way so easily.

But what is a language without its written form?

I mean, fine, if we are going to contrive a comparison where we are only comparing spoken forms, well…English is still going to come out on top, because - exactly as you explained in your edit - its grammar is simple enough that almost anyone can have a go at it. Stick some words together and you’re probably 80% of the way there. That’s not going to be true of any inflected language, even if - as inflected languages go - Japanese is one of the simplest.

Anyway, if we are going purely on grammar and ignoring written forms, Chinese - having almost no grammar at all [citation needed] - is surely the apex of simplicity.

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble).

As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the same, most of the time.. which is arguably very useful for trying to communicate with someone.

"Chinese" has just as much grammar as any other language! Please, let us not confuse the fact that Standard Mandarin does not use as much morphological change to signal different tense-aspect-mood changes in verbs but instead uses syntactically ordered particles with no grammar. A grammar covers morphosyntax!

A language without its written form is a language. The written form is an artifact of modern society and literacy.

Question: What are your mother tongue(s)?

Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.

My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it.

English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).

My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.

I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure.

I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?

Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.

My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.

The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch:

She must have had been being watched.

= It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).

English writing can have unpredictable spelling mostly due to imported foreign words (looking at you French!) or inclusion of Old English.

imo that's better than having a whole other system like Katakana to import foreign words.

I've never heard the term "phrasal verb" but one similar case that doesn't use verbs pops up in my head all the time, "down {for,on,with}":

  - "I'm down for  that", I am prepared and willing to do that
  - "I'm down on   that", I don't like that practice
  - "I'm down with that", I do like that practice

English phonological rules are generally pretty complex for non-natives.

> I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones

As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary.

Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...

As a speaker of English, and Spanish, which has the adjectives after, I feel like putting the adjectives first is more expressive.

"A hot, juicy chicken leg" would sound less exciting if it was said "A chicken leg, hot, juicy" because the listener would first imagine the wrong chicken leg.

Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.

I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point.

(The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)

It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers.

Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hiragana alongside Kanji (which are common).

> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along

I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin.

Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not warm) but it is nowhere near as complex as European languages.

But. You can’t just dismiss kanji. They are the essence of the language and, counterintutively, are what make it easy to read in long form. A stream of hiragana is almost illegible; you need the kanji to be able to pick nouns and verbs out. And outside of very limited contexts, furigana (phonetic transcriptions of kanji) are rare, so you need to a reasonable command of kanji to get by.

> outside of very limited contexts, furigana

Sarcasm aside, I only take issue with this.

The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga.

It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves learn Kanji. And I would guess probably why it even exists, though I'm sure you could correct me on that.

Your view of Japanese seems to be from a very high level, encompassing its totality or close to it. At that level your assertions may be correct and relevant, but that's not where my comments, nor the OP with their post, are aiming.

Can you explain why a stream of hiragana would be unreadable? It's a phonetic alphabet, right? Shouldn't it be just as readable as the phonetic alphabet for any other language?

"The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult"

It's actually many-to-many. I know it sounds crazy, but it's even true for English, just to a much less extent. Sometimes a single Japanese word can be written as different kanjis.

Yes, you are quite right. I got my table relationships mixed up in the heat of the moment.

Interesting, 生 have only one pronunciation in Chinese (native speaker, ref: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F ). Didn't know it's so different in Japanese.

Some of it comes from importing words from different parts of China or at different times in history. From my (very) limited experience, Japanese pronunciations of kanji are much closer to Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.

It's worse than you think. The oldest readings came from KOREA where they used rhyme dictionaries to create a full system of Sino-Korean pronunciations without regards to the actual sounds.

There is a long list of exceptions for Chinese: https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-t...

Kanji will have at least two pronunciations (one called a Chinese pronunciation that often sounds little like modern mandarin, like 电 being Dian in Chinese and Den in Japanese).

Thats 25 characters. Hardly a long list, especially compared to about every kanji having two or more pronunciations.

A sibling comment shared a short list of common characters with multiple pronunciations. If we include variants where the difference is only tone, then the list of common-use characters with multiple pronunciations gets pretty long.

This list is also changes on a regular basis. The following news article details updates to pronunciation guidance promulgated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education at the end of 2022: https://www.ftvnews.com.tw/news/detail/2022326L08M1

It is my understanding that these new guidelines result in mandated changes to educational curricula as well as standardised testing; they are not wholly advisory. It is also my understanding that these changes can be mildly controversial, because even when the changes are made for the sake of simplification, they lead to discrepancies between the educational standard and common spoken language.

I don't think written complexity of Chinese linked to "least logical". Since kanji is composed by parts, isn't it logical? (though it's complex)

If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “justice” or “meaning”, then you have found the Sinitic Holy Grail that people have spent at least a couple of millennia searching for.

Some characters are moderately logical. A tree, 木, begets a wood, 林, and a forest, 森。日, sun, in triplicate, 晶, is a crystal or glittering. But these are very much the exceptions. By what logic would you create a character for a whale (鯨) as distinct from a salmon (鮭), or for abstract concepts like government (政) or crime (罪)?

It's important to distinguish a language from its writing system. The Japanese writing system is a basket case to be sure, but that doesn't say anything about the language itself. My decidedly rudimentary knowledge of the language reveals a rather elegant and logical system, although even here little spikes are already poking through (e.g distinction between wa and ga) that hint of more turbulent waters for the more advanced learner!

> copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.

or language models

Sure, but it’s a messy model that tells you that 生 is pronounced nama or sometimes ki, 生きる ikiru, 生じる shōjiru, 学生 gakusei, 生む umu…

All the examples you gave are pretty obvious to read because of suffixes, called okurigana, or the other kanji next to it. Problem arises only when the kanji stands alone and that doesn't happen so often as people think. Even when it does, most often than not, you can infer the reading from the context.

I think the language is so difficult that it actually holds the society back.

Things are just way harder than they need to be in a lot of instances.

It didn't hold back their society, what was held back was the competition because Japanese is hard and the locals have all the business and flourished. That's my view on why they were successful compared to other Asian nations who adapted English early on their history.

Not sure if this argument holds water in 2023, "tech" for example is well behind in Japan.

I guess the world is a more connected place now.

I love the language though so I'm personally happy if it sticks around.

Phonetically it’s a pain, but grammatically it is very regular and logical if explained well.

It's like all the complexity went into kanji. Pronounciation of -kana- is mostly regular. Grammar - 2-3 main verb types with a VERY small conjugation table to learn, no plurals, no genders. You can take a mostly complete sentence and whack it on top of a noun to make it describe the noun, or add stuff to the end to qualify its meaning, in a much more simple way than English.

I hate grammar and I found that part of the language to be extremely simple.

You start having problems when you learn about registers and how there's basically a second (or third!) set of words depending on who you're talking to.

