japanese

Haven't been posting much because I kept myself busy doing a bunch of scattered projects and studying Japanese (now that I have some free time). Might as well leave here the resources I've used throughout my journey, as I never did and for the time being don't plan to enroll myself in any formal class (they cost a lot of money and learning Japanese is a hobby for me).

My interest in learning Japanese started many years ago, but I never managed to consistently study it for more than a month in a row, and the breaks would take many months, so while I probably started in 2018, if I only counted the days I effectively studied, it would probably be less than a year. It started mostly for my interest in anime, but it evolved into more than that (especially since I don't really watch anime nowadays), as I'm now much more passionate about linguistics and languages in general, and Japanese is a fascinating one to learn.

I've been casually thinking about that idea I had about making translations for math terms in toki pona from that other post, and I've been taking inspiration from Japanese, since their structure of combining kanji to make new words is basically the challenge I'd have to face.

After looking at some interesting ones (such as "differentiation" being 微分, literally "delicate + part", which is cute), I went on wiktionary to see some of the more mysterious ones, such as "dimension" being 次元 (lit. "next + origin"), and while I was expecting some sort of historical etymology combinations, all it said was "Appeared in (...) “Vocabulary of mathematical terms in English and Japanese” of 1889 as a translation of English dimension.".

Youtube's algorithm recently blessed me with a channel called Zundamon's Theorem. It's a japanese channel about maths where the hosts are actually two characters which are vocal synthesizer characters (basically like Miku, I'm not sure if I can say it's like vocaloid but for speech instead of singing).

It's very cute and the creator actually adds english subs for most videos, which is impressive. Hopefully this will help me learn math terms in japanese such as 定理 (it means theorem and it surprisingly sounds like theorem, probably a coincidence). Hopefully that'll make youtube recommend me more japanese math channels.

One of the three writing systems of Japanese, Kanji, originates from Chinese, and so they are basically chinese characters. A fluent reader should be able to read about ~2,000 of them, and thankfully, they're made up of smaller components which helps to memorize and write. For example,

All of these kanji contain 艮 as a subcomponent. I've been using jpdb to memorize these components, and because the kanji for "good" is 良, they call this component "almost good" (get it?). But this produces a very fun pattern. The kanji for gold is 金 and the kanji for silver is 銀, if you think about the olympics, what is "almost as good as gold"?