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!)"
Have Meriam and Webster added
Noob
Leet
Haxxor
Lolcat
pwned
yet?
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.
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).
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.
"Bombay" and "Mumbai" are actually two separate words, not the same word differing from transliteration principles. "Bombay" is from the Portuguese bom baia "good harbor", while "Mumbai" is from the Hindu goddess Mumba Devi, to whom a prominent temple in the city is dedicated.
Or you could just, you know, use English to utterly butcher the representation of any foreign word
I think the Scot's are worse for it. Have you ever heard them say Edinburgh?
Why have a definite article? Why have different ways to pronounce the same syllables as presented in different words? Why have silent letters? Why have emphasis marks on different syllables? Why capitalize certain words, like the cardinal directions? Languages aren't exactly developed by informed committee. The reason you have little quirks like this in Japanese is because, much like English, it's an amalgation of other languages that has developed over centuries rather than a "pure" development.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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.
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
"These nails taste irony."
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.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Word of advice, spend less time watching Anime, and more time studying Japanese. You'll never have time to deal with that tripe again. Hiragana you can write any Japanese word with, and or modify verbs, adjectives, etc. with. Katakana you'll write foreign words or their version of ALL CAPS for native words. Kanji however is for the majority of words of Japanese words. Kanji get dropped here and there because either no one remembers, or does remember, and doesn't want to write the f'ed up Kanji, and use Hiragana usually. It's actually much easier, and faster to read a sentence full of Kanji vs a sentence populated with just Hiragana. Plus there are so many nouns, and verbs that are so similar in sound, it's easier when reading to use the characters, and more representational objects. Even if it's a words you may not know, a few Kanji in it can make a WORLD of difference. Plus it's just faster really. Really it's quite simple!
As a non-Japanese-speaking-person-who-watches-anime-and-stuff I've always wondered why they have both (well, several) writing systems. They have katakana, and Kanji, and sometimes Kanji with furigana to help with pronunciation. Is it just because it takes less space to write in Kanji? Kind of like how we abbreviate things?
Actually, 3 systems:
IMO, Kanji are used partly due to the fact that Japanese has a limited set of pronounceable sounds (~70) which creates many ambiguous situations. Writing the kanji root out instead of having bare hiragana helps to remove some of that ambiguity... So it's actually the OPPOSITE to abbreviation as it provides more accurate information.
Also there are those who consider it more 'elegant' as it's a time-consuming process to lean and use kanji, and even more time consuming to write them with elegance. (something even many Chinese people are struggling with).
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
apparently anyone with a keyboard on slashdot.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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.
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).
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? : )
It's much easier to learn Chinese characters in Chinese than it is in Japanese because the phonetic portions for each character are maintained and the readings of the character is reflected in its structure. Furthermore you generally only have 1 reading per character.
.etc.) is "okonau". Both are written with the same character with the reading changing depending on the character following it. The past tense and conjunctive forms of the above verbs are written identically. However are of course read completely different. (itta / itte and okonatta / okonatte respectively). Furthermore the same character also has multiple Sino-readings associated with it. The main ones being "kou", "gou", and "gyou". These are used when the character is used as part of a "jukugo" (Nouns constructed with Chinese morphemes). Finally on top of that you have exceptional readings. For example the same character is used to write the "an" in "anka" (foot warmer).
In Japanese most characters have a Sino reading and a Japanese reading. The Sino reading can sometimes be deduced from the structure of the character however the Japanese reading is completely arbitrary and often changes completely based on the phonetic characters that follow it or even simply based on context.
For example the Japanese word for "to go" is "iku" and the Japanese word for "to hold" (a party, event
The worst by far though is names. Often Japanee people themselves can't read names correctly without knowing beforehand what the place is called. A favourite example of mine is the place name "Kasuga". It's written with the characters for spring and day. Now the Japanese words for spring and day are "haru" and "hi" respectively. So you would think when combined they would be read "haruhi" (And when used for people's names they are read "haruhi" when combined). If not "haruhi" another logical reading would be "shunjitsu" (using the Chinese readings of the character) and indeed there is a noun in Japanese read "Shunjitsu" which means spring day. However in place names for whatever reason when those two characters combine their reading changes to the completely arbitrary "Kasuga".
Now try learning that for several thousand characters and that's not to count the 1000 odd characters which aren't on the list but you need to know anyway if you want to be literate.
As cool as that would be, it would give Japanese the same difficulties English has with obscure words: adding more roots to build words out of only complicates the process of learning the vocabulary. As it is, most new words are made by putting together the roots of existing words (which, conveniently, are typically represented by a kanji), and consequently it can be much easier to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Often, in Japanese people will ask of an unfamiliar word how it is written; in English this occurs somewhat too, but it seems to be a more prevalent feature in Japanese.
Really, although the prospect of 2000+ kanji is quite daunting to people when they're starting out, once you have them as a solid base they make new vocabulary acquisition so much easier. It's wonderful.
That's an interesting thought, but the characters in question have a long, long history in the Japanese language. The summary can sound misleading, but these are not new words to anyone but the list-makers: by and large, they're words like "key", "curse", "depression", "pot", and a particularly manly but common-as-dirt way of saying "I". Really, the list still excludes plenty of characters used every day, while including some quite rare ones, too.
I must admit to a certain level of ignorance here, but how many new characters are being created in China? Not considering the simplification of the character set, of course.
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--are syllabic yet their forms are derived DIRECTLY from Chinese characters. Exactly what I was talking about.
In the case of Korean, I thought characters weren't used frequently anymore. I don't know if there are direct analogs between the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters, but the influence is clear.
I don't know that any of them are used currently, but I also remember that some northern Chinese "barbarian" groups in history used Chinese character-derived scripts.
The Latin Alphabet is most used, followed by Ara
but how many new characters are being created
Practically none. In Chinese, usually two (the most common case), three, or more characters form a word, which is equivalent to an English word. Chinese words are still being created by combining different characters. But new characters themselves are extremely rare nowadays as existing characters are already much more than necessary.