[visarga]

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds.

As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese, and in turn, it leads to isolation. It's like a "cultural moat" separating ideographic languages from phonetic ones. If they tried to give it up, it would be sad, because of all the history and beauty it has, but on the other hand, in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters and many more combinations of characters by rote. By comparison, a first grader can read a newspaper in English.

In terms of programming, Chinese is like Perl (even Perl6! - huge, complex, mysterious, beautiful) and English is like Lua (small, elegant, expressive).

"There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method"[1]. That's how much they are bothered by the huge initial cost of learning it.

[1] "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" - http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[muddyrivers]

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese."

We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you put a lot of practices. It escalates to another level to speak a whole sentence, that is, a sequence of sounds. That is why it is easy to tell if a person is a native speaker of a language in most cases.

It is true that Indo-European languages are difficult for Japanese and Chinese to learn. It is due to other reasons, which would be a long answer.

[microcolonel]

I think that if Americans try, it's a lot easier to go to the Japanese phonemes; given that they are effectively a subset of English phonemes (with some variation). That said, it seems that Americans feel like they're making a disrespectful accent when they're getting closer to pronouncing things correctly. They would rather be authentically bad than sound like they're making fun of an accent. Here in Canada we have this problem even when kids are learning Québecois French in school; they think they sound like they're making fun of Francophones when they get close to good pronunciation.

An American English speaker can generally approximate る and similar sounds far more easily than a Japanese speaker will learn to pronounce l or figure out the th in the. That's assuming that the English word they're trying to say doesn't have consonant clusters, which (aside from nasal consonant pairs) simply do not exist in Japanese. It really is not equivalent.

[visarga]

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English because their brains are trained with much fewer possible syllable sounds and they can't make the jump.

But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them. Being limited to much fewer ideographs you can memorize, you are also limited to fewer sounds you can use. On the other hand, with English, after 26 letters you can read any combination of them, and they form many more possible sounds. So you learn to make all those sounds as a kid. Even if you come from another phonetic language you will probably have a similarly diverse sound vocabulary which will help you transition to English.

So, memory limitations -> fewer characters known than possible English syllables -> a kind of mental straightjacket in producing other sounds that fall outside the allowed ones in their native language -> difficulty in learning English -> cultural isolation. Sad story.

Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.

[justinpombrio]

> But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them.

Please don't make up facts just because they seem plausible to you. A quick internet search reveals that the Japanese language predates any writing system for it:

"Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of their own. During the 5th century they began to import and adapt the Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture, probably via Korea. However the Japanese were aware of Chinese writing from about the 1st century AD from the characters that appeared on imported Chinese goods."[1]

Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds before there was any way to write them down, so their syllables can't have been limited by their script (at least initially).

> Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.

You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese...

[1] http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese.htm

[philovivero]

I have a couple things to add to this thread, not everything directly related to your comment.

1) Knowing the 26 letters is not remotely enough to be able to read the newspaper in English (earlier commenter made this assertion). Example: "She caught a cough. Such is life and death, dear!" How does knowing the letter "u" help you pronounce half those words? What about "g"? What about "h"? What about even if you put "gh" together? What about "e", "a", and if you shove "ea" together? In this single paragraph I've ballooned the number of letters and letter combinations needed into the 40's, and I've barely just begun. Don't get me started with borrowed words from French and Spanish (c'est la vie!).

2) Your comment: "You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese" - From direct first-hand experience, this is tough for a completely different reason than this comment thread is talking about. You've gone off on a tangent here. The reason Chinese is hard for English speakers is that tonality suggests overall sentence semantics, it does not directly affect any single word, whereas tonality affects every single word in Chinese. I thought we were talking about how syllable pronunciations were expressed by the writing system.

[smallnamespace]

> Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds _before_ there was any way to write them down, so their syllables _can't_ have been limited by their script (at least initially).

You might be underestimating just how huge an influence Chinese has had on Japanese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic_pronunciations#Ling...

Japanese (as well as Korean and Vietnamese) imported Chinese vocabulary en masse, including a gloss of Chinese translation. That made Japanese much more homophonic since the tones got dropped in the process.

Just compare the kunyomi (native) and onyomi (Chinese-derived) readings for some Kanji and you'll see that the onyomi readings are usually single syllables.

"For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines (where borrowings from English are common), over half the words in newspapers and 60% of the words in science magazines."

That said, I don't really agree with GP's contention that using Kanji makes Japanese have a simple sound system. Chinese has a somewhere richer sound system even though it invented the characters (especially if you count tones), and Spanish and Italian have very simple sound systems even though they're written with alphabets.

[dismantlethesun]

> It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them

As an aside, one side-benefit of a language that doesn't have so many phenomes is that automatic speech creation is much easier.

