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Message no. 1
From: Erik Jameson <erikj@****.COM>
Subject: [SR3] Languages
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 19:14:24 -0400
Okay, to get out of the ranting mode...

I was pondering something last night as I thought about how I was going to
convert my oldest PC, the Dark Stranger, to SR3.

He's a high-powered mage and it got to the point it became, for various
reasons, advantageous to learn a pile of other languages. So he's got like
six or eight languages round about Rating 3.

Now, SR3 has a separate rating for speaking a language and reading one.

Upon consideration, it makes more sense that those extra language would
probably be better as being a Read/Write version and not the speaking
version, since the languages were taken to understand various grimoires.

Could this be done? I'm not positive it is allowable by the rules or that
it even makes that much sense. I'm currently thinking that I'll do
something like Arabic: 1, Arabic (R&W): 3 or something similar.

Thoughts?

Erik J.
Message no. 2
From: Patrick Goodman <remo@***.NET>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 18:24:12 -0500
>Could this be done? I'm not positive it is allowable by the rules
>or that it even makes that much sense. I'm currently thinking that
>I'll do something like Arabic: 1, Arabic (R&W): 3 or something similar.

Sounds reasonable to me. It strikes me as being analogous to the
various B/R skills out there.

---
(>) Texas 2-Step
El Paso: Never surrender. Never forget. Never forgive.
Message no. 3
From: Steve Collins <einan@*********.NET>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 09:29:29 -0400
}}snip background{{

>Could this be done? I'm not positive it is allowable by the rules or that
>it even makes that much sense. I'm currently thinking that I'll do
>something like Arabic: 1, Arabic (R&W): 3 or something similar.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>Erik J.
>

I don't think it's specifically prohibited you could either take the
language at a 2 giving you a 1 in the associated R/W skill and then raise
only the R/W skill, or alternatively consider the 50% rating to go both
ways. That is take the R/W skill at a 6 which gives you a 3 in the spoken
part of the skill.

Steve
Message no. 4
From: The Bookworm <Thomas.M.Price@*******.EDU>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 08:26:30 -0500
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Steve Collins wrote:
> I don't think it's specifically prohibited you could either take the
> language at a 2 giving you a 1 in the associated R/W skill and then raise
> only the R/W skill, or alternatively consider the 50% rating to go both
> ways. That is take the R/W skill at a 6 which gives you a 3 in the spoken
> part of the skill.

That last idea(reverse the ratio of written to spoken skill) sounds preety
good. I know that after my 4.5 years of latin i was a good reader of
latin and wrote it decently but i had a lot more trouble speaking and
understanding the spoken language. But since the main way you use latin
is to translate old writen texts the fact i had trouble with the spoken
language was of no consiquence.

Thomas Price
aka The Bookworm
thomas.m.price@*******.edu
tmprice@***********.com
Message no. 5
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:02:50 -0400
> That last idea(reverse the ratio of written to spoken skill) sounds
> preety
> good. I know that after my 4.5 years of latin i was a good reader of
> latin and wrote it decently but i had a lot more trouble speaking and
> understanding the spoken language. But since the main way you use
> latin
> is to translate old writen texts the fact i had trouble with the
> spoken
> language was of no consiquence.
>
Plus no one speaks Latin anymore.

I agree, it is also a consideration of how you learn and
use the language. If you are learning through immersion in the culture
you'll be pretty good at speaking but dubious at writing and reading
(more so with non European languages that don't use a standard 26 letter
alphabet, Cyrillic for example). If OTOH you learn from a book with
minimal speaking (ala French class in high school), you might be ok at
reading and writing but suck at speech.

This gap also widens (as I mentioned above) with
languages with different alphabets than your native tongue. Even if I
fully understood spoken Arabic, I would have no idea how to read it
since I don't know what their alphabet look like. French however uses
the same alphabet and I can wing it to some degree.

On a related topic, this would be a good distinction and
a few modifiers for a spell to read, write or speak a given language
with no actual knowledge of it.

Speak Language, Write Language, Read Language.
+2 target if different alphabet from your native tongue.

-1 target if language is in the same family (romance,
Germanic, etc.) as your native tongue.
Message no. 6
From: Adam Getchell <acgetchell@*******.EDU>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:33:56 -0700
> This gap also widens (as I mentioned above) with
>languages with different alphabets than your native tongue. Even if I
>fully understood spoken Arabic, I would have no idea how to read it
>since I don't know what their alphabet look like. French however uses
>the same alphabet and I can wing it to some degree.

Not necessarily. I picked up Hangul (written Korean) after only a few days
of study. It of course has a completely different alphabet than any western
one. I can read/write Korean pretty well, I just don't have a clue as to
what the words mean necessarily. Of course, Hangul is possibly the most
elegant alphabet devised, purpose-made by King Sejong the Great in the 14th
century to free the commoners from the tyranny of learning Chinese
characters.

(Apologies if that offends anyone, that is a cultural perspective. But it
is true - Chinese characters are difficult to learn, and write, well.)

Also, apparently, you can have a good accent without speaking the language
well. At least, my Korean friends say I have a good accent (from Seoul, to
be precise) but I know only a few phrases. The same has been said of my
Mandarin.

