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Comment by zylonbane | Hacker News Reader

From what little I know and from reading this, Japanese seems exactly like what Microsoft would design if it needed to make its own language. Complicated, full of ambiguity, still trying to keep compatibility with an older system (but breaks it anyway), pointlessly redesigned every once in a while. Reading seems even worse because very visually dense kanji just do not survive compression as much as a couple of sticks (like letters in an English or Cyrillic alphabet). Granted, the language may have a beautiful side which you only learn about by actually learning the language, but still, spending an eternity to do so doesn't seem like a nice way to spend time.

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I'd probably disagree on most points here.

The spoken grammar of Japanese isn't too bad. I'd say it's more logical than English overall.

Written Japanese in Hiragana and Katakana is unambiguous in spelling/pronunciation. It's not like English where you need to learn a bunch of spelling (and sometimes multiple spellings). So it's massively easier.

There's Hiragana and Katakana which have a similar purpose, but then English has upper and lowercase letters for seemly no very useful reason.

Kanji is a significant additional workload and there where efforts to get rid of it in the past. The problem is I'd guess it does have utility, cramming more data in per unit area is useful, as is being able know it mean "on" or "off" or "of passable quality". And now with computers you can type in Hiragana and it prompts for the Kanji. That makes things significantly easier.

The other thing that's interesting about Kanji is the meaning is divorced from the sound. With English your forcing a discretized serialization on sounds. With Kanji the idiographic communication feels closer to a visual representation of a concept.

Kana pronunciation is not completely unambiguous. は and へ have different pronunciation when they're being used as particles. Additionally, there is pitch accent, where small differences in pitch can change meaning. (Although pitch accent varies between regional dialects and you can almost always guess the meaning from context so it's not critical for understanding.)

In English, differences in stress can change meaning.

I've been studying Japanese for a little under a year now. Outside of Kanji, I've found the language at least as easy to pick-up and learn as Spanish. Additionally being an English speaker seems to actually be an advantage, as there are numerous "loan words" that are basically English. This (elementary learning) song is illustrative of that: https://youtu.be/dBGD4guQdME?t=2m38s

Kanji isn't so bad - most of the more complex characters are built up out of smallers ones, and even the smaller ones, as the article breifly hints at, have a primary radical that roughly categorizes it - learn the radical for "water", and you can identify all the seafood on a menu, even if you can't read a single character. They're actually really helpful for both comprehension and reading speed, like learning latin root words would be for English, but a lot more consistently applicable, so it gives you a lot of leverage.

The stroke order seems annoying at first, but it's pretty consistent, and actually really helpful for memorizing. The different pronounciations also seem intimidating at first, but for the most part:

- One's for composing with other characters

- Others are mostly variations on that one for fluidity, where people will still understand you if you get it wrong

- There may be one for when it's used on its own, that gets used so often you quicly think of it as basic

- Anything else is probably an edge case that you'll never see

tl;dr: Don't let the Kanji intimidate you

Every language was designed organically and is full of exceptions and flaws. I don't think most people realize this of their native language. As a native English speaker with a minor in Japanese, I found Japanese to be quite systematic compared to English. I also believe Japanese is more expressive, which is probably true for many languages. The kanji writing system can be difficult, it is true, but there are nice parts about it too if you care to think about them. On the whole I prefer Japanese as a spoken language to English and wish I was better at it. Writing could be argued either way.

All of your arguments apply to English too.

A Chinese reader could wonder why we use multiple glyphs to expose a single concept. "How inefficient," they might think, "each character has so few bits of information! Are speakers of this language just memorizing entire blocks of characters at a time so they can read fast?"

One advantage of Latin characters (shared by Cyrillic, Greek, and even Arabic) is that the featural elements of glyphs are few enough that you can make each individual glyph small. You can clearly read Latin text even at 6-8pt font sizes, whereas the need to distinguish multiple parallel lines in Chinese characters makes it barely legible at a standard 12pt font.

This may be true in general, but extensive use of diacritics, e.g. as in ancient Greek or Vietnamese, could make reading small type extremely difficult.

"standard 12pt font" is biased for latin characters, though - at the larger font size, the Chinese characters are still getting much better information compression than the latin characters, which need to expand horizontally by using several characters per unit of meaning, plus separators (spacing and hyphens) to even be readable. In practice, even adjusting for font size, paragraphs of Chinese and Japanese are almost always shorter than latin-language equivalents.

Of course, the real winner of this argument is probably Korean.

Actually, I think Korean is not a winner. Its block-shape dictates that a character like 이 take the same amount of space as 핥, so there's a limit on how small a character goes. (There are fonts that try to break out of the standard square shape, but I don't think any found wide use.)

I think proportional fonts have a better space utilization by their nature. Anyways, I don't think that's an important metric. It's not like we live in an age where paper is scarce.

Japanese is surprisingly easy to get into, and hard to master. You don't need to know all the grammar in this book to make your way around Japan, you can get a basic amount of grammar down in a few weeks and simply working on "knowing more words" is then all you need.

But, much like English, if you want to know all the subtleties and intricacies: strap yourself in, we're in for a rough ride. There are lots of finer details you can get lost in, just like any established language.

It's much easier than language like Finnish or Russian in some respects (lots of things like needing to match genders, modes, plurality, etc. simply don't exist in Japanese), but then there are also things that are much harder (like knowing which level of politeness to use when talking to someone).

It's all about what you consider "knowing Japanese". Microsoft could never hope to come up with something as convoluted as Japanese, or even modern English. They're both waaaay more nuts if looked at in their entirety =P

Kanji is tough indeed, but that's why hiragana is awesome. You can learn it quickly and since it covers the entire spectrum of pronunciation - you can use it to write/type any word, even if said word uses Kanji. This is how most Japanese type it anyway, since digital text input auto-convert hiragana to Kanji as you put together sentences.

What makes you think English is any better?

Although the writing system is a PITA. It's of great cultural value etc. etc. but it presents a huge barrier to learners.

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