Lurker > darkknight109

MartianManchild posted...

No. You cant read that first sentence and say that he isnt trying really hard to sound smarter than he is.

Username checks out.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

MartianManchild posted...

His whole first sentence was really try hard.

So you're struggling with words like "exponential" and "iteration" and think they constitute purple prose?

This isn't the dunk that you think it is.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Aculo posted...

it's almost as if people were in enormous crowds for long periods of time, all over the country for some reason, ok?

Most of the spikes have been in rural areas. You know - the places where people were dead-set against mask wearing and keeping public gatherings shut down, because not being able to get a haircut is tyranny?

Not saying that the protests aren't going to create spikes of their own, but that's not what we're seeing now (and given the incubation period of the virus, I'd expect we'll start seeing numbers going up in protest areas starting next week).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DPsx7 posted...

Nobody was prepared for the virus.

South Korea was. They had their first coronavirus case on the same day as the US (and were also much closer to the hotspots that were spreading it), except they actually have competent leadership. Now, after adjusting for differences in population, they have several hundred fewer cases and deaths per capita than the US.

Trump could have spent the three months lead time he had preparing, or listening to the Democrats who were yelling at him to act and get ready; instead he insisted it was all a big hoax to make him look bad, and was subsequently caught unawares, resulting in the virus completely devastating the US.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

KnoxKorner posted...

Canada is like 60% Han Chinese. Out of the 20 or so Canadians I've ever met all but two were Han Chinese.

Sounds like you've been visiting Vancouver.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

Isn't the antichrist supposed to be well liked by pretty much everyone?

Not to the best of my knowledge.

He's supposed to try to lead the faithful astray (which Trump has done a pretty good job of doing), but I don't recall any passages about him being universally popular.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

HornedLion posted...

And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead...

You know, I'm not an end-times'er, or anything, but man... if I was looking for the Antichrist, Donnie sure ticks a lot of the boxes...

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Lokarin posted...

I don't live in America, but in Canada we can all feel what it's like to have Toronto, being the largest voting block, having its hand in everything

Yes, and that's what they get for having more people. That's called democracy.

Ontario has nearly 40% of our population, so yeah, they're going to have a big say in how the country is run. The only way that wouldn't be true would be to change the system to be flagrantly undemocratic and, in essence, punish people for daring to live in the most concentrated population centres.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Lokarin posted...

Under the current system, if a state has, say, 10 college seats and the vote is 51% Rep and 49% Dem, then all 10 seats go to Rep instead of the more fair 5 seats each, or even 6/4 at worst.

That's not anything inherent to the EC, that's just how the states choose to do it.

States can apportion their EC votes however they want. "Winner-take-all" is by far the most common, but some states do dole them out proportionally.

I'm in support of that. I'm even more in support of ditching the entire EC model, given that it's outdated, was never intended to work this way, and undemocratically skews the vote.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DirtBasedSoap posted...

because republicans dont want disenfranchised people to vote

Basically this.

If you want to improve the ability of people to vote, there are *lots* of easy ways to do it. Mandate a minimum number of polling stations per population; make election day a national holiday; make voter registration automatic and free, with a national voter ID sent at no charge to every eligible adult; allow voting over multiple days.

The thing is, Republicans don't *want* any of those, because they don't want it to be easier to vote. The Republicans are the minority party and have been for decades - the last time they won a nationwide popular vote was over 15 years ago, in 2004. The time before that was in the fucking 1980s. That's one victory in 30 years, which is pretty damn impressive for all the wrong reasons.

And that's with demographics that tend to be more politically active and have better turnout (such as seniors); if the Democrats could get their demographics to turn out at the same levels as the Republicans, the GOP may never win another election until they dramatically reform their policies and platform. And their strategists understand this - Republican leaders from Moscow Mitch to Donald Trump have given statements announcing their opposition to making voting easier purely because it would be bad for the Republicans.

