Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Also, I realize in my last couple posts I may have come across as a little snooty... apologies if I could've worded my facts better. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/583149/#p583149 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? The only two things I'd say are that the sylable in chinese is actually written with ak in pinyin. Writing it with a qi actually makes it become a ch sound. The syllable in Korean and Japanese you are refering to doesn't actually exist in Mandarin, it's only present in other chinese dialects like Taiwanese, Fuzhou, etc. And both gu and ku also exist in Chinese and are written as such in Pinyin, unless there is a linguistic fact you're rfering to that I'm not aware of which is possible given that I grew up speaking it. But those sounds definitely exist. lol And regarding the JApanese thing, it's a dialectal thing. Let's acknolwedge that and move on. It's like in the majority of Latin America where the s is dropped in the middle or at the end of a word and asperated so it sounds like an h. That doesn't change how the word is written, merely the way it's pronounced when speaking. Mas o menos isn't written as mah o menoh, even if that's how a lot of central Americans and some south Americans may say when you ask them how they're doing.Also, hats off to you for the point about understanding Asian languages only in a western context leaving out some important nuances. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582899/#p582899 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? @9: with the ng and r/l/d comments, it sounds like you did this weird flip from studying linguistics to ignoring phonetics and treating Japanese sounds like Western sounds. The rld thing in particular is a single sound, and has nothing to do with the r/l/d in English, French, German, etc. Furthermore, eeven Japanese consonants that don't generally sound weird to Westerners, like k and s, are pronounced differently, hence the weird things like there being shi but no si, ji but no di, etc. If kana were transliterated with IPA instead of Romaji, it'd be way more consistent.That said, the sometimes ga, sometimes ña thing does indeed happen. But /ña/ is not adding an n before g; it's straight-up replacing the g with a nasal, which is written as ng in much of Europe because it rarely occurs outside of -ing type syllables. But yeah, people randomly going for ña instead of ga is an irregularity (ga is literally ka with a daku-on... not using a voiced k makes it irregular already, but then you find that this is a dialectical / personal thing, and therefore inconsistent in the wild... ).Incidentally, the distinct consonants thing is present in Chinese and Korean as well. Hence, the weird-by-western-standards consonants in Pinyin. Chinese Qi, Korean gi, and Japanese ki are all the same word... and very nearly the same sound, as apparently the main difference is how tense your tongue is when pronouncing them. You don't find ki and ku in Pinyin because they turned into qi and qu, but in truth, the consonants are (were?) the same in the mouth, and are written differently for the benefit of Westerners who have similar but different consonants in their native languages. See also: the wide-spread weirdness in Europe with the letter c. Ca ça, coo cue, cey vs key, c'est cay, ... all through a similar but slower oral mechanism. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582793/#p582793 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? @9, IF you look at the small description offered by NVDA for the three chinese characters, the first one actualy says that it does not distinguish between gender and is usually used as the singular third person. The second one is used as a romantic way of saying she, or when using the word in reference to a nation. The third refers to the third person plural, not just it. So yes, all three are different,but that maters only in writing, as when speaking there is only one word.Ok, here are some explanations to the hiragana oddities you mentioned.The u or i being dropped is only applicable to k sounds, s sounds and ch sounds. The reason that sometimes the vowel is pronounced and sometimes not is dependant on two things. One, where the syllable is placed in the word. If the syllable is in the middle or at the end of a word, the vowel will almost always be dropped. And even to western ears when it sounds like it's being dropped, it's not being dropped, simply muted where it's still pronounced, but at full spoken speed it's hard to hear it. It also differentiates between people, especially in dialects or in more formal speech vs. casual speech. In casual speech, more sounds are dropped, similar to other languages where a more lazy way of speaking prevails, much like the s being dropped in many dialects of latin-american spanish. And speaking of dialects, many dialects from western Japan, namely the Osakan and Kyoto dialects, will pronounce these vowels fully regardless of where they are placed in respect to the fact that those dialects were considered the aristocratic and higher form of the language.Regard ha and wa, that pronunciation was actually used, notably pre-war. I'm not sure of why the shift happened, but it's not hard at all to distinguish which is the particle and which is the other.The way to pronounce g, whether with an n or not, you already answered. IT's a regional difference. Not just western or eastern, but also Northern Japan comes into play here as well. IT's also never written in Hiragana that way because it's a spoken difference, not a written one. R is pronounced the same way always, like a spanish flipped r. No rolls, which is why when it's at the beginning of a word it can sound like a d or an l. But the sound in fact never changes drastically. Ryu is pronounced with an r, and ryugakusei is pronounced the same because the first syllable is litterally the same one. When it's in he middle of a word, it's much easier to hear how it's supposed to be pronounced. But again, depending on people and context, to western ears sometimes it can sound like an L, but that's again due to understanding of syllable placement.Anyway, all that aside, I'd be happy to answer more questions or even provide an audio recording. I just want to make it clear I don't defend Japanese as the best language in the world, because it may sound like that. Three alphabets, one of which