Polyglots, your input please

EArkham

EArkham

Necromancer
me_in_japan said:
The fourth, kanji, is where it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Thousands upon thousands of em. They're not the same as Chinese letters (although many are similar, and they certainly originated in China.) I reckon there's summat wrong with a language where a native speaker can be presented with someone's name and not have the first clue how to pronounce it. Seriously - it happens all the time where I work. A new kid joins the school, I'm typing her name into the computer and I find a new kanji. I ask my (Japanese) co-worker how to read it and she says "I dont know." A quick q&a round the teachers' room results in a great big "wakaranai" from everyone.-
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Yeah, kanji are difficult. Three different sets of pronunication possibilities (onyomi, kunyomi, and nanori) and each of those sets can have a bunch of different pronunciations. So if you have, like, 冷, it can be pronounced "rei-ki" in 冷気 (cold air) or "tsume-tai" in 冷たい (cold). But in a name, it's "ryo" (and yes, I had to look that up cause I sure as hell didn't remember it even though I remembered the rest).

Generally you have one pronunciation if the kanji is part of a compound and a different pronunciation if it's a standalone word (or a word specifically of Japanese origin). Generally, but not always. And then they have about a half dozen different ways to pronounce it if it's in a name, at which point you just say to yourself, "Screw it."

Oh, and it's even worse if you're going from the pronunciation to writing the name. In that case, there are almost endless combinations of kanji that have the same sound.

Never really considered hiragana/katakana and kanji as seperate alphabets. They're all parts of the language... can't really communicate with just one or the other (romajii doesn't count IMO as it's just English characters for the sounds).

Kep
 
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