Slashdot Mirror
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!)"
Your mother takes it in via the passage and outputs disease via her fecal tubes
TROLLKORE ARE THE BEST
Have Meriam and Webster added
Noob
Leet
Haxxor
Lolcat
pwned
yet?
Something developed in China is being bastardized by a foreign country who basically copied it and is changing it at it's will?
Is this that irony I have been hearing so much about?
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!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As far as I know, you can use katakana to write any foreign word. It's not absolutely necessary to add kanji characters.
Is it just me, or is having your language based on a character set that requires computer rendering for most people to be able to communicate clearly somewhat asinine?
No disrespect to those that practice the art of cartography, but for day to day communication... wow.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
But we are left with a problem: the kanji test that people take to get a certificate showing what they have learned (taken by students and others in Japan) will now become more difficult. This technology has allowed people to become more exposed and use a wider variety of kanji, but it has also become a crutch. Many people can read a lot of kanji, but are hard pressed to remember it and write it by hand (which is required for the test).
Japanese and Chinese.
It's also contributed to many Japanese forgetting how to write many less common kanji because in their day-to-day life most of them rarely have to write by hand anymore. They type the sound and press "convert" and pick from a list on both their PCs and cell phones.
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
The Japanese have copied the Chinese characters but they are not changing Chinese, just the subset (the characters) they copied. Nobody is suggesting China should adept them, if this would even be possible.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...words related to the describing of new variants of tentacle rape. And Godzilla.
Finally we can decipher slashdot.jp. For surely among the top stories there must be precisely the following text:
"Those who have studied in our country know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning our language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that we are expected to understand to graduate from one of our high schools or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly ten percent to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and 5 deleted. The added characters are ones we all know are found commonly in life use, but are obviously harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Our officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in this country has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple 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 learners of our language. (Oh, if you read English and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.org has some information!)"
With this summary, we can finally crack the Japanese language!
Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1?
One old crapflooding technique was to use characters intended for use with right-to-left scripts (Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana) to spoof moderation and distort the layout of other comments to the article. See my earlier post on the topic, as well as Encyclopedia Dramatica's.
I checked out the Slashdot.jp article, and got absolutely nothing out of it.
Why would those who read a roman alphabet be directed to a site in Japanese for more information?
The asian countries need to "get with the times". Pictographic languages are so 1100BC.
I meant to write 'calligraphy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligraphy). Brain to finger malfunction.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
At first i thought they meant they were adding completely new kanji specifically dealing with modern electronics (presumably to replace older kanji that had previously been adapted to the task.) Which led to the thought that since originally a lot of kanji got their start as pictograms that were them simplified to their current forms, wouldn't it be cool if new kanji for electronics were developed from simplified versions of circuit diagrams?
Alas, it was not to be.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Big deal. I have to remember like 20000 of them.
Is written with Roman characters, taken from the Greeks, taken from probably the Phoenicians.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When will you Humans grow the F up and choose one standard audible, written, and inaudible (sign) language to teach your children!??
Within less than one century you would be rid of this foolishness...
Such a ludicrously inefficient and overly sentimental species!
Ok, the characters listed aren't difficult, or uncommon, they just aren't "official." The real issue here is, why the hell does slashdot.jp have more features than slashdot.org? Click an external link, and there's an interstitial offering a direct, Google cache, and web archive (Way Back Machine) link. Seriously, bring this to .org. And add Coral cache to both, I know it's got an l AND an r in it, but it could still benefit .jp.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Does this trend have something to do with the shifting of the balance of power in the world?
The Japanese language is well-known for absorbing foreign words and language concepts into its own domestic use, especially from cultures / societies it deems powerful or dominant. It was Chinese during the Ming dynasty, Portuguese/Spanish during the 1600s, German during the 1800s, English from WW2 onwards.
Now that China is a relative economic superpower, maybe the trend is now to absorb Chinese words again?
Japanese students now prefer to study abroad in China rather than the U.S.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
So to be fluent, a high-school student must know about 2,000 characters?!
I'm a Chinese minor (in the US at a university), and we only learn the most basic of topics (sports, food, family, transportation). My list of "you better know these" is about 5,000 characters long. And I use traditional characters too, because I prefer a 1:1 mapping of meaning to character.
So a 10% increase shouldn't be a big deal if you're already (somewhat) used to writing them out.
Is it completely ignorant to suggest that when language changes require a character set to be modified, that the approach itself is impractical and ought to be phased out? What's the kanji for chortle, for instance? It wouldn't be the first time a people (Scots, Irish) had to face up to the reality that being a cultural island loses in the long run.
The characters that cause such things are a well-known set.
The set could be extended in a future version of Unicode.
Like the control (<32) characters in ASCII.
And like an additional block of control characters (0x80-0x9F) was added in the ISO 8859 encodings.
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
You know, it's like rain, on your wedding day. Things like that.
Bow-ties are cool.
That is many characters have a meaning-signifier (radical) and a sound signifier. The sound part gives clue to the pronunciation. I can often guess the meaning and pronunciation of a new character. Mor importantly these parts serve as memory aids for recognizing and drawing the character.
Sometimes a kanji character has been imported to Japanese with a Chinese-like meaning, but solely Japanese pronunciation. Sometimes a Chinese transliteration accompanies the borrowing. And sometimes it the orignal Chinese meaning is now totally alien.
