The Gare and Elin Translate It Out: keikaku means plan

[Elin]

Kanji is easily the hardest part of the Japanese language to grasp. lol

Only to begin with. Kanji actually become super-useful later on, and you'll grow to hate text without kanji because it's so hard to read. They also make vocabulary acquisition much easier. Unless your native language is something like Mandarin Chinese or Korean, the majority of words in Japanese are going to sound completely foreign to you, and it's much easier to remember that a word is made up of "X kanji plus Y kanji" than it is to just remember it as a collection of sounds.

Also, I don't think kanji are particularly "hard" per se. Just really, really time consuming.

[Shane]

It more or less says "pollution isn't that severe in the suburbs", the joke being that pollution and suburbs are both pronounced as kougai. So you're saying "kougai no kougai". Silly, I know.

... Both words being pronounced as "kougai". Japanese is slowly getting harder for me to understand now

As far as I know, letters like ō are also written as "ou"... unless I'm mistaken?

[Gare]

http://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels...hat_nobody_is/

PLZ UPVOTE MY BLOG THANKS

[gezegond]

I can read and write French okay. I don't really have much confidence when it comes to speaking it because I've never really tried, and I know that my pronunciation is probably completely atrocious as a result.

I'm pretty interested in learning French as well. I was actually interested more in French before watching all teh anime and getting into Japanese. I had a university admission for montreal and I was really excited about learning french there (they speak french in montreal) but my visa got rejected.

Well, in retrospect I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up, people from my country are hated all around the world.

[Gare]

If you think kanji in general is hard, try some medieval Japanese.

[Elin]

... Both words being pronounced as "kougai". Japanese is slowly getting harder for me to understand now

As far as I know, letters like ō are also written as "ou"... unless I'm mistaken?

This is another reason why kanji are very useful. :'D Japanese is full of words like that. "Hana" can mean "flower" or "nose", "hashi" can mean "bridge", "chopsticks", or "tip", etc...

They're written "ou" in Japanese characters. ō and suchlike are characters used in a number of systems designed to represent Japanese in the English alphabet. I usually just write "ou" because it's easier. :'D

[gezegond]

you'll grow to hate text without kanji because it's so hard to read.

Why can't they just use the damn spaces?

[Elin]

http://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels...hat_nobody_is/

PLZ UPVOTE MY BLOG THANKS

Registering a Reddit account for this purpose. :3

[Shane]

This is another reason why kanji are very useful. :'D Japanese is full of words like that. "Hana" can mean "flower" or "nose", "hashi" can mean "bridge", "chopsticks", or "tip", etc...

Or how "Chidori" can mean "plover", "staggered", or "zigzag"? (if Google Translate isn't lying, which it probably is)

They're written "ou" in Japanese characters. ō and suchlike are characters used in a number of systems designed to represent Japanese in the English alphabet. I usually just write "ou" because it's easier. :'D

Ah.

[gezegond]

"Hana" can mean "flower" or "nose", "hashi" can mean "bridge", "chopsticks", or "tip", etc...

We have similar sounding words in all languages. People know which is which by context. If you can understand what people say, and you can turn whatever they say into hiragana, then I'd say hiragana is enough for writing the sentences. They use over 9000 symbols because they don't use spaces.

I'm not trying to pick a fight, I like Japanese. And yeah when you use kanji the writing becomes more meaningful than spoken language, and that's cool. I' beginning to like Kanji. But still I find it quite redundant. If the Japanese would stop learning kanji and use that time to do something more productive, I bet their GDP would go up significantly.

[Elin]

Why can't they just use the damn spaces?

Even when they do (and they do in childrens' books), text without kanji is just obnoxious. Putting aside the fact that, as Gare said above, tons of words are only differentiated in Japanese by their kanji, your eye reads Japanese in a different way to the way that it reads English. In English, we read words by looking at their overall shape, rather than sounding out every single letter. Wihch is the raeson taht I can wirte lkie tihs and a ntavie sepaker wlil sitll udnertsand. Our eye only really looks closely at the first and last letter of each word, and how many letters are inbetween, so it's all about word shapes, and as long as the first and last letter of a word are in place and it's about the right length, you can read it if you're fairly competent at English.

Japanese is read slightly differently, for the most part. The shape of words isn't really important. Instead, your eye tends to skip from kanji to kanji, reading the kanji closely and only grazing over the bits inbetween. So when you take out kanji, you take out the "anchor" points that help you read fluently, and it massively slows down reading. To draw a comparison with the above, it would be like writing the way I did, but mixing up the first and last letters as well, or radically altering the length of words. Your brain would have to carefully work through each word. You could probably read like that, but it would be extremely slow and inefficient.

[Gare]

Fun fact: the colloqual/shortened version of my real name is "Geri", and it also means diarrhea in Japanese. I think I got fucked over by fate real hard.

[Tassadar]

Yeah, you were dealt a shitty hand by fate.

/awaitsIvoltrage.

[gezegond]

You could probably read like that, but it would be extremely slow and inefficient.

Yes, but from an objective point of view, does this justify all the time one should put in learning Kanji? And I believe that while they do read it like that, people can change and become efficient at a different way of writing fairly quickly.

Turkey for instance, used arabic letters for writing before Ataturk. Ataturk changed the written language to use roman letters. Now people read em as fast as they would read arabic letters, or maybe even faster. Notice that the spoken language didn't change, just the writing system.

I'd say they can come up with a significantly more efficient writing system both in learning and in communicating sentences if they wanted to...

[Drageuth]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Fire-Emblem-...-/130915762427

why

I fucking hate VGA.

Someone is giving away this kitten on CL. My urge to liberate is rising.

I want it.