That's speech creation, not speech recognition.

Using software to speak Japanese fluently, at a given pitch, with a given emotional context is a solved problem. There's even software that can be used to create singing voices.

It only takes about 1000 recorded sounds to do so. In english, it'd take 10,000 multiplied by the number of emotional contexts and speech patterns you'd like to mimic.

[schoen]

> What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English because their brains are trained with much fewer possible syllable sounds and they can't make the jump.

This claim is significantly misleading.

Every language has its own phonotactics, which includes allowed and forbidden sequences of sounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

English and Japanese both have their own phonotactic structures. While English's phonotactic rules are much more permissive than those of Japanese, and allow more different sounds to be used and to be combined in more ways, and while these differences do affect what native speakers of each language can easily say (or recognize other people saying!), it's a mistake to say that English allows everything while only Japanese has restrictions.

Both languages have restrictions, and both have restrictions that some other languages don't have. For example, Slavic languages allow consonant clusters that English doesn't. Hindi allows distinctions of aspiration in arbitrary locations where English requires particular aspirations in particular positions or at least considers this distinction non-phonemic (and hence extremely hard for English speakers to learn to appreciate even when both sounds in question are part of their phonetic inventory).

If, from noticing the more extensive restrictions on sound structure in Japanese, you get the impression that English speakers can pronounce any sequence of letters from our alphabet, you're missing something significant about how English works.

Edit: as other people have noted in this thread, these differences between these languages are also probably not originally due to differences in writing systems. Often languages that share the same writing system have different phonotactic rules (and different sound inventory, for that matter). It's more likely that many of the important differences predate the writing system, although it's true that the writing system can influence how people learn and think about their language and how it changes over time.

[schoen]

I might have been unfair to the parent commenter here; I just realized that "you can read any combination of them" might mean "you know the intended pronunciation of any English text" (including words you've seen before) rather than "you are able to pronounce any conceivable sequence letters" (including letter sequences that never occur in English words). That doesn't necessarily represent confusion about phonotactics; it might just be a claim that an alphabetic writing system is always/sometimes easier to learn than the full present-day Japanese writing system. I'm not positive this is true of English orthography, but is probably true for some languages written with the Roman alphabet.

[dilemma]

>What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them.

No. After learning 26 letters you're no better off than before. You can't read, because you don't know the meaning of the words. Vocabulary is learnt separately from the writing system, unlike in Chinese or Japanese. On the other hand, with 26 kanji, you'd be able to read and write, but not necessarily speak.

Neither system is better - they're different.

[jcranmer]

> It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph

False. If you look at the history of writing systems, we have seen at least three instances of logographic systems developing into syllabries. Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually devolved into representing only consonants (vowels in Semitic languages largely represent only inflectional variations, so they're far less necessary). When this language and its descendants passed into Greek, distinct letters were added for vowels yielding an alphabet; when it passed into Indic languages, the consonants were systematically modified (e.g., rotating the glyphs) to make CV letter-form pairs. Mayan broke its logography into CV syllables (much akin to how Japanese derived the kana from kanji).

Mayan and the Indic scripts are great examples of the flexible of syllabic systems. Mayan is not a CV-syllable language, yet they still used CV glyphs. The syllable "bak" could be written, for example, as the glyphs for "ba" and "ka". Indic scripts, representing languages that have phontactics as complex as English, yet they also retain basic CV letters.

Even Japanese plays similar games: each letter doesn't represent a syllable, it represents a mora. The syllable "nan" would be represented as having 2 mora: "na" "n". Similar, the phrase "ですか" is written "de su ka" but is pronounced "de ska" in most dialects.

The Japanese kana orthography isn't really limiting its ability to add more sounds any more than the Latin alphabet limits our ability to represent sounds foreign to Latin speakers 2000 years ago like n of 'sing' (IPA: ŋ) or the th of 'the' (IPA: ð).

What makes English hard to pronounce for Japanese is that our phonotactics are very incompatible. You can see the same effects for English speakers trying to pronounce, say, Czech: "strč prst skrz krk" is pronounced exactly like it looks (well, you have to know that č is the 'ch' of chocolate in Czech), yet it is still difficult for an English person to pronounce. It's not that we can't make those sounds, it's that we can't put them in that order (/ŋgis/ makes for another good example".

The other difficulty Japanese speakers have is that some phonemes aren't recognized as separate--the infamous l/r comes up here. In general, Japanese don't hear a difference between them. Native English speakers can have the same reaction to other cases: both ś and sz in Polish sound like 'sh' to an English speaker, but they represent two distinct phonemes.

