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[Pnx]

Yeah, I made a speech about this a while back.

Here's another speech:

I guess I'm not sure, but it seems like alot of memorization. Or maybe I'm just looking at them like unintelligible blocks of lines and squiggles, when in reality they can be read naturally if I know how, and I just don't know how yet. Kind of like how in English you can read words you don't know and still pronounce them even if you don't know what they mean.

This is a big reason why alphabets tended to get preferred by people over logographies. A logography often took years for people to become fully literate in, but when Sejong the Great, emperor, schmart guy, and one of the few people historians call "the great" who actually seems to deserve it (although of course western scholars only translated the name, they didn't give it to him), developed the hangul alphabet, in which people could become literate in it in a matter of days.

As far as I know, China is actually the only country in the world that still uses logographs as its official language.

...

Don't you just love my speeches?

[SalmonGod]

Speaking of butchering the english language, I just had two fun cases of that in rapid succession.  First, my co-worker tells me "that reminds me of the game Snood" and I reply "that reminds you of games nude?"      

Then I looked at the shipment I was working on and noticed the consignee made a spelling error.... "Repubic Machine Tools"

hohohoho

Yeah... it's been a long week.

[Mr. Palau]

I would say if you want to write english correctly than it is one of the hardest languages to learn, but englsih native speakers are very forgiving of gramatical mistakes and improper conjugations. Also at least people in new work are forgiving of accents, makes sense once you see how many foriegners there are. English ative speakers also make gramatical mistakes, for example "X and me did Y" should be "X and I did Y" and instead of "It was me" it should be "It was I". I'm sure I ahve made at least one or more gramatical mistakes in this post even.

Those things make english easier to learn than if you were to learn to master it.

[kaijyuu]

I noticed every one of those typos.

[Pnx]

I would say if you want to write english correctly than it is one of the hardest languages to learn, but englsih native speakers are very forgiving of gramatical mistakes and improper conjugations. Also at least people in new work are forgiving of accents, makes sense once you see how many foriegners there are. English ative speakers also make gramatical mistakes, for example "X and me did Y" should be "X and I did Y" and instead of "It was me" it should be "It was I". I'm sure I ahve made at least one or more gramatical mistakes in this post even.

Those things make english easier to learn than if you were to learn to master it.

Of course, quite a few grammatical mistakes have been "made cannon", which sort of just makes things worse.

In other news, today I learned from crash course world history (which is incidentally something amazing), that in 1324 Mansa Musa accidentally the Egyptian economy with massive amounts of gold.

Then he died in 1337. The man was the first 1337 H4X0R, and he didn't even know it.

[Gunner-Chan]

Man getting back to JA2 is so fun. I'm probably gonna have some happy people in that thread.

[Leafsnail]

That's something I try to do, but even in Hiragana I still get tripped up by the ones that look alike, namely Ne ね, Wa わ, and Re れ. I just need some more drilling in Katakana, and it'll stick eventually.

Somehow I find those easier to remember - I can just sortof bundle them together in my mind and drag them out by remembering that they look similar.

Of course, quite a few grammatical mistakes have been "made cannon", which sort of just makes things worse.

Yeah, you don't fuck with cannon-armed grammarians.

[Aklyon]

Both of the crash course series are rather awesome, Pnx, though the World History one (and its Mongolian exceptions!) is the more interesting of the two. I'm still not really all that interested in biology, but its certainly more interesting to watch that what we had in highschool.

[Sirus]

Went bowling today. Did fairly bad, but it was the first time in years and I had lots of fun.

[Skyrunner]

If I remember right, there are actually tens of thousands of Kanji characters, but you only need to know a very small portion (I think it's still over 1,000, though) to be considered literate... fluent, even.  I think most of them are dialect in nature.  Just like in english, no one uses the whole dictionary.

I'm recalling this off the top of my head from 6 years ago, so I'm likely wrong about something here.  I wish I had time to study Japanese again.  I really wanted to learn.

(I think)
It's officially like 30,000 kanji to be officially literate at the grade school level.

Yeah, I made a speech about this a while back.

Here's another speech:
This is a big reason why alphabets tended to get preferred by people over logographies. A logography often took years for people to become fully literate in, but when Sejong the Great, emperor, schmart guy, and one of the few people historians call "the great" who actually seems to deserve it (although of course western scholars only translated the name, they didn't give it to him), developed the hangul alphabet, in which people could become literate in it in a matter of days.

As far as I know, China is actually the only country in the world that still uses logographs as its official language.

...

Don't you just love my speeches?

Yay Korea! :-D

I'm proud be fluentish, but it doesn't help much in learning other languages. Like, Spanish/French/Italian/Port are similar. >.>

Anyways, Sejong is like the most respected kings of all Korean history. He has little negative stuff and lots of positives. The fact that he made Korean and was said to be a good king, and reigned in a time of peace.

[alway]

English certainly has changed over the past 1000 years; this, for example, is in Old English; the original version of Beowulf:
http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum,
þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum,         meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.         Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden,         he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum,         weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc         þara ymbsittendra

...

[Scelly9]

English certainly has changed over the past 1000 years; this, for example, is in Old English; the original version of Beowulf:
http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum,
þeodcyninga,         þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas         ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing         sceaþena þreatum,

monegum mægþum,         meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.         Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden,         he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum,         weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc         þara ymbsittendra

...

Wow.

[Valid_Dark]

I've just met my future wife.. I'm sure of it

[Aklyon]

Can't exactly call it moonrunes, but its far enough away from recent english to be more or less the same thing.

[Criptfeind]

Old English is, despite it's name, not old fashion English, it is a different language.