The Republican strategy has long hinged on structural advantages given to them by the senate and the electoral college (both of which are weighted towards smaller, rural states that lean Republican, as opposed to larger, urban states that skew Democrat) and even that is starting to fail them as demographic changes swing against them. At this point, voter suppression is one of the last tools they have left in their toolbox. Moscow Mitch will not let any of the proposals for easier voting ever see the light of day, because he would be signing away the Republicans' only chance of winning future elections on their current platform.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I have many questions.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Was leaning towards gun control, as that would have massive beneficial knock-on effects, but I ultimately went for electoral reform.

Fix how politicians are elected and a lot of the other problems become a lot easier to address.

Lokarin posted...

The good thing with the electoral college is that it gives a little more power to the tinier states, so that the US isn't just the dictation of NY and California.

Yes, wouldn't want a tiny number of states (dunno why NY always gets lumped into this bucket, considering states like Texas have more EC rep than they do) dictating the direction of the country because of the large number of people within them.

The current system, where a tiny number of states dictate the direction of the country because they are swing states, is clearly superior.

zebatov posted...

Voting/Election system (Ontario should not have nearly 1/3 of Canadas seats/money in politics)

Why not? They have over 1/3 of our population.

The only way you could reduce their influence is by basically changing Canada's electoral system to be far less representative and democratic.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

SirPikachu posted...

It's the easiest thing in the fucking world to go vote

Sure, if you have a polling station near you. And it's not busy. And you don't have work and/or childcare eating up your time.

I mean, we've definitely not seen anything like people having to stand in line for hours to vote, right?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

I_Abibde posted...

I seem to recall polls predicting that Trump would lose handily in 2016.

You recall incorrectly.

Most reputable polling outfits had Hillary at a ~70% chance of winning just prior to election day. So yes, she was the odds on favourite, but a Trump victory was always eminently possible.

This was not like 2012 where Obama seldom dipped below 90% odds. Trump's win was not the black horse some people apparently think it was.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

zebatov posted...

Versus Trudeau whos the complete opposite.

Trudeau being the complete opposite of Trump is probably the greatest compliment anyone could pay him.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

BeerOnTap posted...

His handlers are keeping him hidden for now as best they can. But eventually he'll have to emerge from the basement. And it'll get bizarre af.

Not sure it'll get more bizarre than saying... oh, I don't know, that a man killed by police is probably happy about job numbers.

I feel like anyone who is spreading the myth that Biden can't give a decent speech has never actually heard Trump speak. Either that or they're just as senile as he is.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

What a fucking yob.

Trump is literally incapable of understanding any human emotion other than greed. His solution to every problem is "the economy".

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

That's a significant underestimate by Biden.

Zeus posted...

Nuh-uh! Trump even says that there are "very good people on both sides."

Which probably would have been looked on more favourably if the event he was talking about wasn't a neo-nazi rally.

Zeus posted...

In 2016, Hillary was calling all Republicans deplorable.

She explicitly and quite literally wasn't. Stop spreading fake news.

Here's the quote: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables."

Not all Republicans. Not even half of all Republicans - half of all Trump supporters.

Which, like Biden, is a gross underestimate.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DDirtyDastard posted...

They are perfectly capable of roaming around off-leash and taking care of themselves without supervision.

Great way to kill off all the local birds, too!

DDirtyDastard posted...
You've probably babied it out of its instinctual nature by now, so it'll never get to live the life of a normal cat.

Cats are not wild animals; they are domesticated creatures. They have specifically been bred to co-exist in a domestic setting with humans. There is no such thing as "the life of a normal cat" anymore. A cat let loose in the wild will simply turn feral, the same way a dog would, because both of those creatures have been selectively bred by humans to serve specific roles in our lives.

This is why cats have longer and healthier lives when kept indoors.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

In another room.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

-The Last of Us
-GTA 4 and 5
-A Link to the Past
-Wind Waker
-Super Mario Bros. 3 kind straddles this - it's a fantastic game, but World was better in almost every way

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

dedbus posted...

pretty decent numbers considering the white house he inherited

One with record economic growth, low unemployment, and no major conflicts that the US was heavily embroiled in?

