"The 1976 Copyright Act, as amended in 1999, authorizes statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed in cases of willful infringement and from $750 up to $30,000 in cases of non-willful infringement."
Google is making copies, they are possibly illegal. Doesn't matter the license they thought they had, they can still be held responsible up $30,000 a copy.
I'm no sinologist, but wikipedia seems to suggest that Classical Chinese did reflect spoken Chinese at least to some degree, and that what you're referring to would more properly be called Literary Chinese.
I don't remember where I read this, but I remember reading in a book years ago that Classical Chinese had a lot more phonemes and tones compared to modern Mandarin, which made the 'one word one syllable' thing practical in the spoken language. It's the loss of this variety that has made modern spoken Chinese polysyllabic.
If by "had worked for us for centuries" you mean "had been used for a handful of short inscriptions", yeah.
You mean a handful of short inscriptions that managed to survive. Also, the Rune Poem is hardly short enough to be called an "inscription", and "Solomon and Saturn" is 550 lines long.
It's hard to call a writing system a success when the society that used it was not literate.
?!?!? The average Greek and Roman was illiterate, too. By that logic I suppose their writing systems were a flop as well!
Anyways, you do realize that the point was that the Roman alphabet was not designed for (or very well suited to) English, but we've made perfectly good use of it anyways, right? Not that anyone was trying to promote runes as a system to supplant it, right? And further, that if English could hack its way around the Roman alphabet, it's not unreasonable that the Japanese could hack their way around a QWERTY keyboard (which they have managed to do).
I never claimed everyone could write all 2000-or-so jouyou kanji--that's you putting words in my mouth. You claimed:
And how many jouyou kanji does the average person actually know - maybe 500? They can probably only read just north of 1000, too
which is laughably false. You couldn't function in this country if you could barely recognize 1000 kanji (unless you're an English teacher or southeastasian hostess).
As for "kani", I also never claimed that the kanji was universally used, only that it was in common use. I'd be shocked if there were many people who didn't recognize it on sight. There are an awful lot of Japanese people in Yokohama, I've heard. Print out the kanji for "kani" and pretend like you don't know what it says. Ask around and see how many adults honestly can't tell you.
Then the onus is on you to show us where the figures are wrong.
And if you somehow prove that the literacy rate is "really" only 97%---what have you actually proved?
I see no Japanese people struggling with reading here. I only started to read Japanese when I was 18, and I manage to make my way through the papers, usually without a dictionary these days. I never took Japanese in college, either---it was all on my own, with the occasional private tutor. Are you seriously going to tell me that my half-assed reading skills are superior to those of native speakers who had a good decade-and-a-half head start on me (and a high level of command of the language by the time they even started to learn to read)?
Well, I don't read a lot of comic books (actually, that's a lie---I read a lot of Western comics), so I won't claim to know the details of the web-comics industry here (nor do I care, honestly).
Paper books, however, are plentiful---tons of bookstores, new and used, well-stocked libraries. And most importantly, I actually see people reading every day. Y'know, books, the ones without pictures.
The illiteracy in Japan meme is a myth. I have yet to meet someone who honestly can't handle a newspaper.
The only Japanese comic I read these days is Jin. No ruby there.
And teh fact that you don't read the papers doesn't invalidate that millions of people do. And I've never heard of an illiteracy problem localized to Yokohama. And it's certainly not a Shizuoka thing, as I spent 6 years commuting to monthly meetings in Nagoya and never ran across anything resembling an illiteracy problem.
You'll also notice that I've said *I* can *write* more than 500 kanji---and when I still have to ask others to help me when I can't remember how to write one, and it's rare that the native Japanese hasn't been able to help me immediately (there may be the occasional false start, but English speakers have the same problem with their spelling).
Oh, and: kani kani kani kani kani
Would you like some more examples? It took me all of 2 minutes to find these and mark them up.
Sometimes I am wondering how the computing world would have looked like if the computer had been invented in Japan or in China, instead of in the US.
I imagine they would have designed something like APL rather than basing it on their own written language. It would certainly have been easier than flipping dipswitches and may have even caught on.