[microcolonel]

One nitpick: ですか is not pronounced "de ska" it's closer to "de s' ka"; They elide the full vowel, but they insert a stop instead of moving on to the consonant (in order to retain the prosody).

[pluma]

Just a tiny nitpick: the "ng" in "English" is actually a bit more complicated than just "n" plus "g". The "n" is actually a "ŋ" (the "ing" sound without the hard "g") and the actual "g" is often dropped in colloquial pronunciation and part of the second syllable otherwise. So it's either "eŋ-lish" or "eŋ-glish" but never "eŋg-lish".

And don't get me started on English speakers making fun of the Japanese "r"/"l" sounds when English doesn't even have a proper "r" sound in most dialects -- as a native speaker of a language with an uvular ("back of the throat") "r" sound the alveolar ("front of the mouth") "r" feels more like an "l" to begin with.

[leemailll]

I love hacker news. Some personal anecdotes soon summaries into neuroscience theory, and sticks to it

[zyxley]

> What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them.

But those combinations are usually learned via oral tradition and rote rather than actually having anything to do with the letters themselves.

[PeCaN]

Most notoriously “ou” and “ough”.

We have a solid 14-20 vowels, and 5 glyphs for them.

I suppose Spanish, Korean, and Russian might be easier to pronounce and less rote memorization, but you're certainly right about English.

[DashRattlesnake]

> What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them.

Not really. For instance: trough.

I forget the specifics and terminology, but to read English competently, you have to be familiar with at least several hundred different letter-sound mappings.

[gfaure]

This is incorrect. You seem to be saying that the writing system is responsible for the fact that English is hard to learn for Chinese speakers because the phonetics are different? Many languages have phonetics very different from English and so are at a "disadvantage" when learning English as a second language -- this is orthogonal to the choice of writing system.

Chinese speakers learn Pinyin from primary school and so know exactly how an alphabetic writing system works. Indeed, many Chinese who are not fully literate in Hanzi know how to read Pinyin.

Furthermore, Japanese children in the fifth grade can already read about 850 characters -- this is not as difficult a feat as I think you imagine.

[FabHK]

It's a remarkable fact, I think, that spoken modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) has only about 400 distinct syllables ignoring tones. With the 4 tones plus neutral pronunciation, there are about 1300, maybe 1500 (including rare ones) distinct syllables. They're basically all of the form

  consonant (optional) + vowel/diphthong + n/ng (optionally)

(typically called "initial + final" in this context).

(Note that older Chinese "dialects" such as Cantonese or Teochew retain many more distinct syllables. For example, the infamous "shi shi shi shi" "poem", consisting only of "shi" sounds in Mandarin (neglecting tones), contains 11 distinct syllables (neglecting tones) in Teochew.)

English or German, on the other hand, have somewhere around 8000 distinct syllables. (Think of "strict", "fractal", "Angstschweiß", "Hampsthwaite", "strengths", etc.)

[FabHK]

By the way, you may not have encountered "Hampsthwaite" before, but you probably know how to pronounce it. This doesn't work in Chinese.

[snaily]

Honestly, though, of all languages written with an alphabet (Latin or no), English is the worst when it comes to mapping from writing to pronunciation. Sure, it might better than Chinese, but flaunting it in public looks rather absurd even when comparing to, say, French.

And that's not even comparing to languages with a phonemic orthography (where the mapping from pronunciation to spelling is essentially injective) like Finnish or Turkish (which is also extremely regular in terms of grammmar, I'm told). English is terrible in this regard.

[adimitrov]

Now try pronouncing Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Worcester, Derby, Edinburgh, Argyll… Granted, the latter two are Gaelic in origin, but it's not like English spelling — especially of place names — is terribly phonetic.

English orthograhpy is in fact widely known for having [less systematicity](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) than many of its Indo-European neighbors.

[zhte415]

> on the other hand, in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters

A child exiting reception grade in China, i.e. entering Grade 1, is expected to know 1000-1500 characters. They certainly don't know all combinations of characters these words form, but the learning starts young.

[Symbiote]

It's more useful if you say the child's age, since I'm not sure which country "grade 1" refers to. If it's the USA, I'm not sure how old that is either.

[zhte415]

From 6-8 years old. Parents in China can 'speed up' or 'slow down' their child's education by putting them in school early or late.

[xiaoma]

>"in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters and many more combinations of characters by rote."

This is completely false. I spent seven years working in Taiwanese schools, and saw a few precocious seven year olds reading newspapers and virtually any 5th grader able to. It's very similar to the situation in English speaking countries, though I would say that first graders growing up with characters are probably a bit behind their English-speaking counterparts and a bit ahead by the time they're in fifth grade. This only applies to developed places like Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Obviously a poor child from rural China will have a different set of challenges and be behind.