Comment on [deleted]

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• cordlesslamp@lemmy.today ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Basically asking if they are learning English and is great at the first half of the alphabet, do they really need to learn the second half?

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  • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Might wanna mention that the character set is a bit larger with Japanese. I don’t know how much larger, but Chinese boasts something like 2000+ characters.

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    • flicker@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This isn’t the best way to describe it. The following is an oversimplification.

      Hiragana is a set of 46 characters, each representing either a vowel or a consonant-vowel combo. These characters are used to spell all native Japanese words. (There’s a lot more than just this, but this is the most basic information.)

      Katakana is a set of 46 characters, each representing either a vowel or consonant-vowel combo. These characters are used to spell foreign words (as best as possible.) Here’s a Wikipedia article on English loanwords in Japanese.

      These two writing systems are called, together, kana.

      Then there’s kanji, which are the symbols that mean an individual word or concept, and which are characters that were from China. 日 means “day” or “sun” and is pretty popular among beginners. (Or at least it’s in all the beginner books.)

      Combined, kana and kanji are the writing system.

      The person asking if they need to know katakana is actually asking a normal question for foreigners. They just need to be reminded that in Japanese they can’t expect the romanization of foreign words, because katakana is for people who speak Japanese to read foreign words. They don’t all learn the English alphabet to read foreign loanwords!

      I might know what Coca-Cola is, but unless I can read コカコーラ and understand that means koka-kola, I’m not going to know if it’s being sold on a menu.

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      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Well, I have heard that The Japanese intentionally made their language difficult for foreigners to learn. I would say they accomplished their task.

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• force@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Dude wtf you’re all over this site, are you John Lemmy or something?

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