Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics

JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"

Comments

What about Official English?

[Monkeedude1212]

Have Meriam and Webster added
Noob
Leet
Haxxor
Lolcat
pwned

yet?

Re:What about Official English?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we have another case of "UANATISOTAANUTAADTPOAA" (Use a new acronym then immediately spelling out the acronym and never using the acronym again defeating the purpose of an acronym)

Re:What about Official English?

[twoallbeefpatties]

...they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.

That is to say, it's the closest thing that they have to the English language. /drumroll

Re:What about Official English?

[Anonymous Coward]

>To be pedantic, Hiragana and Katakana glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables.

To be extra pedantic, they're not necessarily syllables, but morae.

To be hyper pedantic, when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a morae.

Re:What about Official English?

[_ivy_ivy_]

Great.

Now we have Japanese grammar nazis in addition to the more common English varieties.

That's nothing

[Locke2005]

There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. That's nothing... there's a lot more than 1,945 characters that kids are now expected to be able to recognize in order to be considered fluent in Pokeman!

UTF-8

[JWSmythe]

The only thing I can think when I see this story is, WTF? Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1? I know I've tried to post foreign characters before, as others have, and they just get ignored.

    I figured they were too lazy to implement it into Slashcode. Now it's obvious that they're avoiding it.

Re:Let me get this straight

[TheBig1]

"These nails taste irony."

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?

apparently anyone with a keyboard on slashdot.

Re:Let me get this straight

[KiloByte]

That's why we need strong Intellectual Property protection.

Just think of the real true thing, hieroglyphs, provided by the clergy of Amon, available through scribes for Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory fees. Don't accept counterfeit alphabets!

Patent protection would have to be extended to 3000 years, but we're getting there.