Any other president in the last 50 years would have killed to have a White House like that dropped into his lap.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OhhhJa posted...

The only power this enables him is to post on Twitter without penalty lol

So you're in favour of politicians removing the right for people to question them or claim that they are incorrect?

Sounds kind of like a first amendment violation to me (and also autocracy), but OK...

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

RedPixel posted...

Censorship deserves scrutiny.

Oh good, I get to post this again.

Here's the thing Trump and the rest of the idiot brigade don't like to bring up.

Conservatives have fought hard for years for corporations - like Twitter - to have rights on par with individuals.

This is an entirely valid exercise of those rights.

Twitter does not have to guarantee equal access to their platform. They can moderate it and allow/block whatever content they like. They are a private company and, as such, the government cannot compel speech from them and demand that they allow content that could potentially harm their business, and it is up to Twitter to define what that is.

Tomorrow, Twitter could ban all conservative posters from the platform and refuse to allow anything that isn't fawning adoration of left-wing views and there is not a damn thing the government can do to stop them. Doing so would not be illegal or a violation of anyone's rights. When you sign up to Twitter - or any other social media page - you hastily click through a Terms of Service that grants that platform the ability to modify or delete anything you post and/or ban you from the service, for any reason, with no warning. Don't like it? Don't use Twitter. Simple as that.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Zeus posted...

It's funny especially because liberals specifically criticized mail-in ballots while defending voting machines and now they've 180'd

Literal fake news.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Here's the thing Trump and the rest of the idiot brigade don't like to bring up.

Conservatives have fought hard for years for corporations - like Twitter - to have rights on par with individuals.

This is an entirely valid exercise of those rights.

Twitter does not have to guarantee equal access to their platform. They can moderate it and allow/block whatever content they like. They are a private company and, as such, the government cannot compel speech from them and demand that they allow content that could potentially harm their business, and it is up to Twitter to define what that is.

Tomorrow, Twitter could ban all conservative posters from the platform and refuse to allow anything that isn't fawning adoration of left-wing views and there is not a damn thing the government can do to stop them. Doing so would not be illegal or a violation of anyone's rights. When you sign up to Twitter - or any other social media page - you hastily click through a Terms of Service that grants that platform the ability to modify or delete anything you post and/or ban you from the service, for any reason, with no warning. Don't like it? Don't use Twitter. Simple as that.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

"He probably drank water, too; therefore, people who drink water are clearly Nazis."

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Some sort of marker over the character. English doesn't do that but other languages do.

I am aware of no languages that have intonation markings (though I'm far from a polyglot, so perhaps there are some I don't know about). Accents in other languages typically modify the sound of the character, rather than the intonation. For instance, in French, an e with an accent aigu () is pronounced "ey", while one with an accent grave () is pronounced "eh".

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Not to mention you have 2 forms of kana already that could easily be mixed if spaces were allowed for further differentiation.

Spaces are already "allowed" in Japanese; they're just pointless, because it's obvious where words end even if you don't use them, so most people don't bother with them because it looks funny.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

This would indicate that context is pretty accurate at predicting which word is meant to be used.

Sure, in the same way that Google Translate is "pretty accurate". When I'm writing in Japanese, I'd say the word processor picks the correct kanji ~80% of the time, and when it doesn't, the required kanji is usually second or third on the list of suggestions. It helps that most kanji writers are also adaptive, so they'll remember what words you frequently use and suggest those over less common variants.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I don't want to have to read "beginner level" stuff to learn all the time. It'd be much better if I could just do whatever I normally do like playing any video game or looking anything up online and be learning vocab and getting used to the grammar just from that like I could with any language that uses an alphabet exclusively.

I mean... you can do that just fine?