has more than a few thousand characters is definitely a lot, and I agree that from a linguistic point of view, it sems crazy. But you admitted yourself that you don't speak the language and I think that's part of the confusion. For Japanese people, three alphabets actually provides more clarity and precision, which is what the Japanese culture is all about... they are able to tell which words are of Japanese origin, which are borrowed from Chinese and which are foreign loanwords. But yes, learning Japanese is definitely not an easy thing to do, and the alphabets are what make most people very weary of it. It's definitely true that western languages whether latin or slovak have a more consistent alphabet and more clearly defined rules. But there are other things in western languages like irregular grammar that more than make up for the difference. lol I'm just lucky that I was thrown in to a world of Japanese international students where I had more than enough people to ask, and seven years later my Japanese is actually surpassing my native mandarin. I don't say that out of pride, merely to emphasize that I had a lot of the same questions when I first started. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582646/#p582646 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Hello,@6: yes, of course, the quality of language construction depends on how we define a good language. Ludwik Zamenhof was asking this question almost 150 years back, when he was constructing Esperanto. And even though lingvistics of those times can't be compared to the currentone, Esperanto is still from grammatical point of view a language with one of the best constructions out there.The core stone of its construction is regularity. It has a stable alphabet, with regular reading, regular suffixes, regular prefixes, regular grammar and rather simple rules.Thanks to this regularity, one can become fluent in Esperanto in just few months of study, unlike probably any of the mainstream languages.Now, another viewpoint is, that a language doesn't need to be just regular, but also melodic and flexible. I can't tell, how well does Esperanto fit these two criterias, as I don't speak it and neither hear it often enough. I know, that some artificially made languages tend to fail these, for example Interslavic. It's an artificial language, which can be understood by all slavs without any prior learning. It really works, but to be honest, at least in my opinion, it sounds terribly. Although that may be caused by the fact, that some slavic languages sound quite bad to me, but that's another topic.Anyway, there are mainstream languages which sound good, have a good construction and are widely used. For example Italian. It has stable 26-letters alphabet, with completely regular pronounciation and regular grammar.In fact, their writing system is even better than the slovakone, even though they're missing some sounds unique to slavic languages, so we couldn't use it.Thus, as mentioned above, regularity is a characteristics which I expect from a good language construction.Now, how does a language using 3 alphabets, 3 to 8 thousand characters, with various possible pronounciations, and a really big bunch of homophones fit the word regular?Well, it doesn't. Perhaps the only regular thing on Japanese is its grammar, although I can't judge this properly, as like stated before, I don't speak the language yet.As for ta in chinese, for representing he, she and it, there are really separate characters for each.他 for he她 for she它 for itEach has a different unicode code, and a different shape notation (for example cangjie, OPD for he, VPD for she and JP for it).Although in this concrete case, she and it are less frequent than he (they have frequency 2 out of 5 according to the Unihan database, while he has frequency 1), there are many cases where two different characters from frequency 1 share the same pronounciation (even used tone).I made a little research some time ago in order to explore possible ways of increasing reading accuracy of chinese texts for blind people, and only taking in Unihan characters with classified frequency of 1, one mandarin pronounciation had in average about 4 different characters.And again, these were just really the most frequently used characters, about 1700? I can't recall now, don'ŧ take this super exactly, it seems I've lost the source code somehow.But anyway, I'm sure it was significantly under the 3000 border I've mentioned in my previous post, and the number of homophones is drastically increasing as more characters are given for analysis.From lingwistic point of view, this is simply crazy. Just imagine doing a speech synthesiser for Chinese, you can start out by writing up a whole dictionary.And Japanese has simply inherited this mess, adding two more alphabets and various pronounciations, just for fun.Now, seriously, about the Japanese homophones. I don't have statistics about Japanese pronounciations. This is one of the two main real arguments in "why Japan needs kanji" discussions I've read, with the other being that kanjis require less space than full hiragana words.I don't know how serious it is in spoken form, but in the writtenone, it's simply an excuse, like in case of Chinese.Some sources:https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/must-use-kanji/https://japantoday.com/category/feature … charactersAnd the list could go on, I'm not pasting more, as they can be easily found by simple searching for kanji yes / no discussions.As for hiragana irregularities, yes, there is plenty of them.For example, su. Sometimes you say it in full form, like sumimasen. But sometimes you omit the u completely, like in gozaimasu, and masu in general.Shi is normally spoken with i, like in shitsureeshimasu. And sometimes its' simply dropped, like in hajimemashite.Someone has also got the great idea, that ha when used as a particle will be read as wa, even though there already is one wa in use. Good luck with distinguishing programmatically, what is a particle and what is not. R in japanese seems to be read individually for each word, either as r, d or l. For example, you say sayounara, and not sayounada nor sayounala. But you read
