Anime and Manga - I won’t allow your bones to stay on this planet. I will banish your evil soul.

[InsaneCommander]

Uncle From Another World 7

The heroine is revealed and Takafumi learns to use magic.

 

Overlord 4.11

Ainz and Albedo fight against mysterious opponents. Ainz actually bows down to the Platinum Knight when he is supposedly about to lose, but it was just a test and Ainz was never in danger.

[Bartimaeus]

6 hours ago, majestic said:

Chloe (the character voiced by Sailor Mercury) finally showed up in episode ten.

She looks like she escaped from a different anime and invaded Noir:

  Hide contents

Nothing much happened. She shows up, kills Noir's targets of the episode in order to make sure we know that she somehow knows who the Mireille's and Kirika's targets are and calls herself 真のノワール - the true/real Noir.

Rolled my eight ball, it told me: Cannot predict now. So, not really sure what to make of it yet. I'm tentatively leaning towards not liking her character design.

I was thinking "man, that cloak looks really ridiculous". Then I googled her and, well, the cloak is gone. Not...sure...if improvement. Yeah, I don't like it either, but I guess she'll have a chance to win me over.

[uuuhhii]

cyberpunk edgerunner

visual are great

so many recognizable music and background from the game

hard to understand how much time each montage and timeskip take

really hard to see the point of the story

just merc getting too many implant and lose their mind in the start middle and end

too many character didn't get chance to be interesting

[majestic]

Noir episode 11: Moonlit Tea Party.

Curisously, the title is written in Chinese, rather than Japanese. 月下之茶宴 instead of 月下の茶宴. Why? No idea, but "no idea" is the general theme of the episode. Our heroines are contacted by a mysterious man, get ambushed afterwards and then Chloe invites herself to Kirika's and Mireille's home and they all drink tea in the moonlight while having a bit of smalltalk. The episode ends with Chloe asking Kirika if she can keep a fork. Heh. I can post all the spoilers I want and it's not going to spoil anything, because most of the storytelling is visual and not in the dialogue.

Mireille constantly plays the audience standin in a fun way, by demanding to know what the hell is happening while Kirika is content to just play along. Understandable, she lacks the meta knowledge that there'll be 15 more episodes and hopefully things will make at least some sense at the end.

[HoonDing]

之 is still Japanese, just archaic

[uuuhhii]

kanji and kana

Edited September 16, 2022 by uuuhhii

[majestic]

2 hours ago, HoonDing said:

之 is still Japanese, just archaic

Didn't think to check archaic Japanese, but you're right. 之 once served the same function as の today. Obviously still does in Chinese though, hence the post.

32 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

kanji and kana

Kana are simplified kanji, so any given kana was derived from a kanji once. Point in case, 之 is the basis for the modern kana for 'shi': し and シ. 

Edited September 16, 2022 by majestic

[Sarex]

3 hours ago, majestic said:

Didn't think to check archaic Japanese, but you're right. 之 once served the same function as の today. Obviously still does in Chinese though, hence the post.

So what you are saying is that Japanese is basically just island Chinese.

[Amentep]

14 minutes ago, Sarex said:

So what you are saying is that Japanese is basically just island Chinese.

IIRC, Japan will shank you in a dark alley for suggesting that.

[majestic]

24 minutes ago, Sarex said:

So what you are saying is that Japanese is basically just island Chinese.

Joke aside, they're not even in the same language family. It's just the sort of thing that happens when a writing system was adopted from another language and is based on glyphs representing concepts rather than pronunciation, although the Japanese Kana came from exactly such a use, where the Chinese characters were used based purely on their pronunciation to write Japanese words and then reduced in complexity because Japanese words were both complicated to write and even more complicated to read. With many characters having similar or the same pronunciations*, writers often picked the characters for their perceived aesthetic value, making Japanese texts a nightmare to read.

10 minutes ago, Amentep said:

IIRC, Japan will shank you in a dark alley for suggesting that.

So would any linguist, I imagine.

*Courtesy of the very limited amount of sounds in Japanese, leading to an awful lot of homophones and distinction of the words based on pitch accent and context.

[Amentep]

I'm not sure if linguists are shanky, or more glarey, to be honest. 

[Sarex]

All I know is that if I had to learn one, it would be Korean. Seems really easy.

[majestic]

6 hours ago, Sarex said:

All I know is that if I had to learn one, it would be Korean. Seems really easy.