The author has discovered (linguistic) morphology. The `setRole` function he describes compiles to various morphemes in Japanese like は, を, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)

We have this in English too except remarkably little of it actually comes out. Pluralization and possession being marked with -(e)s and -'s suffixes, and "subject-verb agreement" (one wouldn't say "the birds eats the food" but rather "the birds eat the food") are examples of morphology in action in English.

Several folks think that the capacity for language in general is common to all humans, and that we have some proto-language hidden away deep in our brains, inaccessible, where our conception of the world bubbles up through layers of our brain/consciousness, until thoughts-as-words eventually fall out of our mouths or onto paper, and then the reverse process happens as well.

(Incidentally I think the particle は marks the "topic" of the sentence, not the subject. The subject of the verb is marked with が, and Japanese speakers elide/omit a lot of parts of sentences, so there's tons of sentences where there is no explicit subject but there is a topic. Please correct me here, this is all from faint memory.)

To abuse the idea in the article, you could imagine the layers I mentioned in the brain are various stages of a thought compiler, and English is one front-end. In this analogy, C/Java/whatever are the "thought" and linked executables / bytecode bundles are the "words".

Some languages share more intermediate compiler stages than others (Latin, Italian, French) whereas share a lot fewer (English and Japanese come to mind).

One thing I like about this formulation is that humanity doesn't all need to have the same meat / "hardware" in their brains at the bottom layer (which is kind of unsatisfying and less-plausible, and makes me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey), as long as there is interoperability at the highest layer.

I would hazard a guess that Japanese is the second natural language the author has learned. When you learn your second language, you see the aspects of a language that you never explicitly learned with your first language, and additionally are able to connect that knowledge back to your first language.

I can see where the author is comming from . . . although its a bit of romanticism.

Japanese is extremely regular, which makes the grammar easier to learn though it is completely different to any language with indo-european roots.

For valuable insights into Japanese grammar I recommend 'Making Sense of Japanese' by Jay Ruben (he translated works of Murukami including Norwegian Wood into English).

Also a youtube channel Cure Dolly https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49 Who sadly died a few years ago, but who's insights nonetheless are very helpful (if you can get past the modified voice audio)

It was a coincidence that I had just finished some reviews on wanikani just before reading this. I find it very helpful along with using the Core 2k/6k Anki deck for learning Vocabulary.

Just a nitpick but the particle “ha”/“は” is not really used to set the subject but the topic or context. The topic or context can often be the subject but it’s an important subtlety. The particle to set the subject is “ga”/“が”.

A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.

Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?

It's called the zero-が and is before the object, in this case. Note that you don't need 私は for that sentence to be a fully valid sentence. It does not serve an actual grammatical function. The subject happens to be 私, and it is the unspoken subject. But every valid Japanese sentence which is not just an exclamation needs a subject, a "が"-marked subject, and if you can't see it you have a zero-が. For this sentence you would only use ”が” if you need to emphasize the subject, i.e. 私が牛肉を食べます - "it was I who..", or "I, in fact, .." - otherwise it's implicit, and not emphasized.

But the topic marker does not mark the subject. Any sentence with a topic can remove the topic, and the sentence is still a fully valid grammatical sentence.

For more about this, check out Cure Dolly's excellent videos about the zero-が on Youtube.

Edit: Various typos

It's implicit, depending on context. Quite often it's "myself" when omitted and without any context. If you'd like to stick to programming examples, it would be default value. Even if not specified, it's always there. Typically you use が when expressing some new information but follow up conversation uses は. There are few other rules, too. The は vs が is a subject of never ending confusion among Japanese students.

Indeed, my interpretation is also that the subject can be expressed by any of は, が, or the context. I am having trouble understanding the "implicit が" analysis because it seems to me that in many cases adding a が would make the sentence nonsensical (like in the example.) So it just feels like retrofitting が into a role that it really doesn't have. Then again, I'm not an expert, so I may very well be wrong about this.

If the topic and subject are the same, just は is used, but there are many sentences where the two differ, eg. 「映画館は人が多かった」- “there were many people in the cinema”, where “people” is the subject and “cinema” the topic. Or 「ここはパンが売れる」- “they sell bread here”, where the topic is “here” and “bread” is the subject.

That may seem strange but that would be 「私が」私は牛乳を食べます

That's interesting. It indeed seems unnatural because I've never heard anybody say it like that - my impression is that you generally can't just use both particles with the same subject for the same sentence (or at least not like this.) But maybe that's just because of my inexperience. Do you have a real-life example of this pattern being used?

(It's also strange because I typoed 牛肉 in my earlier comment, and milk is difficult to eat. Sorry for the confusion.)

Almost - you would write it 私は「私が」牛乳を食べます, and obviously 私は doesn't serve a grammatical purpose, it only has an indicative function.

I'm amused by the transition from beef to milk.

There’s nothing to understand. It’s not a thing.

Just another nitpick: "は" is pronounced as "wa" not "ha" when it is used as the topic marker, as in the well-known greeting "Konnichiwa".

I've always been amused that a literal translation of Konnichiwa could be something like: So, about today...

Kono(this) nichi(day) wa(is the topic)

Likewise konbanwa is the same thing with "tonight" / "this evening"

it's short for

今日はご機嫌いかがですか？

if you're a rich girl at a private school you can just say ご機嫌よう

Yes but the romanji is still “ha”.

The correct word is “romaji” [0], and in the standard Hepburn romanization, “は” as a particle is written “wa” [1].

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ローマ字

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization#Particles

By far the hardest language I've ever tried to learn. In addition to pissing my Korean girlfriend off, it was so difficult I dropped the class after 2 weeks or so.

Chinese is much much easier by an order of magnitude. Particularly if your focusing on speech and grammar vs writing. Not that Japanese writing is any easier.

Hindsight is 20/20. Shoulda took Spanish...

This has not been my experience at all. The tonal aspect of Chinese adds an extra layer of nuanced complexity to pronouncing the words that Japanese simply doesn't have. Further, Japanese has the ability to write things phonetically using hiragana/katakana which Chinese pretty much completely lacks. Not to mention that with Chinese you also have simplified and traditional from a writing perspective.

I’ve learned both and found Chinese harder just because if you lose context then it’s hard to understand anything else being spoken. Japanese has more semantic repetition in the sentence structures. Both are equally logical grammatically though, and Chinese does have a much easier time learning character pronunciations.

Chinese has easier character pronunciations? I find it hard to believe that. The tones are what makes Chinese the hardest language to learn.

Most people who learn Chinese will never be able to sound Chinese. To Chinese people they will look like some fool who has learning deficits (I know this is not true, but the lack of empathy in mono-cultural nations is quite high). I don't think there's any language in the top 20 most popular that punishes you as hard for incorrect pronunciation. While in English having an accent is quite common and charming, in Chinese bad pronunciation will make things incomprehensible.

