This article does not address another layer that makes the Korean age system complicated: the "빠른" system. It refers to people born in January or February who, due to the school cutoff being in March, often enter school a year early and socially identify with those born in the previous calendar year.
For example, if I'm "빠른95", which indicates that I was born in 1995 between January and the end of February, I get to befriend and hang out with the ones born in 1994.
(Please note that Koreans typically make friends within the same narrow age band.)
As a native Korean speaker who has used this language for more than two good decades with Koreans, I'd count this as the primary reason why I love hanging out with English and Chinese speakers these days.
The language barrier between two Korean strangers (irony) is much thicker than when I talk to a passerby in English or Chinese asking for directions.
> Please note that Koreans typically make friends within the same narrow age band.
Everyone does to some degree or another. For example, Americans do this through middle school. It's not really until high school where you start mingling with other grades.
That's very interesting, thanks for mentioning it! I didn't know about that, hence I didn't include it. But it makes sense, I have sometimes noticed people asking whether the other was born early or late into the year, and change their standing based on that, but didn't know that that could have been because of the "빠른" system.
Being a 빠른 can put you in a slightly sticky situation, especially when combined with the strict hierarchy rules regarding honorifics (존댓말).
Typically, throughout middle school to university days, a South Korean individual is expected to use the honorific version of the language when speaking to someone older. This version involves a completely different set of vocabulary and grammar, used to show "respect to others" and sound "polite," effectively preventing one from being casual with others. Whereas a 빠른 is allowed to befriend people one year above their age and gets to use "반말" (the casual version of the language) with those peers.
A social complication can arise when two groups with a monotonic increase in age meet. Say, friend group A comprises a regular 95 and a 빠른 95. They became friends in high school and talk casually. Then there's group B, which consists of a regular 95 and a 빠른 96, who also became friends in high school. Now, when groups A and B start hanging out together at university, the 빠른 95 has to decide whether to use honorific or casual speech with the regular 95 and the 빠른 96.
The ones stuck in the middle, in this case the 빠른95, gets called "족보 브레이커", which roughly translates to "pedigree breaker".
Just so you know, the system has been adjusted a while ago so that new 빠른 no longer occur.
And it wouldn't matter anyway; the changes from the top are already having their effect, elementary school kids are starting to consistently use 만 나이 with each other.
this is a thing in the us as well—- tho the cutoff is august or september normally. there’s no name for it, but it’s real.
and american kids are also way more like to make friends in their school peer age group. i believe this is almost a universal truth for the first world
Absolutely true in elementary/middle school, and even a bit in the early parts of high school and college (upperclassmen don't want anything to do with "freshmen"), but in the adult world, I don't think age gaps of 5+ years between friends are uncommon at all.
Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load.
In Korean, it works similarly as well though, most people nowadays are quite used to not incorporating Hanja in sentences over multiple decades, to the point where it would be impractical to mingle Hanja in Korean.
> Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load.
Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago.
The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese. It is already a problem in Chinese, but even worse in Japanese due to the smaller phonetic repertoire.
> The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese
So you're saying that verbal communication doesn't work in Japan and everyone just texts each other? "I'm sorry Mr Honda Kawasaki but due to how Japanese language works it's impossible for me to tell whether you want to buy three oranges or cook prostate cancer, please send me a letter" "Okay I will fight the sky colander"
Most countries at some point had to simplify their languages in order to promote literacy. Korea didn't ditch hanja just for shits and giggles, it did so in order to make it easier for schools. Japan never really had to face this problem at a scale that required complete removal of kanji because by the time people got such ideas Japan was already quite literate, so kanji stuck around. Plus, Japan is an extremely conservative society, they only ever change anything once all other options have been exhausted.
Same reason why English spelling is so ridiculous. It's not that English is such a unique language that it absolutely requires a spelling system that doesn't make sense and effectively forces everyone to memorize each word's spelling aside from it's pronounciation (wow just like kanji), it's just that English spelling has never been a problem to a degree that required a systematic solution, so now we're stuck with what we have. If we suddenly decided to make a giant reform of English spelling to have it reflect actual pronounciation, the resistance would be equally giant.