Hangul is a 'featural' alphabet (make of that distinction what you will, at the end of the day, it is an alphabet more than anything else), and that makes it a good deal easier to learn. Still, many Korean texts contain hanja, so you're not off the hook entirely, but even then it is less problematic to learn than Japanese.

Little wonder, Japanese has one of the most complex writing systems still in use. if you randomly pick any writing system on the planet, chances are very good it'll be 'easier' than Japanese.

Edited September 16, 2022 by majestic

[Sarex]

3 hours ago, majestic said:

Hangul is a 'featural' alphabet (make of that distinction what you will, at the end of the day, it is an alphabet more than anything else), and that makes it a good deal easier to learn. Still, many Korean texts contain hanja, so you're not off the hook entirely, but even then it is less problematic to learn than Japanese.

Little wonder, Japanese has one of the most complex writing systems still in use. if you randomly pick any writing system on the planet, chances are very good it'll be 'easier' than Japanese.

I was under the impression Mandarin is a harder language to learn, from what I heard at least.

[HoonDing]

Japanese grammar is similar to Turkish, being "agglutinative" I believe the term was.

Edited September 17, 2022 by HoonDing

[uuuhhii]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

I was under the impression Mandarin is a harder language to learn, from what I heard at least.

japanese are more messy and turn increasingly to english write in katakana

which is incomprehensible to most english speaker

[majestic]

9 hours ago, Sarex said:

I was under the impression Mandarin is a harder language to learn, from what I heard at least.

They're both in the 2200+ hours of study for fluency group, but those were made with English natives in mind. For literacy, you'd need to know twice as many characters for Chinese, but in Chinese each character has one way of reading it (there are a few exceptions) while in Japanese almost all of them have multiple readings, with some extreme examples having 10 or more.

生 is one of these, that can be read as shō, sei, san, ha, i, u, uma, o, ki, nama, na or mu depending on the context*. That's because when the character means life, birth, raw and green, and it was slapped onto every Japanese word that has something to do with that. Nama for raw, umu for giving birth, umareru** for being born, and so on, and so forth, and the first three readings come from the way the character was pronounced in Chinese.

The written language doesn't even follow any rules when to use which reading for compound words. The general rule is that the kanji readings of them are either all the Chinese phonetic reading (on'yomi) or all of them using the Japanese reading (kun'yomi, meaning the Japanese term that the character represents) - but even for that there are exceptions, and there are words where both readings can be used.

So, yeah. Basically, for reading Chinese you need more characters, for Japanese you need to be aware of the context much more, and some of that context is deeply cultural. 私 for instance can be read as watashi or watakushi, both meaning I, the latter being more formal. Which one is the right one? Well, is the context a formal enough one? Good luck and have fun with that.

8 hours ago, HoonDing said:

Japanese grammar is similar to Turkish, being "agglutinative" I believe the term was.

Turkish and Japanese are both agglutinative, yes. So are Finnish and Hungarian, and a couple of African languages.

7 hours ago, uuuhhii said:

japanese are more messy and turn increasingly to english write in katakana

which is incomprehensible to most english speaker

Most Japanese loan words are incomprehensible to native speakers of the language where it was borrowed from. That's because Japanese has an awful dearth of sounds, so all loan words are approximations of their original sound. It is also the reason why there are so many homophones in Japanese***. There's only so much you can do with five vowels and ten consonants (plus their voiced and half-voiced varieties).

Take the word violin for instance, that becomes バイオリン (baiorin) in Japanese.

*Not included are the readings for names, which are sometimes entirely different. There's so many ways to write names and parents often pick the kanji for the names because they like how they look, so how someone's name is written is almost impossible to say without that person showing you how it is written, but our languages have the same problems, there's plenty of ways names can be spelled, and you can't know without the person in question spelling it out for you. Unless you're in a movie or TV show, where that always works, instantly, without spelling it out.

**umareru is simply the passive form of umu, but in this case 生 is read as uma, because the word can be written 生れる (れる being hiragana for reru, the passive verb ending) in addition to 生まれる (まれる = mareru).

**Also the reason why Japanese writing is most likely impossible to reform without changing much of the language. While in the spoken language, pitch accent and context are readily available to help distinguish between, say, hashi the bridge and hashi the chopsticks, in writing that only works because the characters used represent concepts, not the reading of the words. Using an alphabet or a syllabary to write Japanese makes it unreadable.

Edited September 17, 2022 by majestic

[uuuhhii]

31 minutes ago, majestic said:

They're both in the 2200+ hours of study for fluency group, but those were made with English natives in mind. For literacy, you'd need to know twice as many characters for Chinese, but in Chinese each character has one way of reading it (there are a few exceptions) while in Japanese almost all of them have multiple readings, with some extreme examples having 10 or more.

