[Freak_NL]

The word 'sinogram' sounds a bit contrived, and is not something I see a lot of scholars on this topic use. I personally would recommend against using it. They are mostly just called 'Chinese characters' in English when referring to these logograms, or simply 'kanji' if specifically talking about the Chinese characters in use in Japanese writing. Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all.

I'm glad the Japanese writing system survived the first waves of digitization (at which point a vocal group of people worldwide was willing to sacrifice cultural artefacts and linguistic finesse for the sake of modernization) and in time put its own mark on things like character encoding and the technical capabilities of fonts on computers.

[gerikson]

The author seems to be French-speaking, and "sinogramme" seems to be an accepted term in French:

> Les caractères chinois, ou sinogrammes, sont les unités logographiques qui composent l'écriture des langues chinoises.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caract%C3%A8res_chinois

[DocTomoe]

Some additional information: France is actually a leading country when it comes to Japanese Studies, to the point where high-level knowledge of French is a relevant skill in pursuing Japanese studies elsewhere, as many papers were historically only available in French.

[mytailorisrich]

I studies Japanese a bit in France a long time ago and was told that spoken French includes all the sounds of spoken Japanese so that a French speaker should have no problem pronouncing Japanese, apart from the accent.

This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...

[yorwba]

The stereotypical French speaker who has trouble with English [h] would definitely have the same problem with the Japanese [h], [ç] and [ɸ]. If they can't manage the tongue placement for English [θ], how are they supposed to handle Japanese [ɕ] and [ʑ]? And that's just the consonants.

Usually when someone thinks that language X has all the sounds of language Y, it's a speaker of language X who hasn't yet realized that their ears are too attuned to language X to recognize the sounds of language Y as something different. Don't trust your ears!

[mytailorisrich]

It's only the letter H and R (as transcribed in romaji) that are not immediate for a French speaker but they are not difficult. Certainly much simpler than 'th' in English. (Source: not my ears but Japanese textbooks)

[yorwba]

How would a French speaker pronounce し [ɕi] and じ [ʑi]? My guess would be « chi » [ʃi] and « ji » [ʒi]. Close enough to be understood, but different enough to be noticeable.

[kergonath]

Japanese prononciation is not difficult for native French speakers. Off the top of my head, the main “difficulties” are the /r/ and the /h/ (which is always silent in French). That said, I am not sure it is much more difficult for native English speakers.

[anthk]

>This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...

They have a whole country in the South to practice that sound...

[Freak_NL]

Ah, that would explain it.

[GolDDranks]

I did a MA of East Asian Studies at Helsinki University, and our professor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_Janhunen ) used the word sinogram as the standard terminology for the characters. I think this served two functions: 1) to disentangle the concept from a "character used in Chinese language", as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. 2) to create a parallel with words like "logograms" and "phonograms", as sinograms are not purely either, but contain features from both.

[ekianjo]

> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam

While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .

[andrewzah]

Korean doesn't use kanji. It uses hanja.

While Korean uses a syllabary just like English, the sino-Korean words still have the underlying hanja. If you look up those words in the dictionary, it will show the hanja. [0]

From my understanding there are several usages of hanja to this day:

- Korean names. For the most part, given names will have hanja chosen by the parents/grandparents/family. However recently it's becoming more common to have pure hangeul names, or english/foreign names, with no associated hanja.

- To disambiguate homographs/homonyms. This is common on Korean tv shows.

- To represent countries, politicians, and surnames on news articles. For example, 朴 (surname Pak/Park) and 美 (USA). Here is a random article example. [1] and a list of common hanja that pops up. [2] Side note, it's humorous to me that the hanja used for USA is also the hanja for 'beauty' (미).

- For days of the week and months, I saw hanja being used somewhat commonly.

- To guess the meaning of unknown words. If you know a certain hanja reading like 비 or 경 then it makes figuring out words a bit easier.

[0]: https://en.dict.naver.com/#/entry/koen/27ed7d6b4161442885572...

[1]: https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2021/03/25/...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/km01fv/short_list_o...

edit: clarified about modern Korean naming practices.

[hocuspocus]

> - Korean names. Unless they're into trendy foreign names, both the given name and surname will have hanja chosen.

Not necessarily true anymore. My wife has a completely made up given name that has nothing foreign: just two plain hangul characters without meaning on their own.

[andrewzah]

Ah right, I blanked on that.

Some of the most memorable people I ran into in Korea were named 하늘 and 보라. I also met someone with a single character name, but I can't remember which character... I think 강?

[QuercusMax]

English doesn't use a syllabary.

[WildParser]

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/engul.htm

[andrewzah]

You're right, I misunderstood that term.

[rational_indian]

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

[blacktriangle]

Honestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -> meaning in our brains, where a more ideographic language goes symbol -> meaning directly thus cutting out a lot of the processing time. Given that any given text is going to be read thousands of times more than it is written, the extra complexity in writing seems well worth the trade-off.

[EE84M3i]

What resources did you use to get so good at reading kanji so fast? A few months to be able to read all but the simplest japanese is really incredible for someone that doesn't already know kanji.

[blacktriangle]

I don't see the book on Amazon, but it was a pretty basic Kanji book that made a point of sorting them out by radicals so you could see how things were built, nothing too special.

I think the key was I bought tons of manga for children, the ones where all the kanji have the hiragana above them so you can get lots of vocabulary and kanji reenforcement from those.

[andrewzah]

I'm not the parent comment but I used an Anki deck from Nihongo Shark. It sorted the kanji by radicals. I did this for 2-3 months before burning out, but it made learning kanji much easier since I could see the radicals that they were composed of.

[smohare]

Sinograph is the term I’ve seen used in many introductory texts on Japanese. Apparently it was added just this month to the Oxford English Dictionary. https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-march-2021/

[andrewzah]

"Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all."

They mean that in the specific context of those languages. The set of hanzi is different than the set of kanji, which is different than the set of hanja, which is different than characters that Taiwan uses. They are -not- the same characters.

I see no real issue with using sinogram/sinograph over Chinese character since it refers to a Chinese character being used in another language. And it obviates the whole hanzi, kanji, hanja thing when not necessary.

[EmilieTypo]

Yes indeed, I am French-speaking and "sinogrammes" is the most appropriate word in the academic world to talk about kanji. I am not sure if it is the same in the English academic world, some of the comments suggested that it is. I am going to check further about this point. (But writing my PhD in French so I will be safe anyway ^^)

[solarmist]

The essay feels like something written in the 1970s.

[Kelamir]

One can refer to Chinese characters as hanzi.

[Freak_NL]

Only when referring to the Chinese characters as used in Chinese.