So as I understand it, Japanese children learn kanji throughout their school lives, up to high school...

Are flashcards really the best way to remember these things?

For reading sake, sure. Writing is a whole different game. I can read 元気 or 日本語 just fine, but I can't write them out of the blue.

English is more organic. German and French, however, are not. The French have the Académie française. This video gives some insight.

youtube.com/watch?v=4knCakLhPaU

This is why, with names, people present themselves and often show their written name. At schools, the blackboard; at work, presentation cards.

No, totally different. Our alphabet is sounds represented by symbols put together, it can make anything.

Chinese and such have a single unique symbol for every single word and name, if you make a new one, no one knows how to read it or even what it is.

What a hassle, no wonder they all have the same names.

There's multiple different readings of different characters. If you make a new word, you most likely just use the different reading of the same kanji.

This is why in japanese media characters are always asked how they say their name because of the multiple interpretations.

What the fuck do they do when they cant hear a word properly and ask them to spell.

>Spell your name please
Yeah its a little house with 3 lines next to it with a squiggly above and a box with 3 lines under it and 2 lines to its right

Im talking about Chinese more though

>What the fuck do they do when they cant hear a word properly and ask them to spell.
There's a thing called radicals, which make up Kanji and, in the modern age, there is apps for that sort of thing.

It still sounds like a giant pain in the ass when compared to Latin script.

>Who decides and how does everyone know?
The government decides a list as said before, and like all government lists they are promulagated, and when you go register your child's name with the government, and your name doesn't match up, the government worker should stop you and tell you fix the name.

>If i invent a new name

The Japanese characters used in the creation of names have different methods for naming. For example, young hip parents, name their children some special English snowflake name like Sapphire, when the characters in Japanese are Midori which is green. You forget that the Japanese have a syllabary which allows them leeway in the creation of new names.

It is, but I guess If you've lived with the system all your life. Latin script would seem alot more exotic and alien.

Just sounds restrictive and backwards however much you try to justify it.

Same here. It just seems objectively less pragmatic, with very few redeeming qualities.

>What the fuck do they do when they cant hear a word properly

Repeat it louder. There is a reason why the Chinese are notorious for being loud.

>ask them to spell.
You have phones now, and asking them to spell it out is simply not used that often. It's a different culture.

>when you go register your child's name with the government, and your name doesn't match up, the government worker should stop you and tell you fix the name
That's fucking bullshit and I can't imagine someone standing for it. What right does a government have to tell me how to name my child?

jappanese children can read, you have to remeber that japanese is not exclusivley kanji, it also includes a phonetic alphabet

children learn it first and childrens books refflect age apropriate mixes of honetic and kanji......just think of kanji kids dont know being like big words kids cant pronounce or understand

>For example, young hip parents, name their children some special English snowflake name like Sapphire, when the characters in Japanese are Midori which is green
Isn't there a name for this phenomenon, where parents name their kid 'Pikachu' or something equally bizarre but the kanji for the name is actually pretty normal?

Spelling is by syllables in the name.

>What was that?
>You know, "bright flame"
>Oh yeah, Robert!

No, that's not how it happens, neither in English, nor Japanese.

In my country, there are people named Robocop, La-sia (ladashia), and mixtures of names within names - like acronyms.

It becomes worse when misspelling is a relatively common thing here.

>That's fucking bullshit and I can't imagine someone standing for it. What right does a government have to tell me how to name my child?
Because of the different intepretations of the same kanji are finite. So, it would be a pain in the ass for everyone seeing as the kid's name doesn't fit in the with language and only he/she would actually know how their name could possibly be pronounced.

syllables are sounds

>Chinese and such have a single unique symbol for every single word and name
This is a meme and false. The Chinese have a unique symbol for a great many words, this is true, but they also have words which are composed of two separate characters.

>and name
You are placing your cultural bias on the Chinese. Most Chinese names are simply words. For example Mao Zedong's first name means Cat in Chinese.