生 is one of these, that can be read as shō, sei, san, ha, i, u, uma, o, ki, nama, na or mu depending on the context*. That's because when the character means life, birth, raw and green, and it was slapped onto every Japanese word that has something to do with that. Nama for raw, umu for giving birth, umareru** for being born, and so on, and so forth, and the first three readings come from the way the character was pronounced in Chinese.

The written language doesn't even follow any rules when to use which reading for compound words. The general rule is that the kanji readings of them are either all the Chinese phonetic reading (on'yomi) or all of them using the Japanese reading (kun'yomi, meaning the Japanese term that the character represents) - but even for that there are exceptions, and there are words where both readings can be used.

So, yeah. Basically, for reading Chinese you need more characters, for Japanese you need to be aware of the context much more, and some of that context is deeply cultural. 私 for instance can be read as watashi or watakushi, both meaning I, the latter being more formal. Which one is the right one? Well, is the context a formal enough one? Good luck and have fun with that.

Turkish and Japanese are both agglutinative, yes. So are Finnish and Hungarian, and a couple of African languages.

Most Japanese loan words are incomprehensible to native speakers of the language where it was borrowed from. That's because Japanese has an awful dearth of sounds, so all loan words are approximations of their original sound. It is also the reason why there are so many homophones in Japanese***. There's only so much you can do with five vowels and ten consonants (plus their voiced and half-voiced varieties).

Take the word violin for instance, that becomes バイオリン (baiorin) in Japanese.

*Not included are the readings for names, which are sometimes entirely different. There's so many ways to write names and parents often pick the kanji for the names because they like how they look, so how someone's name is written is almost impossible to say without that person showing you how it is written, but our languages have the same problems, there's plenty of ways names can be spelled, and you can't know without the person in question spelling it out for you. Unless you're in a movie or TV show, where that always works, instantly, without spelling it out.

**umareru is simply the passive form of umu, but in this case 生 is read as uma, because the word can be written 生れる (れる being hiragana for reru, the passive verb ending) in addition to 生まれる (まれる = mareru).

**Also the reason why Japanese writing is most likely impossible to reform without changing much of the language. While in the spoken language, pitch accent and context are readily available to help distinguish between, say, hashi the bridge and hashi the chopsticks, in writing that only works because the characters used represent concepts, not the reading of the words. Using an alphabet or a syllabary to write Japanese makes it unreadable.

english word in japanese seems to be so much worse than danish in english or kanji in japanese

took two minute to recognize coffee writen in katakana are coffee

the two pronunciation for kanji thing was there the moment kanji was introduced into japanese

but nonsense like takanashi was fully manufactured by someone trying to sound smart

[majestic]

42 minutes ago, uuuhhii said:

english word in japanese seems to be so much worse than danish in english or kanji in japanese

took two minute to recognize coffee writen in katakana are coffee

The only reason why it doesn't appear to be like that for the on'yomi of the kanji is because you lack a frame of reference. The 'Chinese' readings sound nothing like Chinese - not now after 1500 years of language drift, but also very much not when they first appeared. It's easy to see the similarities when looking at transcriptions into our alphabet, but that's pretty much all there is to it (see the names for the Chinese characters as an easy example, that's hanzi, hanja and kanji).

The Japanese sounds for ha, hi, fu, he and ho and their voiced/semi voiced companions (ba, bi, bu, be, bo and pa, pi, pu, pe, po) are used to approximate an awful lot of common Indo-European (or more specifically Indo-German) sounds (b, f, h, p, v, w), and the very common sounds for l and r fuse into one, and that's before factoring in the lack of si, ti and tu sounds (shi, chi and tsu respectively) and the fact that the only single consonant in Japanese is 'n' which leads to the many seemingly unnecessary vowels in them (like in テーブル - tēburu- table). It's probably easier to draw blood from a stone than to make sense of Japanese loan words based on their original language, so it is probably best to think of loan words as Japanese words that you simply write in katakana.

コーヒー ('kōhī' - coffee) is a good example because neither the 'c' nor the 'f' sound of English exist in Japanese, and the o of the ko part is simply elongated because it's nigh impossible to do say っひ (ッヒ). Technically ふ is transcribed as 'fu' in Romaji, but that is also just an approximation. It certainly isn't an Indo-German 'fu' sound.

