
Japanese writing system basics - bemmu
https://www.candyjapan.com/%E5%8F%A3
======
viraptor
This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took
me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm
supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.

~~~
cynix
It's not exactly a rectangle though, the two downward strokes extend slightly
past the bottom horizontal stroke.

~~~
viraptor
Not on my screen
([http://i.imgur.com/korTPAQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/korTPAQ.png))

Maybe it is a missing character after all :) (Oh no, I've been fooled by
chrome/freetype/something!)

~~~
cynix
I see, it is indeed showing a missing character symbol on your computer. The
actual character is much more square than that, in addition to the strokes I
mentioned. ([http://i.imgur.com/s6bW7u0.png](http://i.imgur.com/s6bW7u0.png))

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imron
In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí.

As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your
favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that
character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.

~~~
matthewrudy
Japanese use of Kanji is usually more similar to Cantonese (Cantonese is a
much older language than modern Mandarin)

So in Mandarin you wouldn't find people using 食 as a verb, but in cantonese it
is the correct verb.

In Cantonese it's pronounced something like "sekk"

("sihk" in Yale romanisation, but I think if you're not familiar with Yale
you'd try and read that "sick" or "sikh")

Edit: "sikh"

~~~
binaryabyss
Not to mention that Mandarin would use 嘴（里）rather than 口

The pronunciations of kanji correlate to different Chinese eras and areas.

The usage and choice of characters are influenced by Classical Chinese, which
was the literary language in Japan until, uhm, recently-ish.

There is a very good recent YouTube video that explains the usage of Chinese
characters in Japanese and which I recommend to anyone interested in the
subject:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3MRMBjd20)

I was very impressed by the accuracy and knowledge displayed, as most of what
is written and said on the subject is ehhh somewhat disappointing.

~~~
matthewrudy
I've never learned Japanese, nor spent much time there.

From my brother who studied Japanese for a while, the Kanji was a real blocker
for him. So I did wonder what it'd be like, given I already know a good amount
of Chinese characters.

I guess this video answers that question:

Even more confusing.

------
primitivesuave
Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex
words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese
word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the
second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an
electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three
symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" \- one who orders rules.

An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000
symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the
meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of
Latin/Greek roots.

~~~
unfamiliar
> you only need to learn around 3000 symbols

This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even
then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper
you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you
also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols
for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write.

Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is
an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an
alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and
think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence
of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer,
politician, etc).

~~~
ddeck
_> It's a hugely inefficient way to write._

Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser:

 _" I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese
Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I
happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a
friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how
to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three
friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them
simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly
produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the
"Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard
forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"_

Regarding the grandparent's point of joining characters, my favorite has
always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.

[1] Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
[http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)

~~~
bsdetector
> my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.

Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language,
which is why it doesn't make much sense.

The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you
have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize
forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound
word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have
thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts
lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and
complicated alphabet.

Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but
the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the
Chinese language worse.

------
anqurvanillapy
In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在
(zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'.

It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗?
(Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought
this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.

~~~
geomark
Same in Thai. They ask กินข้าวหรือยัง ("Have you eaten yet?", or literally
"Have you eaten rice yet?") as a greeting.

~~~
dghughes
That reminds me that sometimes in my family we'll jokingly say jeet? It comew
from the comedian Jeff Foxworthy who said it's redneck for "Did you eat? "

I'm in Canada and not redneck I wonder if jeet is actually used in the US.

~~~
dsr_
My father's native New-Jerseyan uses "jeet jet" for "did you eat yet".

The one bit of that I consistently use is "agnishna", for "air conditioner".

~~~
fenomas
I recently found a list of these for Scottish that were amazing.

E.g.: "space ghettos" (in standard American accent) becomes Scottish "Spice
Girls" :D

------
euske
Yeah yeah, this all makes sense until you see 品, which isn't "a three-mouthed
monster" but "goods".

Languages are weird, man.

~~~
ju-st
I interpret that character as "three boxes" so "goods" is a very intuitive
translation :)

~~~
throwanem
Yeah, I'm not sure what world you have to live in for "three-mouthed monster"
to be a more obvious meaning for that glyph than "stacked crates".

But I think I might like to visit.

~~~
cheiVia0
I see you haven't gotten to the 4th paragraph of TFA...

