Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by new299 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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.

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