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!)"
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.
Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
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.
Not really, Kanji have "ON" and "KUN" readings. One is for full words, others is to mix with other kanjis and make other words. Forgot which is which, but in many cases kanji can serve the same use as kana.
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.
Characters do not necessarily map one-to-one to phonemes. For instance there are 12 vowels in English, but these are represented with only 5 characters.
"These nails taste irony."
Not quite. Yes, kanji have meaning where katakana and hiragana do not. However, each kanji can have multiple meanings and pronunciation which is only known through context or what other characters follow it. For example, the website here (http://www.saiga-jp.com/kanji_dictionary.html) has a lot of kanji with different meanings and readings. They aren't quite unique words, but they aren't characters only. They're more of a hybrid.
Also, depending on context, the pronunciation of a word might be the same, but the spelling could be different. For example, the word "kami" can mean "God" or "paper". Both sound the same, but each has its own kanji character. So as for your statement that spelling is unrelated to pronunciation is somewhat incorrect.
-SaNo
Also, depending on context, the pronunciation of a word might be the same, but the spelling could be different. For example, the word "kami" can mean "God" or "paper". Both sound the same, but each has its own kanji character. So as for your statement that spelling is unrelated to pronunciation is somewhat incorrect.
Uh...didn't you just actually show how pronunciation is unrelated to spelling?
To be pedantic, Hiragana and Katakana glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables.
To be extra pedantic, they're not necessarily syllables, but morae.
For example, "o" is a one-mora syllable on it's own, whereas "oo" is also one syllable, but containing two morae (two beats to one syllable). "Oto" would then be both two morae and two syllables.
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.
"KUN" is the Japanese reading, "ON" is the Chinese reading of the kanji. Originally, all kanji came from Chinese characters. As the Japanese adopted the characters, they would often add their own reading to each character (because the sounds of the Japanese language tend to be quite different from those in Chinese). They also adjusted the use of each character, so usually a character in Japanese doesn't have the same meaning as the character it is based on in Chinese.
Usually (but now always) the Japanese "KUN" reading is used in words involving one kanji and some kana (such as atatakai where 'atata' is the kanji and 'kai' is written with hiragana). The same character, atata, could also be used in a compound word like onsen (hot spring) where 'on' is the same character as used in atatakai and 'sen' is another kanji, both using the Chinese "ON" reading.
There can also be multiple ON and KUN readings for a single kanji--the reading would depend on the word in which the kanji is used (or it can be completely arbitrary and have the same meaning with different readings, such as the different generic ways of saying 'one').
You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Chinese_reading.29
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/
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.