I actually live in Japan, I am trying to learn the language, and it is royal PITA. Heck, every single Japanese person I have asked has complained about their language being so ridiculously difficult. They wish their language was easier, but as you say it is also such a conservative society that it will never change.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with a highly phonemic spelling. My girlfriend is trying to learn it, and she always commends how once you learn a few basic rules, you can read anything.
> Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load",
Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English while afflicted with a strangely selective amnesia hole for entire words. Such that reading a word like 'shoe' would not instantly evoke an association with a piece of footwear but would have to be (admittedly very rapidly) sounded out letter for letter each time, instead of scanning the entire unit as a whole.
That's what reading a word normally represented by a familiar kanji character but "expanded" into hiragana feels like, and slightly more pronounced if it's, for some hipster reason, written in katakana.
> Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji
And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults?
As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
> every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write
This stupid phenomenon is due to the fact that Japanese Gov decided to teach only arbitrarily 1000 kanji to school kids and this number decrease every 10 years.
> People complain that kanji being used in the prefecture are not include in the list (no included so no obligation to teach in school) e.g.阪鹿奈岡熊梨阜埼茨栃媛, so the gov finally add those to the next revision.
While at the same time Chinese people are learning 3X more. No one ever complain about the difficulty of Chinese character after all.
Sounds like an education problem. Traditional Chinese, which is the defacto language used in Taiwan doesn't even have any comparable phonetic alphabet (beyond a phonetic pronunciation alphabet in the form of bopomofo) such as hiragana and katakana.
It's effectively "all kanji" as it were, and yet Taiwan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and I never met any Taiwanese when I lived there (for years) that complained that Chinese was too difficult.
In Chinese tho with extremely rare exceptions all the characters have only one reading.
Japanese has onyomi and kunyomi. The onyomi also come from different periods in Chinese so there's multiple onyomi for most Kanji.
Then you get two Kanji words that come in all varieties. Most are onyomi + onyomi, but you get some that are onyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + onyomi.
There's also not really any solid rules to it, and when there are, there are plenty of exceptions.
It's a real nightmare of a system. A fun one though.
And then you have nanori, the non-standard readings used for people and places names that are impossible to read without furigana or already knowing the name. One that really surprised me was a village called 愛子 (a common female name read as "Aiko") near Sendai but in this case read as "Ayashi".
Yes, so basically the arguments around lack of Kanji leading to worse readability are actually hitting upon the fact that readability suffers short-term not because Kanji enhances readability,but because they're simply not used to processing the language only through kana, and that were they to acclimatize to that, it becomes readable again and in fact easier to read than before.
Kana would be slightly easier to read if we spent as much time reading in Kana as we have in Kanji.
Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.
I don't think so. Kana just don't have enough entropy compares to Kanji. A kanji can be compose with up to twenty strokes with high variety of stroke patterns. Those excessive complexity make it identifiable even in extreme situations. (Blurry or tainted or whatever situation). In some case, a kanji with half of its size masked still be decoded without any ambiguity. But this will never work with an voice based language.
How does turning off TC keep your car from killing you in the rain? just out of curiosity. In my experience, TC has been very helpful, as it means I don't have to worry about feathering the gas pedal in heavy rain.
Some implementations of TC/ESC will abruptly brake one or more of the wheels in on/off pulses, using the ABS pump, disrupting an otherwise balanced cornering car.
Yes. I won't buy a car I cannot disable ABS on, because it extends braking distances, plus by doing so, all traction control is off.
But I honed my non-ABS driving in my teenage years, pre-ABS (for most cars at the time), on rural dirt roads, and on roads with constant snow and ice, and driving on frozen lakes.
Of course, if you disable ABS, you may end up without any form of real differential, as many cars use ediff tech, which is horrible, so I now have to also vet for a true hardware, non-open diff.
ABS has nothing to do with improving braking distance. Any skilled driver, who knows their car, can do far better.
For skilled drivers, ABS extends braking distance.
What ABS does, is let a driver mash the pedal on full, and still steer around obstacles. Something a skilled driver can still do.