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Braille kanji is definitely not often used. I've never come acros it when reading braille, and most of my friends afirm the fact that kana-based braille is much more of a common standard. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582635/#p582635 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Assault pretty much said it all.I am learning Japanese myself, and kanji, although screenreaders do read them to us, are still important for the reasons given above. The different readings can be be very different (toki and ji was already mentioned, another one is hito and jin which are the common readings for a kanji meaning person).It's different, sure. Is it bad? ...I wouldn't say so.Given that in English, I cannot rhyme sword with word, but I can rhyme word with bird, I think I like Japanese a lot better in some regards :-)As for learning to speak vs learning to read first, that is a tricky one. What I have been doing is a combination of the two:- Elon.io and Tae Kim's stuff are very good for reading/writing. I tend to use the Japanese NVDA with the Tiflotecnia Vocalizer voices at present. Jisho is a good dictionary that is pretty accessible to quickly look up kanji or romaji. InstantTranslate can help in a pinch but you'll usually only get the meaning the system thinks you want even though there might be more, so I tend to check Jisho even though that takes longer.- For listening, I combine Japanesepod101 which even though it has a lot, and I mean a LOT, of shortcomings, does have a few redeeming qualities, with GameGrammar and Japanese Quest on youtube. When they mention a kanji and explain it, I note it down, look at how the screenreader reads it, and if I think I can't remember it I add it to a lesson on elon.io .- Apart from that I look at other resources as well, but those are my staples.Oh and as for braille kanji ...that is indeed a thing, kind of, but I've been told it is rarely, if ever, used currently, and the kana-based braille tables in Japanese NVDA are way more common, so I never bothered with that. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582575/#p582575 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Some thoughts as both a native Chinese speaker and someone who's learned to speak fluent Japanese as well as writing in it.If you want to communicate with people especially on the web, kanji is essential. While most people will understand you if you write purely with hiragana, it will make your Japanese look simplistic and like you aren't serious in wanting to learn it.@2, those are some very interesting viewpoints, and I respect them. But I don't entirely agree that Japanese is a horribly constructed language simply because it uses three alphabets, nor that both Chinese and Japanese use words that have similar pronunciations but different meanings. That isn't necessarily bad, just the way the language was developed. And you'll actually note that in modern written chinese, the character for the third person is the same regardless of gender. Japanese also doesn't have words that are the same pronunciations but different meanings. Some are close, but not the same. I'd be curious for examples of words you find in Japanese that you think have the same pronunciation? Also, what do you mean by Hiragana and Katakana being read in strange ways? A note about synthesizers: it's not correct to say that we have less need to learn kanji because of synthesizers reading them to us. Synthesizers, especially in Japanese, make mistakes when reading kanji characters. So while we don't necessarily have to learn the shape, though that can be helpful, you do have to at least know the most common basic reading for each kanji in both pronunciations; the onyomi reading, which is the reading that sounds closer to its original chinese reading, or the kunyomi, which is the japonified pronunciation. Names are especially problematic, so it's important to learn Kanji so you can figure out another possible reading if your synthesizer gets it wrong. For example, the name shindo Tatsuya, written as:進藤龍也is read incorrectly by most synthesizers. Code factory's vocalizer for example reads it as Shinfuji Ryuya, which is completely wrong. Other examples are characters that are usually pronounced one way but are read incorrectly, such as the word for time which can be read as toki or ji. Some synthesizers read this incorrectly as well at certain times, which is bad for learning. Chinese has similar issues, but I can't give any examples of the top of my head at the moment.So in conclusion, for both Chinese and Japanese, if you are serious about learning the language, learning characters is important. You may not need to learn what they physically look like, but learning at least the possible pronunciations and menings is not only crucial for writing, it'll also help learning and understanding new vocabulary easier. Also, without knowing the meaning and possible pronunciations of kanji in Japanese, the small descriptions in the candidate selection box while typing won't make any sense.Should you learn speaking or writing first? Well, as post 2 said, speech is the basis of most languages.. and so from that angle, it definitely doesn't hurt to start with speaking. But to minimize work, it's best to do both in tandom if you can. Japanese, despite its three alphabets, is actually a very simple and well structured languages. There aren't a tone of exceptions to rules, and most things follow a set pattern. But it's so different from English and western languages that it definitely takes time to get used to, which is the hardest part. Hope this helps... happy to answer any questions if you have any if I can! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582506/#p582506 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
2020-10-22
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : mechaSkyGuardian via Audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? I just meant learning it in any way. I didn’t necessarily know what way or what I’d use it for. I just know that everyone learns the three writing systems. And another question, should I learn speaking before writing? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582318/#p582318 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? You need to learn some things about kanji, especially if you're reading with a screen reader.But what do you mean exactly? Braille kanji? Aiui, that is a thing, but also much rarer than print kanji. Do you mean learning kanji as words/word-parts, separate from just learning vocabulary? That'd be helpful, but it'd also be helpful to learn various affixes and greco-latin roots when learning English or any other European language, which is to say, not necessary, but helpful if you encounter unfamiliar words. With Japanese, since kanji can have multiple pronunciations, this might be more helpful than not, for reading new words, recognizing unexpected pronunciations, and if you do want to learn Chinese it is kinda helpful even though the phonetics differ greatly.I do remember serendipitously coming across a Japanese blogger talking about how he finally found a way to learn and use kanji after years of trying, but I don't remember who or where or the context. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582315/#p582315 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