For Japanese on the other hand I have multiple friends who after a couple years are indistinguishable from natives. The pronunciation system in Japanese is super easy in my opinion. It's almost a subset of the English language.

Because each kanji can have 2-unbounded numbers of pronunciations whereas Chinese is mostly 1:1. That said yes, producing the sounds are easier. Also you might think they’re indistinguishable from natives but 99.9% of foreigners can’t get the pitch accent right and sound like foreigners forever

As @presentation already mentioned, Japanese pronunciation has more layers to it than you think.

Additionally, I think a foreigner who actually puts time into practicing Chinese pronunciation can sound very close to native. Most people learning most languages seem to only aim for good enough pronunciation and then focus on acquiring vocabulary instead.

I don't know what languages you speak, but I speak a good amount of Japanese and will occasionally have a hard time being understood in Japan, probably when the person I'm talking to is not used to talking to foreigners. On the other hand, I've had Chinese people compliment me on my Chinese, and I would not even pass HSK 1. From what I've heard from the Chinese people I've talked to you can get away with a lot of tonal mistakes and still be understood, although you will of course sound like a foreigner.

In my experience, Chinese people are thrilled when non-Chinese people speak their language (even poorly), probably because it's pretty rare.

But yes, the tones are the hard part. The grammar is straight forward and similar to English, and characters are (almost always) pronounced only one way.

Isn't the context thing true for anyone learning a second language?

I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context.

As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin. Mandarin to me is like that as well. I have to pay 100% attention to keep up, and as soon as I lose context, all hope is lost in understanding anything in the conversation forward.

I find Chinese much harder for context because the lack of things like conjugations, genders, plurals, tenses, etc plus every word basically being 1-2 syllables means that there’s a lot more meaning packed in fewer sounds. In English and often in Japanese too, if you hear those auxiliary grammatical markers you can kind of piece together the parts you missed. To be fair people then compensate by slurring their speech more than your typical Chinese speaker would so maybe it balances out.

Is English your native language, I find Chinese grammar to be dead simple, at least at an HSK1 level.

My understanding about Chinese is that what makes it hard for English speakers is that it’s a tonal language. Hearing the tones at all, and even more so reproducing them, can be very hard for many English native adults.

As for explaining Japanese to programmers.. When I try to explain basic Japanese grammar to people in general, they always respond "Sounds complicated". But if I explain basic Japanese grammar to long-time programmers they simply reply "Sounds logical."

(Edit: Added 'basic' - I don't go around trying to explain Japanese grammar in full..)

What's most interesting to me about Japanese is that if you look at the Wikipedia page for most spoken languages [0], all of the top 15 show more than 10 million people who speak the language as a second language, except Japanese, there only 0.1 million (100k) is shown.

This means that either there is no good way to track this, or barely anybody gets to a level in Japanese where they would end up in the statistics.

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

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age."

I fail to see how these two things are connected?

sorry it's almost a meme at this point that France has a thing for Japan and vice versa. The 90s in particular were ripe with animes on the main French channel, lots of collaboration between France and Japan. We got Japanese movies in the cinema much prior the rest of the world and even today you can find gigantic sections for mangas and anime in bookshops, cinemas...

I did my PhD in Japan, in a lab focusing on robotics for lunar exploration, among other things. Every semester there was a revolving door of interns and exchange students from France[1], and a good percentage of them came not for the very interesting subject matter, but for their interest in manga and anime. It was always cringy when they introduced themselves as an anime cosplay enthusiast with the mistaken impression that this a normal hobby for adults in Japan.

Now I live in Europe and joke that you don't see a bunch of Japanese weirdos walking around Brussels dressed up as Tintin.

[1] In the ten years I was there, the number from France was pretty constant, but there was an upward trend in this type of person coming from Scandinavian countries and the US. There is an excellent meme on this matter: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/481/981/034...

I know it's a joke, but I can't help but feel endearment for the (obviously not real) guy every time I see this. Who wouldn't want to trade stories with an eccentric foreigner in a silly hat while eating barbeque and watching fireworks?

In my experience, most Japanese people are much less judgmental about these things than this seems to imply (and less so than Westerners in general). Of course, there's always a time and place for "liking what you like", but this seems a bit otakuphobia-esque.

Honestly, the reverse it's a bit true... for Japanese girls/women. They love Disney.

From my childhood, it was obvious the French had a love of anime from series that made it to the UK, like Ulysses 31 [0] and The Mysterious Cities of Gold [1], co-productions between French and Japanese TV companies. I also thought Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds [2] was French, but it was produced in Spain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_31

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysterious_Cities_of_Gold

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtanian_and_the_Three_Muskeh...

Tangentially, Mysterious Cities of Gold played in the U.S. in the 80s, on the children's cable network Nickelodeon, along with another French show they called Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, evidently titled Les Mondes Engloutis in France. I also loved these shows as a kid!

To add a bit, the first manga in Europe was released in France, in 1969. The first anime was 1972. Also in the 70s, a number of co-produced france-japanese anime were produced for the first time, followed by many others over the decades. I also remember a number of cooperations for Live Action-Movies too.

In general, I get the impression that France and Japan seem to have a deep friendship with each other, on the cultural level.

Sorry my dear Northern French friends, but Spain had a lot of animes since the 70's too. Candy Candy, Mazinger Z... and OFC DB since 1989.

Also, well, on Japan... Spain, 1500's/1600's, research about "Coria del Río" and be amazed.

Thanks all for the replies. I retract my snark!

I wonder if the French experience Tokyo syndrome like the Japanese experience Paris syndrome?

Yeah very much so, maybe even more. As noted, the main lense that people use to discover Japan is animes, which is obviously pretty far from what real Japan is like. Especially the work culture in traditional companies is a massive shock for a lot of French expats.

Personally I still find a whole lot to love in Japan, which could be an entire post by itself.

Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.

Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.

Spain, too. We followed the French way since the Bruguera school in the 50s/60s copying the Franco-Belgian comic books (ahem, Francisco Ibañez and Spirou) and then Mazinger Z in the 70's and Captain Tsubasa in the 80's, along DB in 1989.

This craps me up in Reddit: While we, Western Europeans (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...) have been watching manganime since forever Americans keep lying about DB and manganime availability in the West in early 90's as if the West was just the US.

For instance, the big lie on DBZ knowledge on SNES/MegaDrive games from the West. Fore sure the US didn't know nothing at all. Meanwhile, we were nearly finishing the Buu saga. So we were pretty aware of DB games in arcades, the SNES, the MD and any platform.

Not just France, I think the majority of Europe is like that. Here in the Balkans, local dubs of anime (Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ...) were 90% of what we watched on TV as kids.

Add on Pokemon and Sailor Moon and that also describes the US.

To add to this, France holds one of the largest Anime conventions in the world.