"口" = mouth, not crate

"品" is a stack of mouth characters

~~~
throwanem
I read the whole article, thanks. Do you think it's possible that more than
one square or rectangular thing may exist?

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andreygrehov
I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost
the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was
quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食).

Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

~~~
zorceta
It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern
Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is
exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't.

Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the
sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But
modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to
distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It
should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.

~~~
0xfaded
Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native
Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think
we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different
simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both
languages the original logic has been lost.

I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortunate
how much of the meaning was lost with the Chinese simplification. I can mostly
make out Taiwanese/Republic of China newspapers, but can see nothing in the
simplified characters.

Edit: Yay, I'm wrong, see below. Thank you internet.

~~~
Zarel
Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented
(most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese).

On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café).

The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the
simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with
the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.

~~~
prewett
The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones
are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气
doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at
least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem
to have kept the artistic flavor.

~~~
FabHK
Agreed.

Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of
stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for
simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent.

(As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further
inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part
of a character, while the traditional writing maintained it. Example: 金 gold
is the left part of money, which you can see in the traditional 錢, but not in
the simplified 钱. Similarly 言 in traditional 說 vs simplified 说.)

~~~
prewett
Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found
that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing
shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/",
I'm guessing.

~~~
FabHK
Prewett - true. But then, why make it "simple" but ugly for _printing_? It's
absurd... just keep the complex form in books and reading printed text, and
tolerate what people are writing out by hand in cursive. That's distinct
anyway. It's as if we'd "simplify" the "-ing" at the end of words to some
wiggle with a dot and a loop in printed matter.

------
Sniffnoy
Not sure how great an explanation that really is. I like Zompist's
explanation:
[http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm](http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm)

~~~
bemmu
That certainly looks more complete. I was mostly wanting to see if I can pull
the reader into learning Japanese without realizing that they were doing so.

~~~
HaloZero
Your domain was a bit of a hint. ^_^

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zatkin
Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis?
They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them,
nonetheless. ‍️

~~~
alannallama
That's why you see services with lots of pictographic functions eclipse pure
test-based ones in Asia, because they are very used to that kind of symbolic
communication. And why complex emoji using text characters in creative ways
were developed in Asia in the first place.

For example, Twitter never really took off in southeast Asia, but Line is
incredibly popular. Why? Stickers. Line offers endless little pictures you can
use with your messages, while Twitter doesn't.

Now stickers (and emoji) are taking off a lot more in the West, because they
are super compact and effective communication symbols. I think we'll see more
and more of it.

------
rett12
Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a
Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study
past a beginner level any logographic language.

~~~
gizmo686
I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was
a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become
literate.

I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which
does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English,
and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of
characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c').

Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a
modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that.

The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause
spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.

~~~
jacobolus
> _I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for
> Japanese,_ [...]

You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence

* * *

As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty
ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re
stuck with it.

Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning
arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the
symmetries of the number system. Alas.

~~~
gizmo686
Removed the "do not"

As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All
symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our
usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the
fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure"
alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the
ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and
are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to
be their own characters and not have a mess.

Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ
and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities
are not universal.

Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By
pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.

~~~
jacobolus
Here’s my proposal for base twelve numerals,
[http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg) ;
multiplication mod twelve,
[http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg)

It can also be nice to use a “balanced base”, with digits for negative
numbers, e.g. in a base ten context you’d have digits for –4 to 5 (or if
you’re willing to have multiple expressions for the same number, –5 to 5).

A balanced base twelve multiplication table might look like this:
[http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png](http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png)

------
dhfromkorea
Another interesting side-effect that the compactness of Chinese symbols (other
variations: Hanja in Korean, Kanji in Japanese and so forth) allowed was a
higher chance of survival against natural disasters like wild fires or crimes
like thefts or vandalism.

It was/is far easier to ensure redundancy of scripts and books since the costs
of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic
systems.

The compactness explains how so many archaic, buddhist scripts could survive
to this day.

~~~
dctoedt
A counterpoint: When a message is written with an alphabet, it's not as
compact, but its meaning can be guessed at even if significant portions of the
message are missing (known as lacunae). See, e.g., the TV game show _Wheel of
Fortune_ ; another example is the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient
manuscripts that have deteriorated over time.

~~~
dhfromkorea
That may be true. And perhaps the same argument could be made for Chinese
characters?

Could you elaborate on why the alphabetic system is intrinsically more
efficient than Chinese characters in terms of recovering messages from partial
loss of texts?