One problem with these tests, is that if you disable ABS on some cars, the proportioning valve is still set to 50/50, front/rear, meaning you start to lose traction on the rear wheels, and skid. This causes a loss of control, and reduced braking power.
Cars prior to ABS has the capability to adjust rear brake pressure by weight, a typical default of 70/30.
Some card have ABS controllers which you can disable ABS functionality, but still retain proportioning control. Cars with proper diffs are often like this.
Is this true with a modern abs, and have you tested your own capabilities vs abs? It can act on individual wheels which no human can do with a regular brake pedal.
I know of ABS capabilities, and extensively tested ABS on/off on every car I own.
ABS is about steering when people slam the brake pedal down, it is not about improving braking distance.
Outside of how it doesn't help on pavement, it is a absolute disaster on gravel, and deep snow.
For example, on gravel if you lock up the brakes, you dig in. Gravel builds in front of the tire, and your tire sinks. ABS won't allow this, and so on gravel I can stop from high speed fast, while ABS actively works to deny my ability to stop.
On snow, if you briefly lock up the brakes, snow builds in front of the wheel. You can then spin the wheels to turn, let up, and the car will instantly take off in a new direction. ABS actively prevents this.
ABS was never, ever designed to reduce braking distance. It was designed to allow people to steer while braking.
The video I linked shows drivers (one professional, one not) achieved stopping distance in a straight line with and without abs in a fairly recent car.
Gravel and snow I understand - but at least for me are pretty big exceptions.
What kind of cars do you people drive where "feathering the gas pedal in heavy rain" is a necessity? My 90HP FWD car with very little weight on the front can still accelerate faster in rain without wheelspin than I'd ever need when driving normally.
My car is front-biased AWD and is very predictable in the heavy rains we have here during winter that can leave an inch or more of standing water on the roads. Plus I grew up driving older cars that didn't even have ABS, let alone TCS. That means my habit is inducing oversteer to save myself, against the tendency of TCS to induce understeer that most drivers feel more comfortable with. I'd much rather spin out than slide off the road. When TCS activates in the rain that can be dangerous, because I hit the brakes to dip the nose before steering in, only for TCS to detect I'm slipping and jerk the car in the opposite direction (IE, towards the thing I'm avoiding). After having that happen two or three times it became habit to turn off TCS, and I haven't had a scare like that since.
Fwiw, I don't think that's a fundamental issue with the technology or anything... it could be the implementation in your car is just kind of bad.
The traction control in my car is more than happy to let me toss the car around any which way as long as I'm not giving it some sort of input that I want it to be doing something else. It seems to respond not to "the car is doing something potentially bad" but "there's a mismatch between what the driver is commanding and what the car is doing".
Steer into a spin and I can keep the car spinning, steer a bit against it and I can skid it sideways, little-left-little-brake-no-brake-snap-right and I'm tossing the car around 180 degrees. The only point it will cut in is if, during one of these, I point the wheel some direction and hit the gas indicating I want to be going that way now--it will correct the skid/slid/spin and get the car going that direction.
I have a display up during the winter that shows TCS activation and individual wheel slippage so I know when I'm driving beyond the limits of my actual traction. In 6 or 7 years of driving it in Canadian winters really the only time I ever see it cutting in is getting the car moving from stopped on ice.
Try getting off train/tram tracks in snow and ice with traction control off. In many situations you absolutely need to let the wheels slip (but not too much) in order to get around instead of cutting off most of the traction.
The Quake series' source code is a must-read if you wish to learn how to create a fast-paced multiplayer game from scratch. Obviously, you can use Mirror or other 3rd-party middleware nowadays, but reading it gave me multiple layers of knowledge regarding the netcode aspect of a game.
Ideally, He could have kept a low profile regarding WW2-related issues and events just like the previous emperor. It's not a must to pay a visit to such shrines. I wonder what would happen if a politician regularly visits a church that worships Adolf Hitler and other war criminals.
For example, if I'm "빠른95", which indicates that I was born in 1995 between January and the end of February, I get to befriend and hang out with the ones born in 1994.
(Please note that Koreans typically make friends within the same narrow age band.)