"Beginner level" stuff isn't just pre-school level books; games and manga frequently have furigana in them and are ideal tools for learning.

There's no language where you're going to be able to jump straight to advanced-level stuff and read it flawlessly in order to teach yourself the language. You have to walk before you run.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Instead I have to make sure whatever website or game it is uses furigana and you'll still have to look up new kanji even after you're fluent sometimes which as outlined is a pain in the ass.

This isn't really any different to having to look up words in a language if you don't know what they mean. English is my native tongue, I write reports for a living, and I still have to occasionally look up words to remind myself what they mean.

And looking up kanji is only difficult if you don't have the pronunciation; if you do, any Japanese/English dictionary will allow you to look them up by their anglicized form.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Even if I find a game meant for beginners, it's going to be much lighter on kanji than typical japanese writing and the concept of having reading difficulty for something that has the exact same words is pretty lame.

Gonna say it again - I've tried doing Japanese with only kana and it was the exact opposite of easy; it was awful and I don't recommend that anyone do it, because you'll just wind up confusing yourself. It's harder to look up words (you have the pronunciation, but without the kanji a beginner won't be able to tell if it's something "weird" like a conjugated verb that won't show up in that form in the dictionary, and if it's a homophone it may not be apparent which one it is), it's harder to understand the grammar rules... about the only thing it makes easier is pronunciation, which doesn't help when you don't know what the bloody words are.

My first "reading project", when I decided to tackle that particular hurdle, was a manga a friend gave to me. She pointed out that one of the characters speaks entirely in kana (common to denote childish or robotic characters - so, again, the "all kana" route has been taken before in Japanese literature). That sounded great to me! No stumbling over kanji I didn't recognize.

It wasn't; it was awful. Whenever that character showed up, I inwardly groaned. Their dialogue was painful to try and parse my way through. The other characters - even the ones that used more complex grammar or words - were far easier for me to understand or translate than the one who used all kana. To this day I still struggle with similar types of "all kana" characters.

Kanji looks like a really inefficient system for reading and writing - and, for a language like English, it absolutely would be - but for Japanese, it's actually quite elegant once you actually get into it in depth.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

That is basically what you said. You said they would know the kanji for all the characters making up that overall word and from that be able to figure out the words meaning. Learning the kanji for child, blood, and researcher is no easier than learning the roots ped, hema, and ologist.

My point was that there's no perfect language system. All of the characters I referenced are low-level characters - you'd be expected to learn them as part of your first few hundred characters. By contrast, something like "pediatric hematologist" - and even its roots - are something that you would only expect an advanced English speaker to recognize. English isn't in any way superior to Japanese in that regard.

And you can make inferences about a kanji character based on the kana around it, as well as its context within the sentence. Even if I spot a kanji I don't recognize and can't pronounce, there's a reasonable chance I can guess its meaning based on the rest of the sentence (no different from English).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Pediatric hematologist is also made of roots that you could use to figure it out. It's no different than already knowing those kanji. Ped meaning child, hema meaning blood, and ologist roughly meaning knowledgeable expert. So it's a child blood expert.

Literally no one speaking beginner- or even intermediate-level English would know any of those roots without looking them up.

What you're saying is the equivalent of me saying, "Kanji is super easy, as long as you already know all of the characters."

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Entirely kana isn't how you are used to reading things though and if it didn't have spaces it's even more especially confusing.

The lack of spaces is not the issue. It's piss-easy to read Japanese without spaces, whether you're using kanji or not. It's not a language that relies on them.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Ultimately theres no reason for it to be harder than kanji.

Yes, there is. You're not listening - kanji tells you what word is being used; kana does not.

If I write "", it's not clear what I'm saying - maybe it's , maybe it's , maybe it's , maybe it's , maybe it's , maybe it's , maybe it's none of those. It is very difficult to tell. It gets even more confusing when the words are relatively close in meaning, such as (hayai - early) and (hayai - fast); it's almost impossible to tell those apart in written Japanese unless you're using kanji.