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

Others answered about France but everybody born in Italy in the late 60s was exposed to anime before becoming a teen. I remember that the first one was Grendizer (Goldrake in Italy), followed by Mazinger Z (yes, reverse order), Gundam, Lupin III, Future Boy Conan and a zilion of others.

Just to put a number on the « France love Japan », France is the second market in the world for manga after Japan. Despite being a country producing a lot « bandes dessinées » / comics.

Given than English is not the author's first language, and he finds it chaotic, perhaps he actually meant, {despite} being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age

no no, see other replies. My wife jokes about this love between France and Japan so much that I tend to forget it's not common knowledge

oh I didn't it was france -> japan too, I know about the japan -> france fascination from the old japanese prints that feature the eifel tower, and hot air balloons, and of course the stories of japanese tourists being overwhelmed by paris

That was fascinating reading, thank you!

I take an issue though with this assertion:

> The order [...] is quite different to english but very similar to functional programming.

The most widely accepted (imo) order of function composition is right to left:

  send(makeUrl("http://..."))

just like in English "blue fish": transformation stands to the left to the object that is being transformed (*). Whereas "transformation follows the object" is an OO tradition, as shown in your examples. "Take object, apply transformation (method) yielding another object, apply transformation to that new object, etc."

(*) In quintessentially functional Haskell, you can compose functions both ways, but right-to-left is more traditional:

  {-
   - Find numeric value of the first figure of the decimal representation
   - of a number:
   - 1. convert it to a string of decimal characters (show)
   - 2. take the first character of the string (head)
   - 3. convert the character to a string containing one charcter (:[])
   - 4. convert the string of one decimal character into an integer (read :: Int)
   -}
  
  main = do
    let
      firstfigure1 :: Int
      firstfigure1 = read . (:[]) . head . show $ 413
    print firstfigure1
  
    {-
     - Reverse the order of composition. Define "right-pointing" versions for
     - (.) and ($)
     -}
  
    let
      (.>) = flip (.)  -- it will become infixl 9 by default
      ($>) = flip ($)
      infixr 0 $>      -- We need value lower than the above. Use the same as $
  
      firstfigure2 :: Int
      firstfigure2 = 413 $> show .> head .> (:[]) .> read :: Int
    print firstfigure2

As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in

> an introduction to how different language can be has different as

It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second language, one would learn that H's at word beginnings need to be pronounced in English. And then the brain sneaks them in with English words that didn't have any to begin with, like hangry, or habout. I find the whole topic of overcompensation super fascinating [1]. Another good one is German ESL speakers subconsciously overcompenthating by changing s into th.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

I definitely know it's wrong, but whether it's a pure typo, or an overcompensation which my brain somehow converted into typing, I wouldn't know. That's definitely a thing though (hilariously shown in what the fuck france: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ)

Ha, of course he would talk about this. But I hadn't seen this one yet, thanks for the link!

I've been to his show, my favorite bit was the one about carrelage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIqVY1SwXls

Interesting. Thank you for that perspective. You may already know, but "hangry" is english slang for "I'm so hungry, I'm angry!", or "I'm very grumpy right now because I'm so hungry". As in: "I don't care where we eat, just pull the damn car over at the next stop - I'm HANGRY!" (see also: "hucken fungry")

I could see the h-insertion leading to comical lost-in-translation situations.

Yep, this makes it quite the minefield, when a French person you don't know too well tells you "I'm really really hangry right now". Are they grumpy and hungry and joking, or so completely furious that they started overcompensating? Choose wisely on how to respond :)

On the subject of typos there's also a "woudl" that should have been a "would"

thanks, corrected

I recognize that one can’t expect English speakers to consistently pluralize foreign words in ways that match the origin language, and that it is not objectively incorrect when people just add an s.

However, in my opinion, an article purporting to inform about Japanese in a programmatic way really should avoid using “hiraganas,” “kanjis” and “katakanas” as pluralization of thise terms.

Those are just plain wrong. It's like talking about "English alphabets". There's only one. What they mean is "hiragana characters", etc.

It looks like it’s been edited and is far more agreeable to the idea that ‘hiragana’ et al are already plural.

It's not plural at all; it doesn't even make sense. This is like debating whether the word "happiness" is singular or plural.

There's no such thing as "a hiragana".

Maybe a refactor is in order.

    request.setURL("serverurl").send()

This style of sentence structure was one of the strangest things to get comfortable with. You have to think a bit differently.

The function chaining makes sense here and I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development.

Anyone interested in the language should definitely check out the Genki series. It's written well enough you could fully teach yourself.

https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/intro/ or amazon.

The Japanese language does lend itself easily to an endless chain of run-on sentences where the subject quickly becomes blurry. Very useful for programmers and politicians alike. :p

> I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development.

The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.

Yeah that's the link what I was referring to, I forgot to add context.

What I meant was if Matz "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple" was due in part to the way the language is spoken.

Possibly inspired by message parsing objects in Smalltalk, no?

That's only a problem if your native language has strict word order.

Honestly its really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji.

Not only do most Kanji rote-learning resources not take into account aspects such as compound words, but also its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop.

No language learning works well if you are continuously translating it back into your native tongue. You need to learn to think in the language you are learning, that is the only way you are going to gain any sort of fluency. Just knowing that X translates to Y is not going to help you, even if you memorise the whole dictionary.

You might get away with translating back into your native tongue with a Western language, but you won't with Japanese.

With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar and other aspects. It's just your choice if your want to do it the hard way (textbook theory) or the harder way (immersion via graded readers, conversations with patient natives, or anything else similar).

All the time and effort people put into rote-learning Japanese Kanji should really be expended learning Japanese in a more holistic way.

Otherwise you might as well just buy one of those books with set-phrases such as "where's the toilet".

For the spoken language I whole heartedly agree, but as far as reading is concerned, immersion is super hard. Most resource won't have furigana and even with the one that do, it's "down one ear and out the other", I don't particularly learn to read Kanjis this way. Once you've got a base of say the 500 most used kanji, and you're able to recognise patterns (components, composition) of kanjis then it's a different story.

I'd add that WaniKani does go into compound words, whilst it teaches ~2000 kanji it teaches ~8000 words of vocabulary (which can be either a single kanji, a compound word, etc.). However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.

As for my own case, I'm self studiying with a grammar book + the minna no nihong + wanikani + a weekly tutor in immersion, playing Animal Crossing every now and then in Japanese and trying to read Komi san, as well as preparing for a 6 week trip, which will be my third trip to Japan. It's hard to imagine doing anything more – my wife already thinks I'm doing too much.

> However it does not teach kana only words such as りんご.

FYI, while this word is most often written in kana it's also often written in kanji.

Source: I run a website with such stats. See "Alt. forms" here: https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1555480/リンゴ

This is a very nice website! Thank you to share.

Where do you get your stats? Honestly, I always see it written as りんご (never katakana, nor kanji), but I don't want to be a Japanese language Internet troll. (Yes, there are many: "Oh, but actually...")

