I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition to those 46 characters, you have to memorize 2-4 thousand kanji. Oh man that is disheartening. I keep plugging away but it is slow going.

Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the Japanese heard them, and they often have different shades of meaning.

Chinese, on the other hand, uses only one writing system in any given body of text, uses the Latin alphabet with tone markings for phonetic spelling for learners, and is much less reliant on garbled loanwords.

Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not.

Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. And the Japanese use Latin characters to mark pronunciations also, minus the tone markings. (Let me introduce you to -- bopomofo)

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F

That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"):

I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni.

Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store

> Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters.

This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice".

米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)

(I used to think 美国 was descriptive since it didn't sound phonetic, until I came across 米国 and was confused as to why anyone would describe the US as "rice country", and then I learned that both were phonetic, but for the "me" in "america")

Bit of a stretch IMO - the pronunciation and usage can still often be different enough to trip you up, especially when you consider there are non-English loanwords on occasion (e.g. playing Persona 5, it took me far too long to realise that ルブラン, which I naively transliterated as ruburan, was actually the French "Le Blanc").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History

As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese.

Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g.

か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese

A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.

Don't worry about "learning kanji": learn words. A few kanji are used in isolation as words, but most kanji have meanings that you can only infer from context (as part of words). Furthermore, even if you "know the meanings" of kanji, you'll find you just have to memorize words anyway, because you usually can't combine the meanings of the kanji to come up with the meaning of a word. Not easily, anyway.

Too many westerners try to learn Japanese by memorizing 2,000 kanji, because that's easier than memorizing 30,000 words. It doesn't work. The way you "learn kanji" in immersion language schools is that you get word lists, and you're quizzed on how to read (i.e. write the readings) and write (i.e. write the kanji) those words. You quickly start to see patterns.

Memorizing lots of words is painful, but then, language learning is painful. This method comes with the huge advantage that the sooner you start learning words, the sooner you'll get positive reinforcement from the real world. You won't get that by memorizing kanji.

That said, I've found that the kanji separately really helped my Japanese studying. If nothing else, it's kept me from falling too far behind the Chinese and Taiwanese students in class...

The book I used for the kanji is The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course by Andrew Scott Conning. Can't recommend it enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Kodansha-Kanji-Learners-Course-Step/d...

(Though, it should be said that the reason the Chinese kids are better isn't that they "know kanji", but that many of the words are written the same way in Japanese. Substitute some of the kanji with hiragana, and they'll lose the bubble quickly.)

The only things I can say with confidence are:

  * focus on words
  * learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency
  * learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do

Those god forsaken counters.

You can't just say five pencils. You have to say

5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil

Go hon enpitsu

The pattern for which is

Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc.

They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count apples. Or demigods the same way they count flat objects.

Small round objects and military brigades would obviously be counted the same way though. Obviously.

There's also a unique counter specifically for armed naval vessels and slices of fish on top of balls of rice.

And one just for straw mats.

And one for graves, CPUs, wreaths, and dams.

And while small animals and arthropods have one counter, and large animals have another counter, you count butterflies using the counter for large animals.

Oh and the first 10, 14th, 20th and 24th days of the month essentially have unique names.

I knew a native Japanese guy who spent 4 years mostly away from Japan, and he started to have trouble remembering the days of the month.

At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more readily snap into place. More useful than memorizing generic masc./feminine/neuter for most Indo-European languages.

(Assuming it isn't just like.. "parutikkuru akuseroreta" or something)

(Chinese is also much simpler when it comes to measure words)

Hiragana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana...

Katakana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana...

Kanji isn't that hard if you are realistic about how large of a task it is. Japanese children spend 10 years learning kanji at school and that is their native language.

Capital I, lowercase l, numeral 1

Numeral 0 and uppercase O

> Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings

The difference at my resolution is about 10-15 pixels, this seems like much less than the difference between one font and another. But then of course I don't have any knowledge about Hanzi. Is the difference whether the diagonal dash touches the part to the left? Seems very hard to notice.

So I'd say that the difference is mostly how your font chose to indicate the proper stroke direction.

O 0

We have plenty of more ambiguous characters in our limited alphanumeric set and if special care was not given by don't designers it could look exactly the same.

Every written system has its own clues that readers learn to focus on.

In Japanese the number and direction of strokes is important but may translate to barely noticeable pixel differences that Westerners would dismiss as noise.

I think that this particular pair is confusing because in Japanese orientation is not supposed to be important, but is, in that case.

荼 vs 茶

日 vs 曰

已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴

士 vs 土

水 vs 氺

人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几

干 vs 千 vs 于

天 vs 夫

... the list goes on.

https://pingtype.github.io

給 耠

辦 辛力辛

重 量

困 因

痕 㾗

眉 㞒

部 卶

蓑 䒾

任 仼

挑 狣

推 猚

䒷 苦

阿 冋

共 芖

休 你

衡 𧗾

一 –

幹 龫

幸 辛

我 找

Also 苶 looks similar.

I saw the difference, because it reminded me of the difference between ン and ソ in katakana, but if you aren't Chinese I can see how you could assume they are the same. You can draw the same character differently in English without changing the meaning (e.g. 9 straight or curved, 7 with or without a bar through it, looped k or f), so overlooking the difference between 𠮟 and 叱 seems easy enough.

Ask any Japanese person why they use kanji and not just hiragana, katakana, or romaji and they'll tell you the same thing: Because it is hard to determine the meaning. They don't say it is impossible, just that it is difficult, which it is.

For a contrived example, if I write はしをさがしてる。What am I looking for, a chopstick, a bridge, or the side of something? There is no way to discern from the sentence alone. However, if I use this kanji for hashi, 箸, then it is obvious I'm talking about chopsticks. There is no ambiguity.

This doesn't always help. Sometimes the homonyms use the same kanji. 青山, for instance, can be read あおやま, which is a surname, or it can be read せいざん, which means a lush, green mountain. Most of the time though, kanji provides meaning and clarity where hiragana, katakana, and romaji do not.

What Chinese lacks is spaces between words.

Even Korean has spaces. It makes reading a large block of text so much easier, and it helps me to identify vocabulary that I recognise.

Adding spaces and Pinyin are just a couple of the many features of Pingtype.

https://pingtype.github.io