Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?
> Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?
It's definitely blurry, because as the price escalates companies will want a human in the relationship for multiple reasons: price discrimination / market segmentation, onboarding (perhaps with professional service for configuration) to make sure you get bedded in and don't quit early, product management conversations to inform feature development, temperature checks to get early warning signs of churn, etc.
If we are including ready-made B2B products, your high score will probably come from some obscure semiconductor, healthcare, banking, insurance or logistics vendor. Much of the cost is then about consulting & configuring more than any specific code pile.
Top of my mind right now would be the EDA tools used by semiconductor designers.
> I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean.
Me too! Nice to talk with someone with a similar background :)
> you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.
Native speakers don't magically gain the ability to read correctly every new word. So it is fine to hit the dictionary every now and then!
In the case of 仲人, I can guessimate 仲 (naka) and 人 (hito), but recall that 素人 and 玄人 are pronouced <long vowel>~uto. I would try to pronounce it as nakouto (the correct spelling is nakoudo). So people do gain a heuristic for reading.
Also Kanji provides a mnemonic device after learning the meaning of the word. (One who makes/improves 仲).
>So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.
> One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?
Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it.
> Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read.
It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often.
> Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.
I'd agree that manga use of furigana helps (perhaps school-aged readers) reading, but furigana in novels are standard tools in the language that authors can use to achieve some effects that is hard to describe to non-speakers.
Sometimes furigana can be used artistically,sure, but that's the exception to the rule and it's by and large a reading aide in the vast majority of cases, and the inclusion of it in novels aimed at adults indicates that without it the author expects a certain percentage of readers may struggle with how to read the Kanji otherwise.
Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji you at times otherwise wouldn't be able to.
If you come across a word you don't know as either a native speaker of English or Korean, you can at least sound it out, which ups the probability you can connect it with a word you've heard before, otherwise since you know how to type it out it's trivial to look it up in a dictionary. If you come across a word you don't know in Japanese as a native speaker and there's no furigana it's a guessing game. The meaning is slightly more obvious to you, so you might be able to guess, but if you can't guess and you care to know and the word is in print then looking it up becomes a bit more of a pain.
Korean didn't completely lose the mutual intelligibility aspect entirely since the underlying pronunciation of the words still remains and can be used to correctly guess the word in a lot of cases. Like 시간 and 時間 as an example, but there's many, many words I've been able to guess in Korean based off knowing Japanese. I was able to score 50% on TOPIK II reading exam after only having studied Korean for 4 months in large part because of this.
> Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji
This just isn't true. Even most native JP speakers agree that kanji are oppressively hard to learn and remember, so if it were feasible to get by with kana alone, then at least some native speakers would do it in some contexts. But outside of language learning it's virtually never done, and there's a reason for that.
Also, I think you're overlooking that Chinese and Korean have a lot more vowels/tones to work with than Japanese. There are a lot of Chinese-derived compound words that are homophones in Japanese but not elsewhere.
"Science" and "chemistry" are homophones in Japanese: We have special disambiguation reading for "chemistry", bake gaku, used only when misunderstanding is suspected.
There are numerous other examples. Those are all unnatural sounding, mostly industry/field specific, and not replacing the main homophone readings.
That's a better argument :) I'd also like to add that prisoners in the USA lose their voting rights. However, the argument was initially about Taiwan, not about the USA.
China has 18 border disputes and has been encroaching on India. Don’t try make the claim it hasn’t waged war when it is.
It also enslaves an entire ethnic group. Highest executions. Almost 100% conviction rate. Has undercover police operations all around the world pretending to be Chinese cultural or help centers for Chinese people.
> a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations
Based on the definition of war. China has engaged in war multiple times. And is actively in no less than 18 border disputes with conflicts with Philippines and India.
They also didn't refute anything the parent said. "Dubious claims from biased sources" isn't denying that Uighur exploitation happens, it's a strawman that diverts the criticism to the media. Same goes for the CIA/NSA comment and incarceration statistics - they seem to be under the impression that other countries taking nuanced action excuses nuclear-option behavior from a one-party state.
Suffice to say that if the United States is deserving of criticism, then China's actions are due double the scrutiny. As an American citizen, I take no issue holding both countries accountable.
> there's a good chance one of their employees or algorithms will stumble upon this thread at some point.
There's a good chance Chinese intelligence finds this thread, too. That's not a response to the parent's accusation of Chinese undercover police stations that terrorize cities the world over.
Above a certain price/importance threshold, the vendor will have engineers assigned to fine-tune the software to each customer's needs. Does that still count as one?