Yeah, but I forgot what it was. It's basically the same thing happening in America, with parents naming their kids special snowflake names rather than the old staples like John and Luke.

>This is a meme and false. The Chinese have a unique symbol for a great many words, this is true, but they also have words which are composed of two separate characters.
Yet no alphabet so extremely restrictive.
>You are placing your cultural bias on the Chinese. Most Chinese names are simply words. For example Mao Zedong's first name means Cat in Chinese.
How is it a cultural bias to think people should be able to make up a new sound for a name.

Same thing happens.

Suppose the name [Robert] are the characters of [Bright] and [Flame].

If anything, you say:

The characters are [Bright] and [Flame], but the sound of the name is [Robert]

>For example Mao Zedong's first name means Cat in Chinese.
retard

This is what I never understand. They have a way more pragmatic sylabary, why would they use kanjis?

>literally the same as inventing a new alphabetical character

Wrong. There are a certain number of base radicals, and experts create words using these radicals, and try to capture the meaning of the word in the writing. Creating a new character is like deciding which letters to determine how a word sounds.

>no wonder they all have the same names.
Same last name. Their first names are mostly different and unique.

i think in some part its to do with words that sound the same but have different meanings

it also may be largely just about tradition

i think japanese is a mad language to learn becuase you have to learn kanji and 2 phonetic alphabets, and be able to combine the 3 to read

>Creating a new character is like deciding which letters to determine how a word sounds.
Yeah but I can take a name I've never heard before, like the German "Elfriede", and have a general understanding of how to spell it thanks to the sounds in the script. I don't need an expert to sit down and try to invent a whole new way of writing it.

>i think japanese is a mad language to learn becuase you have to learn kanji and 2 phonetic alphabets, and be able to combine the 3 to read
Hiragana and Katakana are piss easy to learn though, I can recognise most of them and the only memorisation I did was last year for shits and giggles.

Kanji is a whole other story.

You don't need to invent new symbols to write new words. Just put together the ones that already exist.
For example, when some Japanese scientist wanted to introduce the word "serendipity" into his language, he wrote 偶察力 - "coincidence", "observation" and "ability". And even though the word didn't even exist in Japanese, the people who read his paper could tell that it meant something along the lines of "the potential to make a discovery by coincidence". And this is also the great advantage of languages that use Chinese characters: You can somewhat guess the meaning of words you don't know from the characters they consist of.

>Just sounds restrictive
Yes, that is the point. It's to ensure that names don't get out of hand and people don't start creating new characters for each child, and that the names in general don't get out of hand.

>backwards
That is your opinion and cultural bias. The Asian nations have a far greater respect for tradition, and authority. To them allowing parents to name their children such things as La-a, Lorwyn, and other such exotic names as foolish and irresponsible. Furthermore, how "exotic and varied" are most names in English anyway? Most names you come across are old names with a cultural history being names. Our lists may not be official, but they still exist.

i find katakana hillarious.....its got to be a pretty uniqe achivent to develop a seperate alphabet soley to isolate foreign loan words

That's not all it does or what it was made to do. It's just handy for that purpose.

>What right does a government have to tell me how to name my child?

The fact that you live in it and pay taxes towards their operation. Asian people's have a culture of conformity and obedience towards authority.

Maybe for you. I haven't tried myself, but I know people who had serious difficulties learning arabic or cyrilic and those are basically just bizarro latin compared to anything found in Japan.

>For example Mao Zedong's first name means Cat in Chinese

It's 毛 (hair) not 猫 (cat), different character and also tone (rising for 毛, high and flat for 猫).

Guess it's just one of those insurmountable cultural walls. I as an American value individualism and believe in having an inherent mistrust of government and power.

Fine, its hair. I failed to actually google his name. My point still stands.

Are you sure they struggled with the actual characters rather than the grammar of Arabic or Cyrillic?

If you tried, you could probably easily memorise all of Hiragana and Katakana in a few hours.

