Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by kadrian12 on Thursday March 25, 2021 @08:38AM (#26579457)

Katakana, to me, is such a trouble. I really wonder whether I'm the only one who believes that Katakana is a big part of the reason, why it's very hard for native Japanese speakers to learn English.

In a Japan of today, you grow up with a plentitude of words taken from English and written + pronounced in Katakana. So you learn to pronounce "san-do-i-chi" for sandwich, "de-za-i-na" for "designer", "su-ma-ho" for smartphone, "ca-re-n-da" for calendar. And since you use and pronounce them wrongly on a daily basis you reinforce the Japanesified pronunciations. Then, actually pronouncing "calendar" in an English way becomes tricky.

So to me, the alphabets are a great example of a "historically grown" system, that's ripe for a "refactoring".

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Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by emodendroket on Thursday March 25, 2021 @08:46AM (#26579533)

I think this is kind of backwards. Japanese just has a restrictive phonetic system that makes it awkward to borrow English words. It’s unlikely that if it were written differently they’d pronounce the words more like English.

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Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by earthboundkid on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:48AM (#26580226)

English has an alphabet, but we still slaughter the pronunciation of harakiri, karaoke, and kamikaze because our phonology demands it. The one Japanese word we pronounce okay is "tsunami" which has a sound we don't have, lol!

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Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by supuun on Thursday March 25, 2021 @10:10AM (#26580498)

Yeah, good point. Some more: anime, manga, samurai.

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Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by andrewzah on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:58AM (#26580328)

Unlikely. English and Japanese have different phonetics. The writing system just reflects the spoken language.

Korean has this same problem. Ice cream becomes ah-ee-suh kr-ee-muh, etc. I don't know very much Japanese but I believe it's even worse for Korean in this regard.

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Re:Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms by supuun on Thursday March 25, 2021 @10:19AM (#26580595)

interesting perspective, but more important reason in my opinion is that Japanese has so simple pronunciation (many vowels and fewer sounds all together), so Japanese people are not accustomed to making those difficult sounds that are in English.

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