You seem to be wholly misunderstanding the problem based on your comparison to cursive. Cursive is difficult to read, if you're not used to it, but the words are exactly the same as printed English, so there's no additional meaning added or lost; kana is simple to read, but much more difficult to interpret. It doesn't take longer to read (if I had to read a letter written in Japanese out loud, I could blaze through one that had kana and spaces, but I probably wouldn't have a fucking clue what I just said), it takes longer to understand.

a better parallel would be if i wrote my paragraphs and posts without any capitalization or punctuation its still possible to read these sorts of paragraphs of course however youll probably go slower than you usually would reason being naturally that youre forced to mentally add in the punctuation so that your mind puts the stoppages and tempo of the reading back to where it should be its not difficult to read paragraphs like this but it is frustrating sometimes you may find yourself having to go back and read sentences a second time just to figure out what the hell im saying a Japanese person who isnt used to our punctuation might think its pretty superfluous the same way you feel about kanji after all the punctuation doesnt make a sound so whats the point in having it but as im sure you agree it actually serves a valuable purpose and the language without it is much less readable actually maybee an even better exampl is if i spell all my words foneticly rather than yoosing proper spelling agen eeven as a naytiv english speeker its not reely hard to reed somthing ritten laik this you nouw wat ai am seying or at leest yool bee ayble to figyur it out if yoo slow down and foneticly sound it out in yur maind but its a reel noosanse to try and reed throo hell just raiting this is giving me a headaek actchooally the best eksampl wood bee if ai spelled things acyuratly but remoovd all the spayses so yoo hav to trai and wurk out wher eech wurd ends but gaymeeffaykyews wont let me doo that becuz yoor not alloud to post wurds ovr a sertin karakter limit ai am not actchooally raiting anything differentlee than ai normally wood in this paragraf but ai am shoor in yoor maind its koming across as sounding laik a toddlr rote it beecuz this isnt how english yooshooally is ritten even tho the wurds are the saem

We don't have this problem with English because 1) We have relatively few homonyms in our language, compared to Japanese, and 2) Our alphabet allows for alternate spellings to differentiate between similar-sounding words (e.g. "bear arms" vs. "bare arms", or "wine cellar" vs. "wine seller"). Neither of those things exist in Japanese - there is one *and only one* way to spell anything with kana, and because Japanese only has 46 sounds it can mix and match to make words, there are homonyms out the wazoo.

That's why kanji exists. The language was literally designed to work with it. Believe me, back before I knew kanji I tried to communicate using only kana - both by writing letters that way and by reading it that way. It was an absolute disaster. The language simply does not work that way.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If they always wrote every kanji with accompanying furigana it might have a point but that shit is tiny and hard to read.

That sounds like a you problem, to be honest.

Also, furigana frequently are printed on everything at beginner level. You don't need them at advanced level because you'll know the kanji at that point.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Japanese is also inefficient when typing because you need to select the version of every word you type.

Every word processor I've used is actually pretty accurate in predicting which kanji you want to use. If you feel like learning how to type on a proper Japanese keyboard, which have kana keys instead of alphabetic keys (I don't recommend it, but some people love them), you can type stupid fast, because one stroke on the keyboard is equivalent to 2-3 on a western keyboard.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

I remain unconvinced that kanji is anything other than pointless hassle kept around because of tradition that could be entirely removed if you added spaces and intonation markers.

I don't even know how you would add intonation markers. How would you signify emphasis and timing on a specific syllable? That's something we don't even do in English, even though we're bound by it too (example: the sentence "I never said you were stupid" can mean six different things depending on which word you emphasize).

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

OniRonin posted...

The thing that annoys me the most about kanji at this point is how much of a pain it is to look up one I don't know from a physical book. I misidentify the radicals a lot

Yeah, I've never found a physical system that actually makes looking up kanji anything but a mammoth pain in the ass. Even trying to work out stroke count can be a pain in the ass on the more complex ones.

