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Old 12-23-2009, 08:01 PM   #21 (permalink)
Shinobu
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Inland Empire, Southern California
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Ugetsu:
Yeah, in one way it's great that you can read a character different ways, but that is one problem with a symbolic language. If you don't know the story, what does the character mean? You have the problem now, with people who have a hard time just reading the newspaper.
Complicate matters with throwing in two writing methods (kata- and hiragana) AND English (not Romanji) and you have a pretty big mess. Can you imagine if in the US we used the regular alphabet, mixed in with Hebrew, then use Chinese at the same time?
It doesn't help either that they have so many ways to express the same name, but then again, it makes for the in-jokes that Japanese has, e.g the characters for Kagami (Hiiragi) can be read different ways.
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