500 kanji? Surely you're trolling? Elementary school children know more than that before they even get to Junior High. I know *I* can write more than that, and I've never even taken a calligraphy class. You couldn't read a (post-adolescent) *comic book* with only 1000 kanji, let alone a newspaper. And I know this because I read the newspaper every day(the Shizuoka Shinbun), not because I heard it from some asshat in an internet forum.
I don't know the kanji for "bara", but I've definitely seen "kani" any number of times---not in texts, but definitely on signs and labels.
"Arigatou" is certainly not something you'd see in kanji in texts, but I've been mailed with the kanji any number of times (and you'll certainly see it in the form "arigatai"). I doubt there's a junior high school graduate in this country who doesn't know the kanji for that.
This is the first time I've heard "touch-typing" defined as not being allowed to look at the screen. If that's the case, then I can't touch-type in English, either.
Would you like to introduce any other hoops for us to jump through?
But the Japanese ebook market is already huge. In 2009 ebook sales in Japan totaled $600 million, more than triple the US sales, and without any Kindles!
So I don't know what your bizarre non-sequitur about digital sales was supposed to be about.
I'm not a native speaker, but I've been studying the language for almost 15 years.
If you put a text in Roman characters in front of a native Japanese speaker, they would most definitely find it much slower to read. Why? Because they're not used to it. I'm a native English speaker and *I* have a lot more trouble reading Japanese in Roman characters than I do in Kanji/Kana.
(I had a script I had to read out loud recently. It was given to me in Roman characters, because it was assumed that, as a foreigner, it would be easier for me to read. I couldn't get through it without making mistakes every paragraph. I retyped it in Kanji/Kana and the only problem that remained was my funny accent.)
In order to compare the two, you'd have to have a Japanese speaker who had made a habit of reading in Roman characters. Then you could find out which was faster/more efficient.
And we only use the Roman alphabet for English because it was a widespread standard, even though we already had a functioning writing system that suited Englisc better had worked for us for centuries (runes). We mangle the system with digraphs and multiple sounds for many of the characters (especially the vowels). It's a hack. We've made do.
Sure, Chinese and Japanese do the 'one word one character' thing, but they also end up with like 3 character sets and a substantial additional amount of work learning said additional characters.
You're a bit confused---Classical Chinese had the 'one word one character' thing, and Japanese has three character sets (five if you include Arabic numerals and the extensive use of the Roman alphabet).
Book sales are amongst the highest in the world, and Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. The extra time spent reading in school must be paying off for the Japanese.
Proof of this is the fact that the number of standard characters (Jouyou kanji) has been increased twice: once in 1981 (from 1850 to 1945), and again in 2009 (to 2136). And there are many non-standard kanji that are in common use (the kanji for ichigo "strawberry"and kani "crab" are two that come immediately to mind).
We don't actually need to write English the way it was pronounced centuries ago. But see how far you get in life trying to spell everything as pronounced.
You actually need all three character sets to function in Japanese society today. Keep in mind that Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. Think the Japanese are willing to go back to an oral society? I live here. They put a lot of emphasis on written communication---and even talk about the written characters in speech when clarifying something they've said that may have been ambiguous when spoken. (I'd love to give some examples, but/. is ASCII-only)
Besides, we were talking about character input, not the appropriateness of the Japanese writing system. Typing Japanese is easy, even on Western keyboards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about disagreeing with you. It's about your inability to comprehend what you have read.
What has upset you so much that you felt the need to post a criticism of teaching languages when the topic's about (natural) language teaching?
"Language Teaching", buddy, not "Teaching Language".
You know, as in for learning French, Japanese, Arabic. Spoken language, not computer language.
So what's your software solution to the first three?
Whoops!
That shoulda been a Page class and an Ellison class inheriting from a Larry class.
Surprised everyone jumped on that rather than on the fact that there's no Larry Brin.
This is where polymorphism comes in:
class Larry (){
public String go_fuck_yourself() {
"Self fucked."