~~~
dctoedt
Spatial dispersal of the glyphs means that fewer glyphs would be taken out by
any given insect-gnawed hole, UV-radiation fading, hurled paint glob, etc.,
and thus less of the overall message would be lost to that single incident of
damage.

It's the same principle as how soldiers are trained to spread out when in
battle: If they bunch up, it increases the risk that a single mortar shell (or
artillery round or machine-gun burst) could take out a lot of troops.

~~~
dhfromkorea
Oh, now I see. Thank you for explaining your point succinctly.

Though I do not have data to back up my argument, I still reckon the Chinese
glyphs/scriptures would have had a better chance of survival.

While I think your point is valid, its disadvantages outweigh the advantage,
at least since paper/papyrus was invented.

Being spread out to double in length (double being an arbitrary multiplier)
would still be inferior to being dispersed to two physical locations
(redundancy). I think this is where don't put all your eggs in one basket
holds true.

Plus, important docs must have been actively maintained by hired
librarians(?). With human maintenance involved, less in volume could have been
an advantage for it is easier to move around and maintain the docs. Ofc, when
left out in the wild, it is a different story.

Personally I do not like Chinese character system as it has so high a barrier
to entry for learners. I love alphabets, Korean Hangeul, or Japanese
Hira/Katakana for this matter. Have you tried learning any of those? :-)

------
Grue3
入 means "enter", 口 means "mouth". 入口 means... "entrance". Actually for most
kanji there is no single meaning. Some meanings might even have nothing in
common with each other, because they've been based on ancient Chinese wordplay
or something.

~~~
colejohnson66
Entering the mouth of the building?

~~~
force_reboot
Almost certainly. One fascinating aspect of language is that many metaphors
that are baked into language appear in many languages. E.g. In English we can
form the future tense with modal verbs, "I will..." and "I am going to..." and
in Chinese there are similar modal verbs "我要..." and "我去...". In both
languages the idea of intention, or motion, are used as a metaphor in forming
the future tense. Or 加油, an expression of encouragement similar to "put your
foot on it" which has no equivalent in English, but does in Danish, "giv det
gas".

~~~
Symbiote
"Put your foot on it" means the accelerator / gas pedal, that seems very much
equivalent.

~~~
force_reboot
I mean in English it isn't used as a generic encouragement, while in Mandarin
and Danish it is.

------
daveheq
"Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce"... Not
with 26 letters we don't. Other languages have other sounds that English can
only try to emulate, and even English has sounds that require multiple
letters.

~~~
dsr_
Here are the 44 sounds that English generally uses:
[http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-
soundsipa.htm](http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc-soundsipa.htm)

It does not include sounds which are borrowed from other languages, like the
Hebrew 'ch' which happens at the top of your throat, or the Spanish trilled r,
or the glottal stop which actually occurs in spoken English all the time in
some dialects.

------
thaumasiotes
If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an
etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too?

If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal?

If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed?

Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily
the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go
beyond two symbols.

~~~
chewxy
That's because you're thinking in English. "Kingly" is a very English way of
thinking of things (as in king-like behaviour for example). In Chinese and
Japanese, there simply isn't a way to describe it as elegantly as in English

In Chinese it'd be 王道 (the tao of the King if translated directly to English),
which has a completely different connotation (it's more holistic in concept
(i.e. it has an overloaded meaning) when compared to "kingly" in English,
which has a more singular-use meaning).

"Royal" itself is an overloaded adjective in English. AFAIK there are no
adjectives in the east asian language that has the same semantic meaning as
"royal" \- The Japanese version would simply be 王の, which translate to
"belonging to the king", while the chinese version would be 王室的 or
王室之(belonging to the king's office(I guess you could say crown)[0]). Ditto
with "regal". There simply isn't any proper translation for the adjectives in
English.

Other than that, in Chinese, there is the concept of a radical, which can be
combined to inform the readers about the context it's used in. In Japanese, as
bemmu wrote, it'd be additional kanas to inform of context.

[0]Fun fact: 之 and の used to denote the same things up to about 300-ish years
ago I believe (timeline could be wrong). In Japanese 之 may be pronounced the
same as の. Either way, the Chinese and Japanese words are very much the same,
barring some minor kanji differences. Grammarwise, however, it's a completely
different language

~~~
gizmo686
>"Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things.

I'm not sure about that. Japanese has adjectival nouns (commonly referred to
as na-adjectives), and the 的 suffix.