>Yet no alphabet so extremely restrictive.
Others would argue that the alphabet is restrictive because it restrict comprehension of the written language to knowing the language. Using Chinese characters you don't need to learn Chinese to read Chinese. In fact that's why the characters came to dominate the whole of East Asia.

>How is it a cultural bias to think people should be able to make up a new sound for a name.
The very fact that you think that people should have the ability to make a new sound for a new name. It comes from a sense of freedom and individualism. The Asian countries come from a culture of conformity.

Can you really name your child whatever you want in Murrica? Even here in Germany you have to get your child's name approved by a government office, mainly for two reasons: To make it possible to infer a person's gender from the name and to prevent parents from ruining their childrens' lifes with retarded names.

>Does that mean until a relatively late point, they're functionally illiterate?
Furigana lets them know the pronounciation of kanji, they can speak, connect the two.

You read stuff appropriate to your age, and continue to learn as you age, the Japanese are people that read a lot in general.

After studying it for long enough to be semi fluent, basically I've given up on ever being fluent in writing kanji, anyways there's phones and computers for that now so I can write all kinds of kanji and seem literate enough.

But after memorizing enough kanji, it really does make reading sentences more efficient. An all hiragana sentence just looks...really long and kinda glaring. But after learning to read the kanji just at a glance you know what word is represented there and reading goes much faster, even than in English, because your mind isn't sounding it out.

That being said, I'm glad I ended up becoming a Koreaboo and learning Korean is a pleasure due to no kanji, and instead glorious 한글.

>Can you really name your child whatever you want in Murrica?
I don't think you can name your child nothing, but otherwise anything flies. J'Quann, L-a (Ladasha), and Goutham are perfectly viable. Most people aren't dumb, though, and name their children sensible names.

Hell yes I can. If I want to give my kid an obscure foreign name like the Aoileann (female Gaelic name), I have the right to.

>the grammar of cyrillic

Cyrillic isn't a language pal

Pretty cute name to be honest

I love Gaelic names, probably because I have one (Ryan, or alternatively Ríoghán). That particular one is pronounced either "ae-len", "ellen", or "ee-len". Never was quite sure which it is, but the first one is my favorite.

So, could you even name your child "all Jews must die" or something along those lines? I feel like naming is one of the topics where the government should have a say, since it affects the life of a third party that cannot give consent. Same reason why the state should always have the power to separate children from their parents when they're being mistreated etc.

HHNNNNGGG

Well you can always get your name legally changed if you're unhappy with it. In theory, you could name your kid "the holocaust was a lie," but in practice I don't think anybody is that stupid. Basically the parent has the right to name their offspring. They made it, they can call it whatever the hell they want.

>here in Germany you have to get your child's name approved by a government office
How very German

>To make it possible to infer a person's gender from the name
Andrea in many countries is gender neutral even though it means man.

Be right back, typing this into pixiv.

There's the katakana syllabary for the foreign words.
For example
ソース (sōsu) is sauce and キウイ (kiui) is kiwi
Therefore a lot of new words are writed in katakana

>serious difficulties learning arabic or cyrilic
well, the actual alphabet of cyrillic is piss-easy, only reason I'm bad at reading it is because when I see 4 consonants and a ' in a string I automatically assume I've done something wrong when in fact I'm just reading a slavic language.

Arabic is a little more difficult, if only because the "letters" change depending on context, but ultimately it isn't super difficult either.

Honestly, if they had trouble wrapping their minds around *writing* cyrillic or arabic scripts, they should walk away from both of those language families very quickly.

>But after memorizing enough kanji, it really does make reading sentences more efficient. An all hiragana sentence just looks...really long and kinda glaring. But after learning to read the kanji just at a glance you know what word is represented there and reading goes much faster, even than in English, because your mind isn't sounding it out.
You don't have to sound out english, how do you think speed reading works? You just look at the word as a symbol.