As far as I know, you can use katakana to write any foreign word. It's not absolutely necessary to add kanji characters.
Kanji has the advantage of succinctness over phonetic systems.
I did wikipedia it, but perhaps you did not do so as thoroughly as I. Or you are simply upset by how I summarized the links between the alphabets.
"The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Alphabet
"... was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
"Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_alphabet
"The most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_alphabet
"The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet ... One of its descendants, the Greek alphabet, revamped some letters to more consistently represent vowels." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
A book (or two) that details the history of Indo-European alphabets more thoroughly might be worthwhile if you're interested in links between Latin, Etruscan, forms of Greek, or Phoenician.
What is curious is you get upset then state "Roughly speaking, 50% of the greek chars appear in the roman alphabet. And 30% of those have a different meaning, pronunciation." So there is a relationship. Did you expect it to be 100% identical in form and meaning? I find that people in different regions of my own continent pronounce vowels differently. This also occurs over time as well, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...in China, people are trying to SIMPLY the writing...
I live in Japan and I've talked to Japanese teachers about this; I've also seen the kanji they're adding. It's not "because of computers" or "because they need computers to write kanji" -- the kanji they took out are very, very rarely used, with one being an archaic form of measurement equal to around 350 grams or something. A lot of the kanji they added are kanji that ARE common-use kanji as a matter of fact, just not officially. Many of the ones they added are simple ones that show up in a ton of names. Another example is the kanji for "turtle" -- something that comes up often enough that you'd think it would have been in the original set to begin with. It's not some gigantic "Oh god nobody speaks our language and everyone's stuck on computers" deal; it's just MEXT updating their "official" set to reflect the changing times and vocabulary... and fix some mistakes from the past.
People forgetting how to write kanji due to always using cell phones or computers IS a problem, but unrelated to the update to the Joyo Kanji.
http://www.tenjou.net/
I've been learning Japanese for 4 years and have level 1 of the JLPT and I can say with confidence that this doesn't complicate anything for learners at all. If you're at all serious about learning Japanese you'll need to accept that the Jouyou-Kanji-Hyou (the list being discussed here) is not the definitive guide and you have to know lots of characters beyond that list. Most people would say about 3000 characters at least for literacy.
Government agencies might choose to avoid using kanji not on it. However they often ignore it. Some newspapers now days pay attention to it and replace characters not on it with katakana. For example 'hatan' is often written in newspapers with the character for 'yaburu' (i.e. 'ha') followed by tan written in katakana. Although even government agencies and newspapers use some characters which aren't on it. Everyone else just ignores it and uses whatever characters they see fit.
It was never designed to assist Japanese learners and (at least previously) contained some extremely rare characters which you seldom see used which omitting extremely common characters that you'd expect even a 8 year old to be able to read. (An 8 year old Japanese kid that is obviously)
P.s. According to the comments on the slashdot.jp article the characters mentioned there are a hidden reference to some dating sims titles (Or however you want to translate eroge).
Honestly, a small increase in kanji, by 196 characters, people are complaining about learning Japanese? Try learning Chinese 100% kanji at 10,000 characters or more.
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? : )
Yes, having to do with breast, suckling, etc. Wonder why. This is according to a linked news article at http://www.jiji.com/jc/c?g=soc_30&k=2010060700495
The Joyo list is pretty irrelevant anyway, used maybe as a guide for high school textbooks and not much else. Most of the new characters they're adding are very common, and everyone knows them already. Actual literacy in Japanese requires more like 3,000-4,000 characters, which everyone just picks up through reading and daily life regardless of what the government's official list says.
And as you probably know, for those learning Japanese or Chinese as a second language, characters start getting a lot easier once you know a thousand of them or so.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Noooo!
Hopefully this doesn't add a bunch of 20+ stroke kanji to the JLPTs.
I have to give credit to Korea for their Hangul writing system. It's very nice!
That would be the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary, the only authority on English language vocabulary and spelling etc, that matters as far as many English speakers are concerned.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Wouldn't it be much easier for Japanese and Chinese to be simplified by using an alphabet, as is done with European and other languages?
Why do they continue to use an overly complicated system?
I am disappointed in you all. Does no one get the Hitchhiker's Guide reference?
Bow-ties are cool.
Have you noticed the http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji16/draw-canvas.html link on Jim Breen's http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi website? Makes it dead easy for Westerners and clumsy beginners to enter three or four strokes of a handwritten character (using the mouse!) and get immediate feedback in the form of 20 candidate characters that might match what you've entered so far. This is the most lenient "clumsy kanji" analysis routine I've seen so far. Bodes very well for cyberlinguistics.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Practically speaking, this will only have a significant effect on those unfortunate children whose parents dig up one of these obscure characters for use in a personal name, as there is an increased chance that other people will not be able to read the person's name, or will read it improperly.
Imagine the irritation at having the FEDEX guy always misread your name when he hands you a parcel.
That is, if you wanted to name your child using one of these characters yesterday, your application would have been rejected at city hall. Today, as a result of this decision, the clerks will probably have to accept the name, no matter how obscure.
In summary, this is good for parents and bad for children.
"For someone acquiring a non-native language, the difficulty of that second language is entirely dependent on that person's first language."
Yes indeed. Japanese, for example, may be the *easiest* foreign language you could study if you're already fluent in Korean.