Additionally, as you identify, the の particle also serves this function; but
you give it a much more restrive role that it actually has (as is typically in
English language Japanese learning material. In general, の marks the genitive
case, which simply means that the first noun modifies the following noun in
some way. It is often used to show possesion, but can also be used in a way
close to ~ly in English.

------
partycoder
The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than
that if you actually want to do something practical.

Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other
things.

~~~
cynix
Pretty sure you need to learn more than 2000 English words at a minimum too.
The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional arrangement
of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

~~~
mistercow
> The only difference is that instead of learning the 1-dimensional
> arrangement of letters, you learn the 2-dimensional arrangement of radicals.

Except that usually, almost nothing about the arrangement of strokes can be
inferred from the sound or meaning of the word, and vice versa.

~~~
mcguire
"Ghoti"

------
dghughes
I just discovered NativLang on YouTube so this really is in my zone of
interest today.

I've just spent the last few hours learning all about languages how they
developed and each culture's spin on adding as much meaning as efficiently as
possible to written symbols. I've always loved languages so this was more of a
brush up plus learning.

It seems and rightly so ambiguity is death to any characters and efficiency is
also fundamental to the character.

I'm not Korean but I like their style literally I like how their language
style is so efficient in context to mouth position. It was created because
Chinese characters didn't suit Korean language. Japan also streamlined Chinese
characters to better suit their culture.

Mayan is another wild language full of meaning in such compact symbols. I had
a hard time following their characters.

------
falcolas
Everything old is new again.

I have no , but I must ...

Edit: Nevermind, HN swallowed the Emojis.

~~~
thunderbong
Actually, without the emojis, it's even more intriguing!

------
paradite
This has the added advantaged of being recognized by both native Japaneses and
Chinese speakers instantly, as long as we keep it to kanji.

I recognized what the author is doing from the start as a Chinese speaker.

------
kevindeasis
How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?

~~~
donatj
Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is
phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The
IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would
save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

~~~
sdrothrock
> The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it
> would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

I don't think anyone does it kanji-by-kanji. In reality, it's really
autocomplete as it exists with English keyboards. You type the first few bits
in hiragana or romaji, then autosuggest comes up with commonly-used words and
you select the one you want.

In addition, hiragana input on mobile devices is FAR faster than romaji input,
so I'm not sure how you lose time.

~~~
fenomas
Yep, and add in that with swipe gestures, the hiragana keyboard only needs ~10
keys, making it much less fidgety to hit the keys on mobile.

Typing Japanese on mobile phones is pretty fast and painless. Easier than
English on a regular keyboard, though not quite as fast as English "swipe"
style input (whatever the term for that is?).

------
rezashirazian
That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with
emojis.

~~~
labster
Exactly. Although the Japanese realized that the emoji are moji a long time
ago.

------
andrezsanchez
I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese
characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some
could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the
characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese.

Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way
that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different
pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different
languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters
specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool.

The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.

------
Joof
Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two
separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a
perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is
an English style alphabet.

~~~
akavi
Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work?

Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though
if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent
_might_ be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic
weight).

~~~
rett12
It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking
with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's
said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what
character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in
Chinese pinyin.

For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう:
[http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kan...](http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kanji)

Try to do that with tones.

~~~
akavi
Why do you have less context in writing than in speech?

I'd be willing to bet heavily that the vast majority of those "homophones" are
primarily writing-only, domain specific or archaic "shorthands", which are
referred to in speech with slightly more verbose alternatives. Switching to a
non-character based system would admittedly in that case mean some domain
specific writing would be slightly less compact, but that seems a reasonable
tradeoff given the unwieldiness of the current writing system.

~~~
fenomas
> I'd be willing to bet heavily that ...

You'd lose your bet. In that "shuu" link as an example, most (10-12 or so) are
common enough that you might hear them in a typical newscast, with that
pronunciation.

What makes things manageable is the combinatorics. E.g. there are dozens of
kanji read "shuu", and many dozens more read "kan", but most of them are only
read that way when part of a 2-character compound, and only a small subset of
the possible "shuukan"s are words, and only a subset of those words are common
in spoken conversation.

Even then, it is a very homophone-heavy language. I can think of four
"shuukan"s off the top of my head that you might hear from a newsreader; it
would only be after those that you'd get into domain-specific words. This is
pretty typical.