>Can you really name your child whatever you want in Murrica? Even here in Germany you have to get your child's name approved by a government office
lel, fucking nazis still

though a few years ago some Americans named their kid Adolf Hitler

what a horrible thing to do to your own child

Just looked it up and apparently America does have some naming laws, though they're state-based and usually less restrictive than in most countries.
By the way, it's not even just stuff like naming your kid Assmuncher or calling a boy Elizabeth - what if you named your kid 太郎 or Ивaн? Your regular civil servant literally couldn't type their names in documents and that's where it crosses the line from stupid to actively disruptive.

>By the way, it's not even just stuff like naming your kid Assmuncher or calling a boy Elizabeth - what if you named your kid 太郎 or Ивaн? Your regular civil servant literally couldn't type their names in documents and that's where it crosses the line from stupid to actively disruptive.
Change the language and stop infringing peoples freedoms? If i want to name my kid Scipio i can, i cant if im Chinese

>So as I understand it, Japanese children learn kanji throughout their school lives, up to high school. Does that mean until a relatively late point, they're functionally illiterate?
No.
By the early years of elementary school, they should have comprehension of at least a few hundred kanji, and even then, literature intended for people their age will have furigana, which is hiragana placed on the side of a character. Since they know the word from common speech, the meaning of the character(s) should be immediately obvious.

>An American 10-year-old can read anything you put in front of him; he may not fully understand it, but he can sound it out and follow along.
We must come from different areas. In my AP English class, people would struggle on words like epitome, amorphous, aesthetic, etc. In a similar manner, people in Japanese will trip up on obscure words which might have dated or unique pronunciation.

Source: Self-taught Japanese, translate shit

>Others would argue that the alphabet is restrictive because it restrict comprehension of the written language to knowing the language. Using Chinese characters you don't need to learn Chinese to read Chinese. In fact that's why the characters came to dominate the whole of East Asia.

You do need to learn Chinese - Classical Chinese in the olden days, Standard Mandarin nowadays. The Japanese for the most part won't understand Chinese text even though they use Chinese characters. How does it make it any easier to have a different language for writing compared to using a spoken language phonetically written as the lingua franca? It's either one more language to learn for everyone, or one more language to learn for anyone except those who have the lingua franca as their mother language.

And they got little adolf taken away too

>Change the language and stop infringing peoples freedoms?
Government workers should learn Chinese?

You would just phonetically translate it to English. Asian and Slavic immigrants don't have to get name changes, they just switch alphabets.

But isn't that already a restriction of your freedom to name your child? If you want to give another meaning to a name by writing it with some specific Chinese characters, an English transliteration of the name wouldn't suffice.

The sound of it is still there. It's a concession, but miles better than "you can't have that name."

no wonder they are more disciplined and hard-working than whites if they learn all that shit as kids

That's true, but I guess this means that there can't really be a true freedom to name your children in any country with a functioning bureaucracy.

>after learning to read the kanji just at a glance you know what word is represented there and reading goes much faster, even than in English, because your mind isn't sounding it out.
i think i read somewhere that all languages evolved to be read at a maximun speed which is as fast as the human brain can read it out loud (maybe it's because for a given sentence, you need less symbols in chinese than in english but they are bigger; also it's vertical lines instead of horizontal)

does this makes sense?

>What right does a government have to tell me how to name my child?
Actually, that happens in a lot of countries, even western ones.
Basically, it's to prevent parents from ruining a kid's future by giving him a retarded name which will cause him trouble.

An interesting fact is that spoken Japanese has a low information density, meaning you have to say more than another language to get the same point across. For example: "Jesus wept" vs.「イエスは泣きました」(Iesu wa nakimashita). Three syllables vs. seven.

Chinese surnames are mostly derived from vocations,toponyms or cadet branches of rulers.

How is this any different from Western surnames?

>You do need to learn Chinese - Classical Chinese in the olden days, Standard Mandarin nowadays.

No? If I draw a character, assign it a meaning. That meaning is tied to that image independent of sound. I could call the Sun, Assmunch, and in an alphabet system, a person would have to learn that in my languange, Assmunch means Sun. You learn both the sound, writing, and the meaning. In a logographic system, there is no need to learn the sound, simply the meaning of the word as you hear it.

iirc, in japan, names are written in kanji with furigana.