Oh wow. Difficulty lists for books too? With vocab lists! This is awesome!

For furigana, you can try the Google Chrome extension "Japanese IO": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-io/dccefj...

You can either select specific text and ask to "decorate" (kanjis with furigana). Or you can click the extension icon (top right in your browser) and it will decorate the entire page. Mouse over kanjis will show furigana. It was a game changer for me.

> really tiring to see people promoting the rote-learning of Kanji

> its just the wrong way to learn Japanese full stop

First, let me say that you may be responding to a strawman. There's few-to-zero people who will recommend memorizing kanji to the exclusion of learning grammar and other aspects.

Realistically, people who promote rote-memorization of kanji are also suggesting to learn grammar, attempt to think in the language (not translate in their head), and suggesting immersing/talking/etc as much as possible too.

So, let me ask you, what do you suggest people do instead of rote-memorization of the readings of kanji? How do you suggest someone become able to read a sentence in japanese, guess the pronunciation of an unfamiliar name, if they have not memorized how to pronounce the relevant kanji?

Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?

> Do japanese school children not learn kanji by rote memorization themselves?

They do indeed, but in a context of everyday immersion, so it’s not rote learning to the exclusion of all else.

Who are you responding to? TFA doesn't discuss learning methods at all, let alone "promoting the rote-learning of Kanji".

Is it just the mention of WaniKani? Personally I don't like WK either, but the author barely mentioned it in passing, and says nothing at all about the stuff you're criticizing.

While I agree with your sentiment, I do not believe the author tried to "promote rote-learning" here -- they just presented a nice little analogy between Japanese and programming constructs.

I have often thought that people who advocate anything but rote-learning of English spelling are misguided. I know that phonetics are a popular myth in English.

Rote learning of English spelling is a much more daunting task than rote learning of kanji. To unfairly cherry-pick from the paragraph above, the English word "person" is about 10 strokes; "people" is also 10 strokes. But there is no obvious connection between the two words and the different spellings have to be memorized individually. 人 is two strokes; 人人 is four strokes; 人々 is six? All are easier to memorize, easier to write, and easier to read. Of course, I might have cherry-picked the most extreme comparison. But even that little four letter word "myth" is 9 strokes and must be rote memorized. It is a small word in English. Somebody else can correct my belief that 9 strokes is not short in kanji.

Ok, I'll correct myself. 神話 is a 9? stroke character and a 13? stroke character. So 22 strokes total? It's funny what we convince ourselves to believe when we cherry-pick. "God talk" is a 5 stroke word + an 8 stroke word. "God speek" is 5+10. So even if I go out of my way to justify my belief in Japanese brevity I have to start rethinking. Maybe if I can think of a word like "deity" or something with even more strokes I could eventually avoid having to adopt a new position on which language is easier.

Another observation is the number of times each day a Japanese person whips up their hand as a chalkboard and asks, "This or this?" while air drawing out two different kanji. The fact that the observer can recognize the characters written in air has always seemed instructive to me, though.

> With Japanese there's no escaping learning the grammar

Learned Polish recently. It's the same. But people do try the supposedly easy way of learning it "without studying the grammar".

Spending painful years in classes where we've been taught the grammar extensively I couldn't agree more with those people. Two languages, the same way of teaching and time wasted all the same. So I say, just skimming the grammar book should be enough to get you going. You can always come back to it when you read something and don't get the rules.

Indeed. I sucked at English (as a foreign language) in school. Real progress came from video games / books / later TV shows.

It's perhaps a slower way (unless you go to live for half a year+ in the country and don't use too much the crutch of help available in your languages), but not a harder one (ditto).

Maybe for the very beginning, when you first learn phonetics and alphabet/ideograms, where the "floor" is infamously higher in Japanese for non-~Asians ?

Incomprehensible to me. Learning the grammar of a language is the most fun part, in my opinion! Vocab is hard work, but learning ways to form a sentence? Magical.

Agree, learning vocabulary or characters is the most boring part of any language.

It can work for some people? You aren’t so much not learning grammar as you are inferring the grammar via practice instead of up front studying the rules. Like the difference between training a neural network to compile code vs writing a parser.

Eh, worked fine for me in Latin. Well, until "Hannibal, with his friends, the Romans, traversed the alps". At least my teacher had her laugh for the year.

I mean it's probably the best way to get some basic proficiency in a language or any skill, teach you enough to become familiar with the language and give you the confidence to move to the next level.

Rote learning and gamified approaches like duolingo have a low barrier to entry; buying a textbook, enrolling in a class or living in the country for a year are much higher and the latter two are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for casual learners.

> You need to learn to think in the language you are learning

The article uses code to illustrate how this might be different thinking in Japanese with a URL request:

> request.setURL("serverurl").send()"

I think there is formality/ceremony here like "I have a request, it is for this URL, and I want to send" vs. the other style in the article: send().request.setURL("serverurl") is more forceful as in "I'm sending you a request for this URL" there is no politeness of the exchange.

I almost had a business trip to Japan some years back and people were discussing the formal and polite ceremonial business card exchange process with certain sequences of presenting, bowing, etc. I think learning about the cultural norms might be a key here with learning the language and the reasons why things are structured differently.

And language "learning" via duolingo was tremendous disservice provided by technology. They basically took the worst method of learning (flashcards) and made it available in the 21st century as something "revolutionary".

I tried learning it with Duolingo and was disappointed to see it was just trying to teach me characters via rote-memorization... gave up after a 10-day streak

Duolingo doesn't manage to show you the structure of the language. I wasted a very long time with Duolingo. It's much better to use the time on just about anything else if you want to learn Japanese.

Yes! And I would insist that learning how the language works is easier, even if it might seem more intimidating at first.

If you just want to get by for your holidays, sure just learn to translate with Duolingo. But if want to speak the language, you will just lose time.

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material.

I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan.

But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the most common constructions. As a result I often hear people say things like, "this language has pure vowels," or, "this language has very consistent word order," but in fact it is mostly because some teacher emphasized the most regular forms, or the places where it contrasted from their native language.

I am not suggesting that all languages are equally irregular, or illogical. But I do think that many times the differences are exaggerated.

That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.

As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity).

So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is communicating with you is ignoring that because their personal dialect doesn't have those pauses and you kinda just have to deal with that when it happens.

Every other rule-set I've heard has to be accompanied by so many exceptions, and has so many competing schools that disagree, that they're just dogma, not description. And they're extremely hard to remember. So they're more about socially signaling that you're part of the well-educated upper-crust than they are about communication.

And yes, I'm an Oxford Comma user. It reduces ambiguity.

Some teachers can do that to any subject, no matter how interesting.

> The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. [0]

There is a proper order for adjectives in English that native speakers follow, but cannot explain.

