Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics 284
JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"
Re:What about Official English? (Score:2, Insightful)
Kanji Test (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worst Languages Ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Re:What about Official English? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
To be pedantic, Hiragana [wikipedia.org] and Katakana [wikipedia.org] glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables. Kana generally represent consonant-vowel pairs, with a few exceptions, such as 'n' [wikipedia.org]. For example, this is what causes the additional ending "oh" vowel on many loan-words in Japanese. Even though the consonant sound exists, it's completely unnatural for a native Japanese speaker to "stop" mid-syllable.
The syllables represented by these two syllabaries (akin to 'alphabets') are the same, with hiragana used for phonetic spelling of native words, names, etc.; katakana is used both for foreign words/phrases as well as for emphasis, similar to italics in English and other Latin-based writing systems.
Re:What about Official English? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, depending on context, the pronunciation of a word might be the same, but the spelling could be different. For example, the word "kami" can mean "God" or "paper". Both sound the same, but each has its own kanji character. So as for your statement that spelling is unrelated to pronunciation is somewhat incorrect.
Uh...didn't you just actually show how pronunciation is unrelated to spelling?
Re:You can use katakana (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kanji Test (Score:1, Insightful)
What good is a language proficiency test that doesn't change as the language changes?
The issue is that the language is changing because in the real world everyone uses computers so so people can whip out some arcane kanji from an electronic dictionary and everyone else can take a picture of it on their cellphone and know what it means. So now there's more kanji being used, therefore the government thinks everyone "knows" more kanji.
In the test room you don't get to cheat, so the hard reality will hit: people don't know these kanji, their cellphones do.
Question the definition of "ironic", and you get.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
You know, it's like rain, on your wedding day. Things like that.
Re:Parsed the title wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
As cool as that would be, it would give Japanese the same difficulties English has with obscure words: adding more roots to build words out of only complicates the process of learning the vocabulary. As it is, most new words are made by putting together the roots of existing words (which, conveniently, are typically represented by a kanji), and consequently it can be much easier to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Often, in Japanese people will ask of an unfamiliar word how it is written; in English this occurs somewhat too, but it seems to be a more prevalent feature in Japanese.
Really, although the prospect of 2000+ kanji is quite daunting to people when they're starting out, once you have them as a solid base they make new vocabulary acquisition so much easier. It's wonderful.
Re:Does this have to do with socioeconomic shifts? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's an interesting thought, but the characters in question have a long, long history in the Japanese language. The summary can sound misleading, but these are not new words to anyone but the list-makers: by and large, they're words like "key", "curse", "depression", "pot", and a particularly manly but common-as-dirt way of saying "I". Really, the list still excludes plenty of characters used every day, while including some quite rare ones, too.
I must admit to a certain level of ignorance here, but how many new characters are being created in China? Not considering the simplification of the character set, of course.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--are syllabic yet their forms are derived DIRECTLY from Chinese characters. Exactly what I was talking about.
In the case of Korean, I thought characters weren't used frequently anymore. I don't know if there are direct analogs between the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters, but the influence is clear.
I don't know that any of them are used currently, but I also remember that some northern Chinese "barbarian" groups in history used Chinese character-derived scripts.
The Latin Alphabet is most used, followed by Ara