Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Neil Booth <NeilB@example.com>]

Scott Stone wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, John De Hoog wrote:
> 
> > No, it was not studying kanji that made the difference. The difference
> > was that the students who studied in kanji had a deeper understanding of
> > what they were studying than those who studied the same material in
> > romaji. This is the whole point of the necessity of kanji. Japanese is
> > limited phonetically. It borrowed lots of words from Chinese, which is
> > richer phonetically. To distinguish words that end up sounding the same
> > in Japanese, it needs the kanji. Even over the phone, people have to
> > resort to explaining which kanji they mean sometimes.
> 
> This would indicate to me that something IS wrong with the Japanese
> language, if you have to explain yourself verbally via the writing system.

It's nothing to do with a writing system, that just happens to be a
convenient mutually-comprehensible way of distinguishing homophones
("Shinjuku no juku", "sett as in badger"). Are you saying you've never
come across a situation using English, where your "aite" wondered which
English word you were referring to?

I'm English, and I have hundreds of times. In both languages, it's what
many jokes are founded upon. Let's be at least a bit realistic here...

Neil.
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