> "It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist." [1]

0 - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

1 - https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37285796

Sounds a lot like how chatgpt learns :)

The best way to teach: start teaching ireggularities first; then teach patterns that cover the whole.

Actual best way to teach: just have conversations about lots of different topics, a lot

Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.

I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.

Blame it on the Chinese - Japanese didn't have that many "counter words" until Chinese influence increased that by an order of magnitude or more.

As for why you need them, Wikipedia points out that because there's no concept of singular or plural (in general, excepting words like "私たち" for "we"), you may consider all Japanese nouns mass nouns. And with mass nouns in English you usually have to use something similar: ".. loaf of bread" ".. grain of salt". The "solution" is not the same in English as in Japanese (you still use "one, two, three.." in English), but still, you can't just remove it. For Japanese there are other ambiguities which are resolved by the counter system as well.

But yes, the counters.. that's one of the bigger stumbling blocks I ran into early on. Learned the numbers, yay! Then learned that I can't use the numbers when I want to say how many there are of something.. I limited myself to the few where I can, as in the counter for flat thin items like e.g. tickets. "にまいください"

Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga.

You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advantage of Japanese and more programming-like is the combination of kanjis to make up new words but even then the pronunciation might totally change. For example in Spanish:

"I eat beef" = "Yo como ternera" = subject + verb + object. Both in Japanese and Spanish, but not in English, you can omit the subject "yo"/"watashi". But this is so syntetic that people wouldn't use normally, I might instead want to say how good cow meat is and say "¡me encanta la ternera!" "Gyuniku ga suge ski!" (transliterated), in Japanese effectively eating up some random letters there.

I was thinking something similar while reading the article. Studying Japanese it's easy at first, and even kanji is easier than it appears, but eventually there is a huge increase in difficulty when you get to advanced grammar and conjugation, which changes based on tense, voice, imperative/not, gender, ranking, politeness level, etc. Every language is like this, although every language has its own unique quirks and difficult points.

Learning it is also kind of like learning physics in high school. After a few years you realise the first things you learn are a bootstrap to get started and not actually used in daily speech. Simple example: You hear the words "anata" ("you") and "sayonara" ("goodbye") one time in a month, but you will use them all the time in beginner Japanese class.

I don't speak Japanese, so this is kind of half baked, but I find the OP description of "transform polite present tense" explanation a little confusing. Or at least, maybe it assumes we don't do that in English? Or this is using a bad example? Let me explain.

"I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Something about "I eat beef" as a statement conjures chest pounding imagery (it sounds primitive), so I'd propose we often pass through a sort of politeness filter too?

Anyways as a English only programmer, I don't know if I learned anything from the article - maybe you have to speak Japanese to get it?

A bit that you can get away with learning: in English, the things foreigners start learning (and probably you in elementary school about the language and its structure are closer to the actual English usage compared to other languages like Spanish and Japanese. In my example, the textbook beginner "I eat beef" is very out of place usually in the 3 languages, but in English "I like/love beef" are perfectly valid examples that still follow the same basic/beginner structure of "I eat beef" and are valid. In Japanese and Spanish, you have to change the whole sentence structure to not sound like a robot.

(English grammar being simpler in this trifecta, but then in exchange you have the crazy pronunciation learning of English that I found out I would never "fully learn" and nobody really does in English, since you even have literal competitions (spelling bees) where people show off how good they are at it, and with jokes still happening between professionals like "is it 'data' or 'data'?").

In Japanese, the formalizations of polite speech vs impolite speech are significantly more rigorous than in English. So much so that different words and grammatical changes to words occur. You can insult someone by saying "I watched my boss be given an anniversary present by their boss" by using the word 'give' word which implies the recipient or the giver are a lower social status than you the observer.

> [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga

Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.

He even goes on to give an example of everyday Japanese as something nobody outside of a manga would say.

You misquoted me :)

I said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.

Combination of kanji to create new words is a feature of Chinese, which Japanese inherits. It’s the same way we (used to) coin words in European languages by reaching for Latin and Greek.

At a simple level, the use of particles feels somewhat programming-ish. As one's knowledge expands, the exceptions and idiosyncrasies end up destroying that picture, but I get where it comes from.

I would assume it is similar to introducing a programmer to sentence diagramming in English. You start to see patterns and those patterns start feeling like a more formal system. Yet it always ends up crashing down and being too illogical to keep building upon.

One aspect that is likely at play is that learning a new language tends to be more formalized than one's understanding of their native language (outside of a sentence diagramming class or similar). When you learn a specific piece of grammar in a new language, you want to understand it formally. That means finding equivalent examples in a native language if they exist, or otherwise formally explaining the distinction between what grammar exists in a native language and the new grammar structure. I think this sort of pattern goes away when one approached fluency (unless they specialize in studying grammar itself in both their native and new language). The eventual goal is for grammar in the new language to feel as natural and yet illogical as grammar in the native language.

Quite. I suspect there are other natural languages far more suited to programming analogies than Japanese. Latin, anyone?

Programmers are really attracted to Japanese. It's the language with the most over-engineered tools for learning.

Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college.

I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest).

Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago.

I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.

I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe.

I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity).

Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.

I don't think it's necessarily limited to video games.

Japan simply has so many strong otaku (original meaning) subcultures to nerd on, anime/manga/game being the obvious ones (to be more accurate, manga in Japan isn't really a "sub"-culture, but the otaku portion of it is big enough on its own).

The only things I can think of that are comparable in the Western world are Star Wars or Sci-Fi in general, and Superhero comics. But I'm not super familiar with Western cultures.

I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly

I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.

Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing.

But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.

In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.

And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.

Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.

> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

Do explain!

I learned English for school material (math, physics, etc). I then learned further while taking Computer Science at University.

I can watch full length videos on any topic from physics to philosophy to politics and understand nearly everything. But I have a hard time following casual conversations about small daily life things.

Further more, I can only think about programming and technology in English. If I have to talk about technology in Arabic (my native language) I basically have to think about it in English in my head then translate it to Arabic.

Something similar happens to me, but it doesn't seem to be related with how logical/math-related English is, but rather the context in which you've learned it.

If you had learned Chinese (or Portuguese, or whatever) for your school material and computer science courses at university, you'd probably think it's Chinese that's "purpose built" for logic/math.

English seems to me a very illogical language, see for example the pronunciation rules compared to a more "logical" (pronunciation-wise) language like Spanish. Or Japanese, I hear, though I wouldn't know about that. Written English can feel similarly illogical very often.

I think that’s more of a reflection of the fact that English is the dominant Lingua Franca for those subjects.

When you’re at the cutting edge of research, it’s inevitable that you are going to have to come up with new words/language to describe new concepts, and so that process has been happening in English for decades.

It’s a fairly common phenomenon that languages assimilate words from other languages as new concepts are introduced by people who use that other language.

So I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that English has some sort of superior utility for expressing scientific/programming concepts, at least not innately. It’s just that it’s more fleshed out after being used so heavily for such over a long time.

Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s

I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty.

I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis.

On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.

Yeah. Putting the hat of a product manager, I have to ask: what value does this programming analogy offer? Japanese is a pretty structured language that is quite easy to understand. You use particles to "glue" phrases to sentences, and you use conjugations of verbs, for lack of better words, to modify the meaning of a sentence. Of course, there are exceptions and nuances and advanced concepts in Japanese, but it's damn easy to start learning Japanese and I fail to see the utility of using a programming analogy (not that it's not fun, mind you).

Or are we saying that programmers are so one-dimensional that have to square any concepts into the round hole of programming?

My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.

No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots.

I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written.

Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!

Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it.

I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading).

Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.

Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.

Learn the hiragana and Katakana on your own, then use JapanesePod101.com material.

This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years.

But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner.

The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange meetups, but if you can find online ways to do it, that should work too.

The great thing about podcasts is you can listen to it while walking/commuting/etc.

To be quite honest it can be quite an overwhelming endavour, and it's very easy to think "f this I give up I don't care about this anymore".

Physiucal language exchange events help give you an "anchor" so that your learning has a purpose: you're meeting people and having positive social experiences with them.

thansk so much

TIL Japanese kanjis are like German words, composed to make a new meaning. Quite insightful. Is this also the case for chinese usage of Kanji? I vaguely remember that Japanese language differs from Chinese language because of using sybils or something?

Japanese inherited this property from Chinese.

You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first.

Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store

In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.

In Chinese creative hanzi combination happens a lot more than in Japanese, as in Japanese foreign concepts tend to get transliterated into katakana first, though sometimes you do get kanji combinations, like vending machine -> jidouhanbaiki (自動販売機): automatic selling machine.

Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.

Maybe a little off-topic, but do you in general need to account for larger fonts when designing software to work with kanji og traditional Chinese? It could just be my untrained eyes, but I find it hard to see the details in many of the glyphs.

It depends a lot on the text rendering system and screen in question.

For the longest time the font rendering in Windows for example was absolutely garbage for kanji/hanzi on screens like most would be using and in that situation, and yes font size generally needed to be larger than it would be for Latin language users. While Windows technically worked for these languages it clearly wasn’t designed for them. This is somewhat fixed in newer releases.

On the other hand the text rendering on macOS has handled those characters considerably better at small sizes for the past couple of decades, which isn’t too surprising because macOS has aimed to replicate printed text with more accurate letterforms ever since OS X was released, as opposed to the pixel snapping technique used by Windows’ ClearType which only plays nice with Roman characters.

Linux/Freetype has been pretty good with Japanese/Chinese for the past decade too, ever since the improved antialiasing algorithm was added in.

HiDPI screens on smartphones, tablets, and laptops handle these characters pretty well regardless of OS because at those pixel densities, text rendering systems can usually render in adequate detail even at small sizes without doing anything special.

Yes. If you compare the dialog UIs between WeChat (the most popular IM in China) and telegram, it’s clear that WeChat’s font size is bigger

I'm not sure about that.. I just measured on screenshots of WeChat and WhatsApp, at least on my Android phone with no UI customization, the text height only differs by a few pixel. WeChat even have a denser user interface showing more chat channels on a single screen than WhatsApp.

It's no different from english or probably most other languages if you think every character is a primitive. Example: word.new("T", "E", "A") would be equivalent to word.new("牛"). Then word.new(word.new("T", "E", "A"), word.new("S", "P", "O", "O", "N")) would be equivalent to word.new(word.new("牛"), word.new("肉")).

Next concept the author mixed is working with the verbs, verb.new(word.new("E", "A", "T")).PastTense() would give you "ate" Just like verb.new(word.new("食", "べ", "る")).Polite().Past() would output "食べました"

Then working with sentences, ex: Topic.new("me").toString() would be just "meは"... Put it all together and output everything subject > object > verb, instead of the more familiar subject > verb > object.

The author mixed a lot of those grammar concepts, with the words etymology... and it got confusing.

"2 kanjis becoming 1" is just the radical. 涙 (tear) 汗 (sweat) 泳ぐ (swim) 沈む (sink) 溺れる (drown), they all share the same radical (氵/sanzui/mizu/water). While it's not a rule, they are likely to have some relation to it. Just like in english waterfall, waterproof, waterspout, watermelon, etc.

I like the fact that the author is fascinated by the Japanese language and wants to share his discoveries. I guess everybody learning a seemingly completely new (unrelated to anything you know), experiences a similar phase. In his case he found similarities with a programming language. And I guess we all do that, we connect the things we're learning to the things we already know.

Someone learning english would probably be equally amazed by the watermelon. I mean... It's not so surprising if watermelon in your native language is, let's say: Melancia (portuguese). It takes half of the discovery surprise from you, as you already could suppose it's melon related.

I can't deny, "Fire + Mountain = Vulcan" was awesome to me as well. Learning that "Vulcan = god of fire in ancient roman mythology" does not hit me the same way, I already expect it to be greek/roman/latin.

One of the things I like about Japanese are the particles, but I don't know enough about the language to say if they're completely interchangable in any order. e.g. could you say things in these orders in Japanese? You can't in English, it just doesn't sound right.

ジェームズはダブリンに車で水曜日に行きました。 James-subject Dublin-to car-using Wednesday-on went. James went to Dublin in a car on Wednesday.

ダブリンに水曜日に車でジェームズは行きました。 Dublin-to Wednesday-on car-using James-subject went. To Dublin on Wednesday in a car, James went. In charge of words, Yoda was.

水曜日に車でジェームズはダブリンに行きました。 Wednesday-on car-using James-subject Dublin-to went. On Wednesday, in a car, James went to Dublin.

Similarly, specific to English, there is a definite order in which you have to place adjectives. You can pile up adjectives in front of a noun, but unless they're in the right order, they just don't sound right. "The big red balloon" works, "the red big balloon" is just wrong. As far as I know, Japanese does not have such restrictions.

So something the author has noticed, and as far as I know is correct, is that Japanese is a significantly more composable language than English.

For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?). I was also fascinated by Japan, even tried to learn the language but got discouraged early on by having to learn 3 different "writing systems". The grammar was also not quite easy to grok (definitely not easy as the presented code-like example).

Now I am more fascinated by contemporary China than contemporary Japan. I see that Japanese culture is based on much more ancient and broad Chinese culture. I also see a pick up in interests to learn Mandarin among my friends/coworkers.

I watched a few Chinese movies and I have to say they bring a breath of fresh air. I think whenever we want it or not we will see more Chinese media in the future, simply because they are different from what a typical person is used too. That makes them more interesting at least in the beginning.

> For some reason Japanese culture is quite popular among nerdy types (be it anime? games? sushi?).

It's popular among all types, very much so in the states and France due to anime.

