Comment by barking_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barking_biscuit | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

barking_biscuit

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com