Slashdot Mirror

"In Japan robots are friendly helpers not Terminators."

This idiotic meme just won't die, thanks to eternally lazy reporters. Tip to the BBC: Outside of Japan, robots are not Terminators. The Terminator was a movie character. It's fiction. Get it?

Here in the real world, people and companies outside of Japan are falling all over themselves researching, building, and commercializing robots as home helpers, caretakers, special-needs assistants, workers, and more –the same as in Japan. Sorry, BBC, but if you want to claim there's some magical difference in Japan, you have to demonstrate it, not just assert it.

From my home in Tokyo, where I can assure you the average person has zero daily contact with helper-type robots, I got so tired of this meme I ripped it apart at http://www.homejapan.com/japan-and-robots . The robot-loving "Westerners" I describe should feel mighty familiar to Slashdot readers (who, unlike the BBC, are probably smart enough to get that "OMG robots are evil Terminators!" is the stuff of jokes and movies, not the attitude of real people).

Certainly, kanji is one of the difficulties – I name it one of the three things a person would find hard about learning Japanese ( http://www.homejapan.com/2008/02/whats_hard_about_learning_japanese ). It's a heck of a lot of work for Japanese/Chinese speakers, too.

But you're probably familiar with all the points in favor of Chinese characters, such as the vast richness they add to the written language, and even the way they arguably make reading easier and faster (once learned thoroughly enough). I myself vote to keep 'em (but then again, I would vote that way, having put in the time to learn 'em : ).

I cringe a bit every time a story like this pops up. Here come the myths, the misinformation, the wild exaggerations... Life was easier before the "anime/manga" fans took up their little obsession.

Well, let's be positive: This is a learning & teaching experience, right? So for the interested, a bit of debunking about Japanese:

1) "Kanji" is not a language.
I know, I haven't seen anyone on this page make that mistake, so I'm not pointing a finger at anyone here. Just at people out there who do think "kanji" is the name of the language – like Steve Jobs in his keynote a couple days ago. I had to write a debunking: http://www.homejapan.com/japanese-language-is-not-kanji

2) Japanese does NOT use "three writing systems". (That claim does appear on this page.)
Japanese uses ONE writing system. Precisely one. No more, no less. It contains multiple character sets, including Chinese characters (aka kanji), home-grown "kana" phonetic characters (with two variants, hiragana & katakana), punctuation & typographic symbols (including some from European languages), and Arabic numerals. Those all combine to form exactly ONE writing system.

It's nothing special. English uses multiple character sets, including Latin letters (with two variants, upper case & lower case), punctuation & typographic symbols, and Arabic numerals. All of which combine to form ONE writing system.

I haven't written a post on this one yet, but definitely need to. That "three writing systems" is a really common misconception. (Comment by Moridineas is very much on the right track, pointing out that the jumble of features and origins found in the Japanese writing system is just the normal way human language rolls.)

3) "OMG Japanese is so hard." Well, that's purely opinion, so I won't say it's right or wrong or a misconception or anything. I'll just add that there are learners with precisely the opposite opinion: I call it a wonderfully easy language to learn! There are plenty of reasons; see http://www.homejapan.com/2008/02/whats_easy_about_learning_japanese .

Lots more linguistic debunking at my site. But I'll refrain from further boring the good people here.

So, anyway. Fascinating stuff, and actually it's nice to see so many people take an interest. Let's just watch the exaggerations and stick to reality. (Yeah, like that'll happen. Who am I kidding? : )

I cringe a bit every time a story like this pops up. Here come the myths, the misinformation, the wild exaggerations... Life was easier before the "anime/manga" fans took up their little obsession.