But they export A LOT of culture. and they are very good at streamlining that export. Fashion, video games, anime, food, etc.

It's really no surprise it's popular. If you end up consuming the culture (as many of us did as kids) you will be attracted to the origins of it as it contains many elements of the culture you consumed.

But yes, there's a lot of cross over between "nerds" or "otaku" and Japanese culture exports.

I assume because they didn't fit into their home culture fully, so they found escape in another foreign one that was adapted for them, and thus found a community to share common interests with, which reinforces that "obsession".

tldr: you can nerd/otaku out on anything, but Japan makes some good stuff to nerd out on, so you get hardcore fans.

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel.

Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now.

You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out):

In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば).

Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいうお).

The middle character in "青い魚 (あおいうお)" is い, which is a form of the auxiliary verb "to be". In this case, it indicates that the noun "fish" (魚) is in a state of being "blue" (青い).

By using the auxiliary verb "to be", the phrase "blue fish" (青い魚) can refer to any fish that is blue, as opposed to a specific type of fish like mackerel (鯖). This helps to avoid confusion and allows for a clear distinction between different types of fish.

ChatGPT's response is full of BS.

青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいうお

The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix.

青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.

I think I can see the confusion about い here. Not so much うお instead of さかな though...

い adjectives are said to have a built in copula, at least in material I've read, and since な in な adjectives is from the classical Japanese copula にある, one could surmise that い is also derived from a copula. As far as I can tell that is entirely wrong, but it is the kind of thing I wondered immediately after hearing that な and だ were derived from forms of ある.

Disclaimer: very little actual understanding of Japanese.

I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea.

Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.

No, TFA was a little vague but there's no collision. The kanji for mackerel 鯖 is a standalone word/idea, whose graphical representation happens to consist of the characters for "blue" and "fish" next to each other. But virtually all kanji are constructed this way, so native readers just see the overall word without considering the parts, similarly to how you'd read the word "notable" without mistaking it for "not able".

What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together?

There's no technique per se. It's just the character size.

Example:

好 vs 女子

Chinese characters/Kanji are typically monospaced and characters are written within a box.

It's so weird. I know Japanese and I know chatGPT mostly confidently wrong. But still I wanted to believe it and give it the benefit of the doubt. I was wondering if fish had another pronounciation in addition to sakana.

うお is indeed a valid reading of 魚, just not in 青い魚. But 飛び魚 (flying fish) for example is とびうお. btw, the bit chatgpt spit out about い in 青い meaning to be is just totally wrong

> The japanese standard library offers a bunch of chainable functions to add meaning to your primitive types.

English and French work in the same way.

However roles are usually determined by word order. But in essence it's the same thing as obj.do_stuff(), 'obj' is the thing that do_stuff.

English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO.

I've never really thought of programming languages in passive voice before, but it explains why I've increasingly written and spoken in passive voice structure even though I know it's "wrong" to do so.

I wouldn't say that programming is expressed as OVS. Function calls are VSO, e.g. `push(array, element)`. Method calls are SVO, `array.push(element)`. I speculate that this is why method-style dot-notation has become so dominant over the past few decades, because of its natural familiarity to English speakers as compared to the functional VSO style.

Programming doesn't have a definite order, it depends on language. Some examples:

  movq %rax, %rbx
  add rbx, rax
  (cons a b)
  a := b;
  b 1 a + !

> English passive voice construction is inverted similar to Japanese. It's just OVS vs SVO.

Maybe I misunderstood you, but Japanese is neither of those - it's usually SOV, although could be OSV (and you can omit the subject or object sometimes).

Here's my take on explaining Japanese as a programming language.

Verbs are functions. In English, arguments are positional.

SUBJECT verb OBJECT.

I eat pizza.

But in Japanese they are named arguments with small helper words called particles. The subject uses 'wa' and the object used 'wo'. The convention is postfix in contrast to English's prefix notation.

Watashi-wa pizza-wo taberu.

With other verbs English uses named arguments too:

I go to the bank by car.

Japanese uses "e" and "de" for the arguments to this verb. Car is kuruma so "by car" becomes "kuruma-de".

Watashi-wa kuruma-de ginko-e iku

Obviously this is a massive simplification but I always found thinking about verbs as functions and the other words as named arguments to be very easy to understand.

(Edited for clarity)

did you misspell "ha" instead of "wa"¿

Yes, but with good reason. It's pronounced "was" but always written and typed as "ha".

Very interesting. How does regex/pattern matching work with Kanji? Or does it?

It works okay. You can setup unicode blocks and use them.

I have a collection of python scripts you can use for text manipulation:

- regex:https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master...

- translitteration tables: https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts/blob/master...

https://github.com/olsgaard/Japanese_nlp_scripts

Surprised this post didn't mention Forth. https://arcanesentiment.blogspot.com/2011/02/japanese-lisp-f...

BTW this toy language came up in my search for the above: https://gist.github.com/typeswitch-dev/ac86d7e32167c1e5bf311...

What makes Forth really distinctive is LIFO, not merely being postfix. You can have stack-based LIFO human languages, too, but it's very hard for humans to parse things that correspond to non-trivial nested constructs in them because of the need to maintain said mental stack. Fith is/was a conlang built on that idea:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110610231636/http://www.langmak...

Nice find! It may be interesting to compare Shallow Fith to Japanese grammar -- I don't know Japanese, but I have played with variations on Forth to try for better readability.

While Forth has little point nowadays, RPN still is worth keeping in mind for combining direct manipulation with programmability in UIs.

Should have used Ruby :p

I once heard that Rails the aggregate object for Person is People. I went like, wow. In Spanish you say: "Baraja la baraja" .. shuffle the deck. Which makes sense (the object changes itself but the verb is the same as the noun" Is like Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The rhetorical device here is called polyptoton.

It have noticed it usually sounds clunky in English, though it was a favorite of Latin and Greek authors. For instance, "Et lux perpetua luceat eis," is usually translated, "And may perpetual light shine upon them." But in Latin, the same root is in the subject and the verb. "And may perpetual light light them," is grammatical and (mostly) semantically equivalent in English. But it sounds clunky and looks like a typo :P

My uninformed supposition would be that it sounds clunky in English because English has less variation in word morphology, so the words are too similar when they have the same root.

Back in the early 2000s I saw a wonderful 3-part series explaining Japanese as a context-free grammar. It was on kuro5hin, which later shut down and everything disappeared. At one point I was able to find two of those posts archived, but never the whole thing.

For a moment the title got my hopes up.

I wonder if there is any "natural" language which has the precision of programming language, Perhaps there are efforts to create one?

I believe a language like that could be truly globalised without any cultural aspects

The AI-generated origins of the shrine image at the foot of the article are extremely obvious, btw.

I mean, yes... and? It's a pretty image is it not?

Great stuff!! If there were a whole course in this style, I would pay good money for it!

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