}
}
public static void main (String[] args){
Larry ellison = new Larry();
Larry brin = new Larry();
ellison.go_fuck_yourself();
brin.go_fuck_yourself();
}
Google is still distributing illegal copies.
"The 1976 Copyright Act, as amended in 1999, authorizes statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed in cases of willful infringement and from $750 up to $30,000 in cases of non-willful infringement."
Google is making copies, they are possibly illegal. Doesn't matter the license they thought they had, they can still be held responsible up $30,000 a copy.
Is "worked infringed" the same as "copy"?
They have suspend/resume now?
I guess this will be the Year of the OpenBSD Netbook!!
In the case of copying text like that, I suppose. Not something I've found myself doing, though.
Any more hoops?
I'm no sinologist, but wikipedia seems to suggest that Classical Chinese did reflect spoken Chinese at least to some degree, and that what you're referring to would more properly be called Literary Chinese.
I don't remember where I read this, but I remember reading in a book years ago that Classical Chinese had a lot more phonemes and tones compared to modern Mandarin, which made the 'one word one syllable' thing practical in the spoken language. It's the loss of this variety that has made modern spoken Chinese polysyllabic.
If by "had worked for us for centuries" you mean "had been used for a handful of short inscriptions", yeah.
You mean a handful of short inscriptions that managed to survive. Also, the Rune Poem is hardly short enough to be called an "inscription", and "Solomon and Saturn" is 550 lines long.
It's hard to call a writing system a success when the society that used it was not literate.
?!?!? The average Greek and Roman was illiterate, too. By that logic I suppose their writing systems were a flop as well!
Anyways, you do realize that the point was that the Roman alphabet was not designed for (or very well suited to) English, but we've made perfectly good use of it anyways, right? Not that anyone was trying to promote runes as a system to supplant it, right? And further, that if English could hack its way around the Roman alphabet, it's not unreasonable that the Japanese could hack their way around a QWERTY keyboard (which they have managed to do).
And how many jouyou kanji does the average person actually know - maybe 500? They can probably only read just north of 1000, too
which is laughably false. You couldn't function in this country if you could barely recognize 1000 kanji (unless you're an English teacher or southeastasian hostess).
As for "kani", I also never claimed that the kanji was universally used, only that it was in common use. I'd be shocked if there were many people who didn't recognize it on sight. There are an awful lot of Japanese people in Yokohama, I've heard. Print out the kanji for "kani" and pretend like you don't know what it says. Ask around and see how many adults honestly can't tell you.
Then the onus is on you to show us where the figures are wrong.
And if you somehow prove that the literacy rate is "really" only 97%---what have you actually proved?
I see no Japanese people struggling with reading here. I only started to read Japanese when I was 18, and I manage to make my way through the papers, usually without a dictionary these days. I never took Japanese in college, either---it was all on my own, with the occasional private tutor. Are you seriously going to tell me that my half-assed reading skills are superior to those of native speakers who had a good decade-and-a-half head start on me (and a high level of command of the language by the time they even started to learn to read)?
Well, I don't read a lot of comic books (actually, that's a lie---I read a lot of Western comics), so I won't claim to know the details of the web-comics industry here (nor do I care, honestly).
Paper books, however, are plentiful---tons of bookstores, new and used, well-stocked libraries. And most importantly, I actually see people reading every day. Y'know, books, the ones without pictures.
The illiteracy in Japan meme is a myth. I have yet to meet someone who honestly can't handle a newspaper.
The only Japanese comic I read these days is Jin. No ruby there.
And teh fact that you don't read the papers doesn't invalidate that millions of people do. And I've never heard of an illiteracy problem localized to Yokohama. And it's certainly not a Shizuoka thing, as I spent 6 years commuting to monthly meetings in Nagoya and never ran across anything resembling an illiteracy problem.
You'll also notice that I've said *I* can *write* more than 500 kanji---and when I still have to ask others to help me when I can't remember how to write one, and it's rare that the native Japanese hasn't been able to help me immediately (there may be the occasional false start, but English speakers have the same problem with their spelling).