Best systems I've found are the digital ones that either let you draw the kanji yourself or let you build it from radicals and it then tells you what it is.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Almost anything would be better than a written language that you can't even attempt to pronounce phonetically.

You actually can make educated guesses at how kanji is pronounced and what it means based on the radicals that make up the character. You won't always be right, but it's not impossible and after learning your first couple hundred, you'll start to get a kind of sense like, "Hmm... it looks like this character should be pronounced _____".

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And of course it's harder to read a letter all in kana when you aren't used to that.

It has nothing to do with how "used to it" I am. You read kana in Japanese all the time - that's not the problem. Even native speakers don't use kanji for everything; if they're hand-writing and can't remember a kanji for a word they want, they'll just write it out in kana instead (and some words are typically always spelled using kana, even if they technically have kanji as well).

The problem is that it's so much slower and takes so much more effort to discern meaning out of all but the simplest sentences. Kanji is a bitch to learn, but it's so, so, so much more efficient when you do. Consider, for instance, the English words "Pediatric Hematologist". A beginner at English would have absolutely no idea what those words mean; yet a beginner at Japanese would see the equivalent phrase () and - even if he didn't know how to pronounce it - would see the characters for child (), blood () and researcher () and be able to figure out the meaning pretty quickly. It's a very different system to English, but every bit as functional, in my opinion.

Note that there is already a system to provide pronunciation guides for difficult or unusual kanji (or for works aimed at children and other beginners who don't know much kanji): furigana. That system works just fine when you're learning and addresses your complaint of not being able to phonetically sound out a word.

Voxwik posted...

This is an interesting topic because I once had someone tell me they actually don't literally pronounce the Katakana and often just say the English word with a Japanese accent.

I don't see what the difference would be.

In nearly all cases, katakana *is* the English (or other foreign) word with a Japanese accent.

Voxwik posted...

There was an amazing conversation I saw, I forgot what it was about, in which two people that didn't know Japanese fully resolved something with their combined knowledge. One was someone who knew spoken Japanese but didn't know many Kanji. The other was a Chinese person who didn't know Hiragana/Katakana but did know what the Kanji meant due to similarity with Chinese.

Yeah, that is something you can kind of do. Kanji and Chinese largely use the same character set and a lot of the characters have the same or similar meanings. I can't speak a lick of Chinese, but if you show me something written in Chinese I can usually take a stab at it and understand the broad strokes meaning if I can recognize the characters from kanji.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Revelation34 posted...

The literal translation of "gomu" is rubber not gum.

It's both. It's a borrowed word from dutch - "gom" in dutch means both rubber and gum.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Krazy_Kirby posted...

^
but i'm not a weeb, so i don't pronounce it like that. i don't speak engrish

That's not a weeb thing, that's literally how Japanese is anglicized. There is literally no other way to write it unless you want the actual kana characters that no one who doesn't speak Japanese will be able to read.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

YoukaiSlayer posted...

And don't be complimenting japanese pronunciation until they remove kanji since that just straight up isn't phonetic at all and theres thousands of them for no reason. Also, they don't use spaces between their words. Wtf japan. You could remove kanji easily if you just started using spaces and then your shit would be way more readable as well.

I can tell you don't actually read Japanese if you think this way, because trying to read Japanese without kanji is a fucking nightmare, whether you add spaces or not. One of my friends in Japan wrote a letter to one of my students - who was just starting learning Japanese - and she wrote it entirely in kana (the phonetic syllabary) because my student couldn't read any kanji yet. I tried to read said letter and even though it was simple Japanese, it took me far, far longer than it would have if she'd just used kanji.

The reason why Japanese doesn't get rid of kanji, and likely never will, is because their language is absolutely riddled with homonyms. Something like "shin", for instance, can mean a couple dozen different things. In the spoken language, intonation and context will largely tell you what word is actually being used, but in the written language you need the kanji to know what the fuck is being talked about.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Krazy_Kirby posted...

