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RedRedditor84 t1_jb95k3r wrote

Reply to comment by AnglerJared in TIL that Chinese is written without spaces between successive characters and words. by Neither_Parking3581

It's not exactly like that. Kanji makes it more like if you used camel case in English. MoreLikeIfYouWroteLikeThis. But even that's not the same since kanji are far more distinct than upper case letters.

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AnglerJared t1_jb963oh wrote

Fair, but that comparison loses traction for katakana and hiragana compounds, so I don’t think I missed the mark by that much. I’d have to combine Roman numerals and some kind of ideographic font like a complex mixed Wingdings to truly represent the difference, but I considered my approach sufficient to get the point across.

I do find it fascinating how many people like to chime in about how much more they understand about the Japanese language than a person who has lived in the country for the better part of two decades, though.

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RedRedditor84 t1_jb9aryn wrote

You made it sound like Japanese was as difficult to read as running all your words together. And on the odd occasion you actually find all hiragana, children's books, for example, you'll find spaces to help separate words.

I find it fascinating that someone with near 20 years experience thinks they can misrepresent the facts and be surprised when people "chime in".

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InkOrganizer t1_jbccxqu wrote

They didn’t say 20 years of humble learning of extremely high-context language. As apparent in that reply.

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AnglerJared t1_jb9gyrs wrote

I was trying to illustrate the formatting and to show it wouldn’t be all that hard to read if we did it that was in English, either. And you can keep moving the goalposts all you want; your comment was unnecessarily pedantic and didn’t really make a rebuttal of any point you thought I was trying to make.

でも、この話を続けたいのだったら、是非日本語でお願いします。そんなに日本語が詳しい方なら、きっと大丈夫でしょう。では。

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InkOrganizer t1_jbccb8z wrote

Maybe because we are native speakers?

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AnglerJared t1_jbcw7u1 wrote

I’d argue that a native speaker who had been raised in Japan wouldn’t have found any fault in what I originally said. I’d also say that native speakers aren’t necessarily any more aware of writing formats than people who’ve acquired the language (though I admit they likely are), or of the nuance of English which would contribute to the linguistic comparison.

The third, and most relevant, point I’ll raise is that, by and large, the majority of people who’ve made comments like this to me in the past were not at all native speakers.

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RobinsShaman t1_jb97xho wrote

Meaning of camel case in English. the use of a capital letter to begin the second word in a compound name or phrase, when it is not separated from the first word by a space: Examples of camel case include "iPod" and "GaGa".

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