Oh, and:
kani
kani
kani
kani
kani
Would you like some more examples? It took me all of 2 minutes to find these and mark them up.
Sometimes I am wondering how the computing world would have looked like if the computer had been invented in Japan or in China, instead of in the US.
I imagine they would have designed something like APL rather than basing it on their own written language. It would certainly have been easier than flipping dipswitches and may have even caught on.
500 kanji? Surely you're trolling? Elementary school children know more than that before they even get to Junior High. I know *I* can write more than that, and I've never even taken a calligraphy class. You couldn't read a (post-adolescent) *comic book* with only 1000 kanji, let alone a newspaper. And I know this because I read the newspaper every day(the Shizuoka Shinbun), not because I heard it from some asshat in an internet forum.
I don't know the kanji for "bara", but I've definitely seen "kani" any number of times---not in texts, but definitely on signs and labels.
"Arigatou" is certainly not something you'd see in kanji in texts, but I've been mailed with the kanji any number of times (and you'll certainly see it in the form "arigatai"). I doubt there's a junior high school graduate in this country who doesn't know the kanji for that.
This is the first time I've heard "touch-typing" defined as not being allowed to look at the screen. If that's the case, then I can't touch-type in English, either.
Would you like to introduce any other hoops for us to jump through?
Nobody pushed our newspaper subscription us us. We went out and got it ourselves.
According to this guy:
But the Japanese ebook market is already huge. In 2009 ebook sales in Japan totaled $600 million, more than triple the US sales, and without any Kindles!
So I don't know what your bizarre non-sequitur about digital sales was supposed to be about.
I'm not a native speaker, but I've been studying the language for almost 15 years.
If you put a text in Roman characters in front of a native Japanese speaker, they would most definitely find it much slower to read. Why? Because they're not used to it. I'm a native English speaker and *I* have a lot more trouble reading Japanese in Roman characters than I do in Kanji/Kana.
(I had a script I had to read out loud recently. It was given to me in Roman characters, because it was assumed that, as a foreigner, it would be easier for me to read. I couldn't get through it without making mistakes every paragraph. I retyped it in Kanji/Kana and the only problem that remained was my funny accent.)
In order to compare the two, you'd have to have a Japanese speaker who had made a habit of reading in Roman characters. Then you could find out which was faster/more efficient.
And we only use the Roman alphabet for English because it was a widespread standard, even though we already had a functioning writing system that suited Englisc better had worked for us for centuries (runes). We mangle the system with digraphs and multiple sounds for many of the characters (especially the vowels). It's a hack. We've made do.
**PSST!**
I think he was emphasizing "the act of reading" rather than "your descriptions" as being laborious.
Sometimes it helps to finish reading someone's post before responding to it.
Sure, Chinese and Japanese do the 'one word one character' thing, but they also end up with like 3 character sets and a substantial additional amount of work learning said additional characters.
You're a bit confused---Classical Chinese had the 'one word one character' thing, and Japanese has three character sets (five if you include Arabic numerals and the extensive use of the Roman alphabet).
Book sales are amongst the highest in the world, and Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. The extra time spent reading in school must be paying off for the Japanese.
Suffer what fate?
Being forced to continue to used a standard QWERTY keyboard?!
Proof of this is the fact that the number of standard characters (Jouyou kanji) has been increased twice: once in 1981 (from 1850 to 1945), and again in 2009 (to 2136). And there are many non-standard kanji that are in common use (the kanji for ichigo "strawberry"and kani "crab" are two that come immediately to mind).
We don't actually need to write English the way it was pronounced centuries ago. But see how far you get in life trying to spell everything as pronounced.
/. is ASCII-only)
You actually need all three character sets to function in Japanese society today. Keep in mind that Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. Think the Japanese are willing to go back to an oral society? I live here. They put a lot of emphasis on written communication---and even talk about the written characters in speech when clarifying something they've said that may have been ambiguous when spoken. (I'd love to give some examples, but
Besides, we were talking about character input, not the appropriateness of the Japanese writing system. Typing Japanese is easy, even on Western keyboards.