Well, let's be positive: This is a learning & teaching experience, right? So for the interested, a bit of debunking about Japanese:

1) "Kanji" is not a language.
I know, I haven't seen anyone on this page make that mistake, so I'm not pointing a finger at anyone here. Just at people out there who do think "kanji" is the name of the language – like Steve Jobs in his keynote a couple days ago. I had to write a debunking: http://www.homejapan.com/japanese-language-is-not-kanji

2) Japanese does NOT use "three writing systems". (That claim does appear on this page.)
Japanese uses ONE writing system. Precisely one. No more, no less. It contains multiple character sets, including Chinese characters (aka kanji), home-grown "kana" phonetic characters (with two variants, hiragana & katakana), punctuation & typographic symbols (including some from European languages), and Arabic numerals. Those all combine to form exactly ONE writing system.

It's nothing special. English uses multiple character sets, including Latin letters (with two variants, upper case & lower case), punctuation & typographic symbols, and Arabic numerals. All of which combine to form ONE writing system.

I haven't written a post on this one yet, but definitely need to. That "three writing systems" is a really common misconception. (Comment by Moridineas is very much on the right track, pointing out that the jumble of features and origins found in the Japanese writing system is just the normal way human language rolls.)

3) "OMG Japanese is so hard." Well, that's purely opinion, so I won't say it's right or wrong or a misconception or anything. I'll just add that there are learners with precisely the opposite opinion: I call it a wonderfully easy language to learn! There are plenty of reasons; see http://www.homejapan.com/2008/02/whats_easy_about_learning_japanese .

Lots more linguistic debunking at my site. But I'll refrain from further boring the good people here.

So, anyway. Fascinating stuff, and actually it's nice to see so many people take an interest. Let's just watch the exaggerations and stick to reality. (Yeah, like that'll happen. Who am I kidding? : )

Hard to "learn Japanese business culture?" Come on, there's nothing wacky going on there.

As for the language: Reading and writing take a long time, but there's nothing overly difficult about it as a spoken language.

A little reading for the interested, re what's hard and easy about learning the language:
http://www.homejapan.com/blog/siteowner/2008/02/whats_hard_about_learning_japanese
http://www.homejapan.com/blog/siteowner/2008/02/whats_easy_about_learning_japanese

Hard to "learn Japanese business culture?" Come on, there's nothing wacky going on there.

As for the language: Reading and writing take a long time, but there's nothing overly difficult about it as a spoken language.

A little reading for the interested, re what's hard and easy about learning the language:
http://www.homejapan.com/blog/siteowner/2008/02/whats_hard_about_learning_japanese
http://www.homejapan.com/blog/siteowner/2008/02/whats_easy_about_learning_japanese

Posting here too late to be read, probably, but:

I agree, MagikSlinger, there's a lot of crud on 2ch (and other Japanese BBS-style blogs I've read); low signal-to-noise. It's the kind of noise that makes a newbie feel he's missing a lot of subsurface meaning... but after a while, it becomes clear there's really just a lot of mindless keyboard-banging.

(*Some* forums, *some* threads, of course. There's good stuff too.)

I think the WIRED article overall tries too hard - as "cultural comparison" pieces usually do - to sell the exotic "so different from us" angle, at the expense of factuality. The subject of the article, Nishimura, is genuinely interesting; the sideline "Japanese Internet is, like, so weird!" angle is overblown. All in the interest of telling a good story, I know...

I picked some bones with the WIRED article here
http://www.homejapan.com/2008/05/wired_on_cultural_differences_tell_em_what_they_want_to_hear
and so won't bore this discussion with further opining. But for anyone who cares, this particular Internet nobody contends that "cultural difference" pieces always need to be taken with heaping spoonfuls of salt. There's too much interest among writers in concocting a good story, and too little desire among readers to cast a critical eye toward claims.

There is, in fact, plenty of robotic research and deployment going on in Japan. No argument there. But there isn't a lick of evidence to support some psycho-socio-cultural "special relationship", or its equally laughable imaginary counterpart, "Western fear of robots". (Everyone here who's afraid of robots, raise your hand.... I thought so.)

I'll save the forum my blathering; anyone interested can read all about it at Culturology Myth Debunked: Japan's "Special Relationship" with Robots. http://www.homejapan.com/robot_myth

There! Harumph! Bugger all!