------
frostymarvelous
After viewing this a couple of hours ago, ads for Candy Japan are popping up
for me on Facebook.

~~~
andrewaylett
If you don't like that, you might find Privacy Badger useful:
[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

------
nxzero
>> "Since we already have symbols for all the sounds we can pronounce [in
English]"

English has 26 letters, but there are 40+ sounds; which is to say that there
are NOT symbols for all the sounds.

~~~
mcguire
One of my goals in life is to introduce Khoisan words into common English use.
We need more clicks.

------
codedokode
The problem is that many characters look similar but have nothing in common.
For example, the article mentions the character 食 meaning "food". So when
after reading the article you see similar character like 良 you might think it
is somehow related to food. Well, it is not, it just means "good". And another
similar character 長 meaning "long" or "leader" also has no relation to
previous two.

And when you get to more complicated characters like 感 it becomes even more
confusing.

------
OOPMan
"The English alphabet has only 26 letters, which most kids can master with
little difficulty. But we are adults now, why limit ourselves to the 26?"

Less is more. Why waste time learning 2k pictograms (Just for the standard
stuff, there's over 50k in total) when you can achieve the same thing with
less?

------
sideproject
Really like the live streaming of Google Analytics at the bottom. :) Now I
have an idea how much traffic you receive when you reach the #1 spot on HN on
the weekend.

~~~
joeyspn
Yeah, nice insights! Direct Link to the stream:
[https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu](https://www.twitch.tv/bemmu)

------
drwicked
I'm kindof fascinated by the idea of livestreaming the pageview statistics. I
had a surreal moment realizing the weird recursion. Is this something people
do now?

~~~
comboy
After the wave of web counters in 90s, there were some services that offered
"number of users online" (visits during the last few minutes, because doing
CGI for that was not that easy).

Looks like we are now using a few more bytes to provide that information ;)

It's a cool idea though, I wish GA provided a public link to the stats you
could share. Instead you need to ask people to provide their google account
e-mail so that you can add them.

------
danielrhodes
I'm interested in how this compactness changes the expressiveness and
evolution of the language. In English, as in other languages written in the
latin alphabet, you can make changes to the spelling of a word and create new
meanings rather fluidly and it's usually easy for the reader to comprehend. I
have no knowledge of Japanese, but are there similar possibilities? How do new
words/slang get created?

~~~
kailuowang
Yes Chinese characters (used in Japanese as kanji, which means Chinese
character) often are composed of smaller elements or other characters. it
common for a character to be composed of two common parts,one indicating
meaning in some way,the other indicating pronunciation.

~~~
ryao
Someone made a video showing how this is the case for some characters:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA)

The entire character set is not that simple though.

------
giancarlostoro
Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only
have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'.
Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system
in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is
similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.

~~~
azernik
This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto-
Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent
vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system
was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their
meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the
sounds. Similar to the origins of the Japanese kana system, but NOT its use of
kanji.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I'm not following you too much, I'm not saying it is like Hebrew modern or
paleo. I'm saying it's like Ancient Pictographic Hebrew[0]. Each character has
a meaning, and they're simpler than the second character shown in the article
to register (though in their defense that character is likely made up of
variations of a couple of other characters). Also, the Hebrew didn't have
vowels up until the Masoretes who added to the Hebrew Scriptures by adding
vowels to them, but that's another topic not related to this topic.

[0]: [http://ancient-hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif](http://ancient-
hebrew.org/files/alphabet_chart.gif)

------
fogleman
That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?

~~~
bemmu
I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?)
people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here:
[http://eepurl.com/ccistz](http://eepurl.com/ccistz)

~~~
comboy
Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the
risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views
just from the current wave.

~~~
bemmu
It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I
start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before
it's finished.

Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another
article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the
comments or another article. I know I do.

Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I removed the sign-up
link from the post.

~~~
comboy
FWIW I'm very likely to check out the second part, but completely unlikely to
fill out the form that you provided. Not sure it's rational, but my guess is
that others can feel the same.

------
ryao
口 and 食 are also Chinese characters for mouth and eat, although I had to check
google for 食. Initially, I thought that he was teaching Chinese until I read 食
was eat (which needed Google) and that it was "Japanese".

~~~
kailuowang
As mentioned below, 食in Cantonese or ancient Chinese means eat as a verb

------
wch4999
Well, reading the first part I just realized this is japanese/chinese! In
Chinese all characters are like 口 or 食. Sometimes we can also break the
character down to several parts to understand its meaning.