2020-10-22
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : mechaSkyGuardian via Audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? I disagree on one point. I think Japanese sounds better than Chinese. If the synthesizer on my iPhone is anything to go by. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582305/#p582305 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? Hello,@1: first of all, I'm not a Japanese, and neither can I speak Japanese, so I'm probably not the right person to answer this question.What follows are things I've learned during my studies and collecting of informations, as I was one time really serious about learning japanese and I technically still am, although now I'd say rather interested than serious, and I've choosen possibly a bit untraditional approach.So, let's start with a simple fact. Japanese is a horribly constructed language!Chinese is its badly constructed friend, but that is a quite pleasant experience, compared to Japanese.Just take in the fact that they're using three alphabets, which they read in strange ways. Not just kanjis have two pronounciations, but also some hiragana and katakana characters seem to be read in various ways, especially those ending with u.We could continue with listing various strange things about Japanese, but one concrete thing I wanted to point out is their amount of words with the same pronounciation, but completely different meaning.This is better noticeable in Chinese, which uses only special characters. Ta for example, in normal speech means he, she and it at the same time. But there are various characters for each gender, which you can use accordingly to the situation.This is why people speaking Chinese argue, that you *need* to know the characters and writing with pinyin (latin alphabet based phonetic input) is insufficient, because it doesn't hold enough informations.But the truth is, that Chinese language is the one guilty here, not pinyin.Spoken language always develops before writing system, speech is according to psychology the basic for thinking, which can't exist without it.Thus it's fault of the first people developing the language, that they were reusing words so much, and the people developing the writing system, who in order to improve things for some reasons decided to introduce more characters rather than more words.I would be really interested why this happened, as it seems totally... wrong to me. But back to topic, today, Chinese is in state, where there are way more characters than phonemes. And by way more, I mean really, really way more. Bopomofo, another phonetic writing system for Chinese, contains about 30 characters? and is said to have all sounds occuring in Chinese. For a comparison, you're supposed to know about 3000 characters to read just average documents.So you can imagine the fraction I guess.But still, when people speak with each other, do they draw characters in order to clarify what they're wanting to say?Of course not. And speech is the base of language, not its writing.So, Chinese people are using something they technically don't need and shouldn't need, may be the only reason would be historical and cultural, but still...Now, the situation with Japanese is very similar, with the only exception, that Japanese is far worse than Chinese. It has the same homonimes problems, although on its own level, as Japanese words are constructed of sillables rather than individual characters.Therefore, people speaking japanese use the same excuse like people speaking Chinese, that use of kanjis makes text more readable and kanji characters better represent what they mean.I've described the problem with this statement above, the same goes for Japanese of course as well.But this doesn't change anything on the fact, that people are using it.So, if you want to be able to understand and speak the language, then no, kanjis are not important. Especially with synthesisers reading them correctly, even text won't seem any different from purely kana written thing.But if you want to be able to write, what you most likely want, and if you want to look like at least a bit normal person during written communication with people speaking Japanese, what you most likely want, then yes, learning kanjis is important.The question though is, how exactly will you approach the learning. This is not the same for sighted people and blind people, as we have synthesisers, which can read the characters for us, and we don't need to memorize shapes.The good thing is, that while writing, you can make use of selection system, which will allow you to select the correct kanji based on its short description. The bad thing is, that due to the correct reading, you won't be able to identify kanjis used in texts you read and thus you may face difficulties knowing, that a particular word is supposed to be written using one or more kanjis.Just for information, I personally have selected a completely different approach. Kanjis are just chinese characters, even though they have japanese pronounciation. So, in order to learn chinese characters, i've decided to learn Chinese!Chinese sounds way better and cooler than japanese, is widely used, has verbs ordering more similar to our languages and had significant influence on development of other
does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
2020-10-22
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : mechaSkyGuardian via Audiogames-reflector
does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese? so around one year ago I posted a topic about how to learn Japanese. I’m wondering though, should I try to learn kanji? Will it be useful to me? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/582257/#p582257 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