It's called "kirakira names".

That's another disadvantage of Japanese. You can't have retarded meme spellings like "THICC".

But you can do really cool puns and double meanings, e.g. writing 専制 (sensei, despotism) instead of 先生 (sensei, teacher) when you're some edgy school kid

>Jesus wept
>ジェーザス ウェプト
I see 7 syllables here by any reasonable definition of syllable.

Once you know the basic kanji, you can sort of guess the pronunciation of more complex kanji you haven't learned, so it's entirely likely that, say, a 12 year old would be able to pronounce all the kanji in a newspaper article without actually understanding them. There's always the risk of nonstandard or archaic readings, especially for names, so you do need a lot of experience. As people have pointed out, there are phonetic aids aids that are meant to help children and retards figure out the pronunciation.
Anime makes fun of dumb students who misread kanji, so it can't be a rare occurence.

You can compare it to a non-native speaker reading English without having learned the rules of pronunciation. I'm a fluent reader with a wide vocabulary and I still fuck up the pronunciation of obscure words because I have too little listening/speaking practice and I can't memorize pronunciation rules for shit.

More incredibly, I heard that native Korean, Japanese or Vietnamese speakers who study Classical Chinese often don't know how to read it in Chinese at all and just translate the meaning of the sentence (the pronunciation of pre-Tang dynasty Chinese is very speculative anyway, Old Chinese was reconstructed by linguists trying to make sense of ancient poetry) and Chinese people just read Classic Chinese in their modern dialect. Again, it's a bit like English speakers who don't know how to pronounce Latin words properly.

Its like the halfway point between shit ass cuneform and the amazingly clever phonecian alphabet.

>you can't have retarded meme spellings like "THICC"

otokonoko (男の娘) is basically the japanese equivalent of "boi" as in boipussy. Another way is to write the words in katakana. In fact, fucking around with the script is the japanese answer to meme spellings.

Take a look at pic related if you think Japanese is too rigid.

>otokonoko
Senpai, the only way you would know this is if you read trap doujins.

>nakimashita
Or naita, 泣いた
Of course you should use the polite form but that's added information, not getting the same point across (though I guess "wept" is more solemn than "cried")
By the way, the typical formula is イエスは涙を流された (Jesus shed tears/let tears flow)

You can guess the meaning of characters you don't know after you become familiar with them. You can also infer their meaning, similar to seeing an English word you don't know but knowing what it's supposed to mean given the context.

It's also worth nothing that you don't need that much time to study this shit. I studied Chinese for 4 years and worked using the language for another 2 in conditions far from full immersion; could read almost every single character, even though they're in traditional. At a certain point you become familiar with the structure of characters, you can guess their meaning.

For example, 姚. I know that the radical aka the part on the left is 女, woman, so it's talking about something female; I know that the particle on the right, the sound particle is 兆, 'zhao', so I know it sounds something like 'zhao'. The character is pronounced 'yao', but it's still fairly close and will be quickly corrected so you don't forget it again. Similarly, 铵, or ammonia. It has a radical and a sound component, 安 or 'an', and so it sounds something like 'an'; the character is pronounced 'an'. 钢 is a metal radical with sound component '冈' or 'gang', so I know it's pronounced something like 'gang'; the character is pronounced 'gang' in reality. Another example, 植 has a plant radical and the sound particle 直, 'zhi', which leads me to believe that the character is pronounced 'zhi'; it is indeed pronounced zhi. Once you have an idea of what you're doing, you're able to guess meanings and sound things out. It's sort of similar to knowing that 'thorough' isn't pronounced 'thor-o-guh' or that 'rough' isn't pronounced 'row-guh'; other example are psychic, chasm, phenomenon, the, etc.. Once you know the basic building blocks of the language you can pronounce most things. There are very few exceptions.