[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.