------
sova
As someone who has spent years of their life dedicated to mastering Japanese,
I must say, you sir are a genius.

By the way, I'm happy your site is rockin! I saw it when you launched
candyjapan and I am happy for you =)

------
dingo_bat
Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are
they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about
candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.

~~~
pcr0
Japan isn't famous for candies per se but they do have a lot of very
interesting/sometimes bizarre treats that you won't find anywhere else in the
world.

E.g. Yuzu KitKat, chilli KitKat, caramel lamb, chocolate squid, coffee
bubblegum, caramel chips, cake soda, DIY candy, etc.

~~~
mistercow
I'd say rather that Japan is famous for its candies for different reasons than
Switzerland is for its chocolate. It's not that Japanese candy is of
outstanding quality (although it is often quite good), but that they use candy
as a vehicle for such a wide variety of novelty products.

------
raverbashing
About Japanese writing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY)

------
alecsmart1
This is off topic, but I can't find any pricing on the candyjapan.com website
when visiting on mobile (iPhone). Anyone can tell me how much it costs per
month?

~~~
throwanem
$25 per month according to the top of the page. But yeah, that's not visible
anywhere in the narrower of the responsive views; it's not just mobile, but if
you narrow the window on desktop, you get the same result. I'll email bemmu
and point that out.

------
haddr
This article is cool, I love the way is actually encourages to learn something
by starting with something simple that you can grasp in seconds.

I was like (｡◕口◕｡)!!!

------
bootload
@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

~~~
ggreer
It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi",
"guchi", or "kou".

That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection
between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic
alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature.

Still, that was a fun post to read.

~~~
Gigablah
Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on
font: ロ

~~~
tasnent
But there's usually context given.

------
seanmcdirmid
囧

~~~
et-al
For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong)

btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?

~~~
fenomas
Totally thought that was supposed to be a 3.5" floppy disk.

------
billmalarky
Love the live video analytics! Such a simple yet effective hack.

------
BlakePetersen
That path tho, /%E5%8F%A3 rendering as /口, so slick

------
smnplk
I'm struggling to find a comment that is actually related to the story of
CandyJapan and not that character.

------
fiatjaf
Can I believe this? Does Japanese really mix characters that mean things with
characters that mean sounds?

~~~
kd5bjo
It does. Kanji represent meaning; hiragana and katakana both represent
punctuation.

------
ChuckMcM
Ok, thats a fun hack.

~~~
biot
A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :)

I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign
language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then
kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written
in the foreign language.

~~~
gleenn
What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn
Japanese.

~~~
foota
Very interested to know as well.

~~~
biot
I'm not sure. It might even have been an idea I had years ago and am
misremembering as an actual thing. Either way, I'd buy those kinds of books,
so someone please start writing them. :)

~~~
whiteandnerdy
Maybe you're thinking of
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-
langua...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1405842914/learn-languages-
through-stories)? That's all I could find by googling around.

------
itaysk
why is this post getting so many voteups?

~~~
mcguire
Because it is a brilliant introduction to a difficult foreign language, for
most of us.

~~~
itaysk
The essence of the post is "In Japanese there are characters that represent
words". Is that a surprise to anyone? (I don't speak Japanese or any similar
language)

------
weinzierl
Flagged for moderator attention: The link of the article just goes back to
this page on HN. Is this an error or did I miss the joke?

Other articles are fine. Reload, clear cache and reload didn't help.

EDIT: Unflagged and sorry for the noise. I clicked on the article's domain and
not on the article's title (口) just as fenomas suspected.

~~~
fenomas
Make sure you're clicking on the article's title (口) and not on the article's
domain, which comes right afterwards. Clicking on the domain takes you to a
list of past submissions from the same site.

For a title like this one it's pretty confusing. I'm guessing you and I aren't
the only ones to misclick.

~~~
weinzierl
I feel dumb:-). That's it, thanks a lot.

~~~
mcguire
Modern computing has transformed intellectual activity into an exercise in
eye-hand coordination.

------
monomaniar
Nobody said these are all Chinese letter? Japanese is "invented" and forced
educated by Meiji government one hundred years ago.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration)

------
disruptalot
Finding it surprising no one has corrected the article in that you technically
learned Chinese and by proxy Japanese. Chinese traditional characters +
meanings largely carried over from Chinese as well. I'm studying mandarin and
i was enjoying it until I was told I just learned "Japanese".