Edited September 17, 2022 by majestic

[HoonDing]

"For literacy, you'd need to know twice as many characters for Chinese"

That does not seem to be true. Japanese at school learn about 3,000 characters with which they'll be able to read >90% of writing (of course you need to know more in academic/literate/medical circles).

To be able to read >90% of Chinese you need a bit more than 2,000 characters.

[majestic]

58 minutes ago, HoonDing said:

"For literacy, you'd need to know twice as many characters for Chinese"

That does not seem to be true. Japanese at school learn about 3,000 characters with which they'll be able to read >90% of writing (of course you need to know more in academic/literate/medical circles).

To be able to read >90% of Chinese you need a bit more than 2,000 characters.

The current list of kanji taught in school in Japan contains 2136 characters. That is considered baseline literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and the characters that official government texts are limited to. Newspapers and other modern texts have more than that - Chinese language tests expect you to know at least 2500 characters (and 5000 words, and for what that is worth, that number is around 10000 words* and the 2136 kanji for Japanese) for the higher levels, but the same caveat exist.

Certain words and grammatical elements are written in hiragana in Japanese writing, the Chinese grammatical elements are still Chinese characters, not a simplified syllabary.

You're right about the diminishing returns though - knowing the most common characters in either language will give you the abiilty to read a lot of texts and look up the rest in a dictionary. Still a far cry away from being literate in the strictest sense. Japanese also has furigana to help with the reading of less common characters. Being able to comfortably read texts really does require more characters for Chinese than Japanese.

Academic and literary circles are an entirely different beast - especially in Japanese, where they come with their own set of rules, much like business Japanese has its own set of words and ways to express oneself that is fairly different from regular (but still polite) Japanese in everyday conversation.

*Japanese has an excessively large vocabulary. There's a whole slew of forms for the copula, for instance, a simple verb particle with predicative function for sentences that would otherwise lack a predicate. Da, de aru, desu, de arimasu, de gozaimasu and de irasshaimasu are all the same thing, to be used in different contexts.

Edited September 17, 2022 by majestic

[Lexx]

Just finished that Cyberpunk show. Story is simplistic but who cares. Visual and audio was really nice. Generally a good experience for me.

[Amentep]

Speed Racer - The Secret Engine

Speed tries to help an old guy whose Model T engine holds the secret to stolen money.  An episode that again proves that little on earth can withstand a sustained attack from Spritle and Chim-Chim.  Some funny animation moments as well (my favorite is the weird expression Racer X has on multiple times in the story).  Pretty enjoyable.

[Bartimaeus]

42 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Speed Racer - The Secret Engine

Speed tries to help an old guy whose Model T engine holds the secret to stolen money.  An episode that again proves that little on earth can withstand a sustained attack from Spritle and Chim-Chim.  Some funny animation moments as well (my favorite is the weird expression Racer X has on multiple times in the story).  Pretty enjoyable.

Is that the one with the old dude and his daughter...and the million or so motorcyclists who just come pouring out of a flying helicopter right at the end? If it's the one I'm thinking of, I'm pretty sure that's the episode that broke me, but in an unexpected way: I thought the episode was largely ho-hum, but all the motorcyclists dropping out of the sky and bouncing off mountains and stuff was so mind-breakingly absurd that I just started laughing maniacally for the rest of the episode and for some minutes after it had ended. That was kind of the beauty of Speed Racer for me: the goofy weird stuff that it (and no other show) would do had the effect of befuddling and amusing me into enjoying it in a way that few other shows could.

Edited September 19, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Amentep]

19 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

Is that the one with the old dude and his daughter...and the million or so motorcyclists who just come pouring out of a flying helicopter right at the end? If it's the one I'm thinking of, I'm pretty sure that's the episode that broke me, but in an unexpected way: I thought the episode was largely ho-hum, but all the motorcyclists dropping out of the sky and bouncing off mountains and stuff was so mind-breakingly absurd that I just started laughing maniacally for the rest of the episode and for some minutes after it had ended. That was kind of the beauty of Speed Racer for me: the goofy weird stuff that it (and no other show) would do had the effect of befuddling and amusing me into enjoying it in a way that few other shows could.

Yeah, the first episode has that -

 

Its Mr. Klepto and his grandaughter who own the car (the rest of the family doesn't matter to the story)

Racer X has a repeatedly goofy expression -

The henchmen is a giant brick

Trixie goes in disquise -

Spritle and Chim-Chim rampage

Pops has to be reminded he used to be a wrestler -

And the villain attempts a getaway by driving over a lake that Speed Racer goes underwater to follow him with no explanation.