"waifu" would not be pronounced anything like "wife"

If you're reading it like a Japanese word, yes, it would.

When anglicizing Japanese, "a" is pronounced flat like in "father"; "i" is pronounced like in "elite". "Wife" would therefore become wa-i-fu - "waifu", as mentioned.

The English word "waif" that you're referring to would be "weifu" in Japanese phonetic spelling.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

After speaking Japanese for a while, I actually found it more difficult to just randomly switch back to an English accent for an English word in the middle of a sentence. It's like you have to reconfigure your mouth to speak English words, so it's actually just easier to continue on using the Japanese-accented words.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


This can also be a problem. Especially because English has sounds that Japanese doesn't and a native speaker won't know to listen for them, so even if they know a word as it's pronounced in Japanese, they may not recognize the English version of the exact same word.

For those curious, this is also true in reverse - "long vowels" are a thing that Japanese has that English doesn't, so two words in Japanese that are only separated by an elongated vowel will sound the same to someone who isn't used to the language (for instance: shujin () means "husband"; shuujin () means "prisoner").

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

An adult male gorilla's dick is two inches, fully erect.

Humans have the largest erect penis to body size ratio of any of the great apes.

I also happen to be human, ladies...

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Of the ones listed, TLJ. It had problems, but it wasn't a retread of previous material (TFA) or a nonsensical story that completely abandons any pretense of logic (TRoS) and it was a decent movie in its own right.

Rogue One is by far the best of the Disney era, though.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Yeah, they went out of business a while ago now.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

xjayguyx posted...

Don't do what again and we're good? Telling me not to do something so we're good doesn't make it good.

Why'd you apologize if you don't even know what you were apologizing for?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

xjayguyx posted...

Try not to do what again?

You said sorry, so I'm just saying don't do it again and we're good.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

xjayguyx posted...

Sorry to me the Liberals are the communist party of Canada...

To me the Communist Party of Canada is the Communist Party of Canada, but there's me thinking words have meaning again...

Anyways, I accept your apology, just try not to do it again.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

zebatov posted...

Well we wont have guns if the Libs stay in power much longer.

One can only hope.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Goldmember was awful. I think I laughed once in the entire movie.

The Spy Who Shagged Me wasn't great either, but it was a lot better than that.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

My opinion has been coloured by randomizer runs. When I'm doing a randomizer:

Spirit > Water > Shadow > Fire > Forest

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

Dikitain posted...

There is good DLC and bad DLC, but the majority of the DLC nowadays is bad. I used to love when you bought expansion packs that cost 1/2 the price of the base game, and at the very least gave you 2/3 more content on top of the base game. Blizzard and ID were awesome with that. Valve too with the original Half Life expansions. Nowadays you are lucky if DLC gives you 1-2 hours of content, and that is for the $10 - $20 stuff.

This, man.

Paid DLC is, by and large, terrible. Low quality additions with production costs that round down to zero, sold for a massive markup to schmucks who think this is something the game devs put together just on a whim of passion and don't realize that for any game of appreciable size, the amount, nature, and price of the DLC is something that's worked out at the start of production of the game itself.

At least expansion packs typically added enough content to make them worth their price tags. With DLC, you can sell faster firing guns or different coloured costumes or 100,000 in-game currency for five bucks and call it a day.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DPsx7 posted...

Why do the haters act like they aren't the insane ones?

Because we don't have to flat-out make shit up and disregard the actual published results of elections to make our point?

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DPsx7 posted...

That's what they want you to think, it's not true.

If you're just going to straight-up say that the numbers reported in the 2016 election aren't true, I can just as easily counter by saying that Trump must have only got <20% of the vote, because no sane person would vote for him.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!

DPsx7 posted...

He did win after all

With a minority of the vote.

Kind of an important point there.

Also, most polls won't have approval + disapproval = 100%, because "neutral" or "no opinion" are also permitted answers.

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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!