--Adam

acgetchell@*******.edu
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu
Message no. 7
From: Kama <kama@*******.NET>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:34:30 -0400
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998 bryan.covington@****.COM wrote:

>
> Plus no one speaks Latin anymore.
>

Not neccesarily true. I found three years of high school Latin and two
years of college Latin very handy when travelling in Europe during my
junior year. Not only did it help me understand and be understood in
Spain, but I had an easy time of it in Vatican City being able to actually
ask someone where the bathrooms were and understand the directions!

- Kama (who can't believe how long its been since that Junior year . . .
:))
Message no. 8
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:38:53 -0400
> > This gap also widens (as I mentioned above) with
> >languages with different alphabets than your native tongue. Even if I
> >fully understood spoken Arabic, I would have no idea how to read it
> >since I don't know what their alphabet look like. French however uses
> >the same alphabet and I can wing it to some degree.
>
> Not necessarily. I picked up Hangul (written Korean) after only a few
> days
> of study. It of course has a completely different alphabet than any
> western
> one. I can read/write Korean pretty well, I just don't have a clue as
> to
> what the words mean necessarily. Of course, Hangul is possibly the
> most
> elegant alphabet devised, purpose-made by King Sejong the Great in the
> 14th
> century to free the commoners from the tyranny of learning Chinese
> characters.
>
Isn't that what I said?

> (Apologies if that offends anyone, that is a cultural perspective. But
> it
> is true - Chinese characters are difficult to learn, and write, well.)
>
I've never heard of anyone claiming that leaning Chinese
was easy. In fact most students of the language I know claim that while
they enjoy the language they hate it for its complexity.

> Also, apparently, you can have a good accent without speaking the
> language
> well. At least, my Korean friends say I have a good accent (from
> Seoul, to
> be precise) but I know only a few phrases. The same has been said of
> my
> Mandarin.
>
I would think this would vary wildly from person to
person.
Message no. 9
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 10:47:52 -0700
At 19:14 8/19/98 -0400, Erik Jameson wrote:
>I was pondering something last night as I thought about how I was going to
>convert my oldest PC, the Dark Stranger, to SR3.
>
>He's a high-powered mage and it got to the point it became, for various
>reasons, advantageous to learn a pile of other languages. So he's got like
>six or eight languages round about Rating 3.
>
>Now, SR3 has a separate rating for speaking a language and reading one.
>
>Upon consideration, it makes more sense that those extra language would
>probably be better as being a Read/Write version and not the speaking
>version, since the languages were taken to understand various grimoires.

Frankly, I think the Read/Write skills shouldn't be per language; they
should be per alphabet. It's bad enough that the folks with skillsofts
can run rings around the magicians when it comes to languages, but now
with SR3 you have to spend karma on multiple skills!

When my campaign converts over to SR3, one of the house rules will be
that Read/Write is per alphabet-- examples would be Latin (which
lets you read all the languages that use a few unusual characters
in addition to the standard Latin set), Greek (includes Cyrillic),
Kanji (I hear that folks who don't speak a common language in China
can still read each other's writing!), Arabic, and so on. I'm
still not sure whether to make kana (as in hiragana and katakana,
the Japanese syllabic alphabets) part of Read/Write Kanji or not...

If your campaign uses such house rules, you'd only need to pick
up Read/Write for the appropriate alphabets, so your Read/Write
Latin would cover English, French, German, Italian, Spanish,
Norwegian, ... Read/Write Greek to deal with Greek and Russian,
and so on.

--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
Message no. 10
From: Erik Jameson <erikj@****.COM>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:47:14 -0400
At 09:29 AM 8/20/98 -0400, you wrote:
>}}snip background{{
>
>>Could this be done? I'm not positive it is allowable by the rules or that
>>it even makes that much sense. I'm currently thinking that I'll do
>>something like Arabic: 1, Arabic (R&W): 3 or something similar.

>I don't think it's specifically prohibited you could either take the

Well, since nothing of this sort was mentioned in SR3 one way or another, I
thought I'd take it to the list.

>language at a 2 giving you a 1 in the associated R/W skill and then raise
>only the R/W skill, or alternatively consider the 50% rating to go both
>ways. That is take the R/W skill at a 6 which gives you a 3 in the spoken
>part of the skill.

I'm thinking I'll going to do it/allow it, since it seems to make a certain
amount of sense, to simply reverse the skills. And since it actually
*limits* the PC in some ways without giving any sort of advantage (beyond
the skill that is) I can see, as a GM I have to kinda like it.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Erik J.
Message no. 11
From: "Ojaste,James [NCR]" <James.Ojaste@**.GC.CA>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:52:50 -0400
bryan.covington wrote:
> > Also, apparently, you can have a good accent without speaking the
> > language
> > well. At least, my Korean friends say I have a good accent (from
> > Seoul, to
> > be precise) but I know only a few phrases. The same has been said of
> > my
> > Mandarin.
> >
> I would think this would vary wildly from person to
> person.
>
It varies more widely from language to language - english is terrible
for inituitive pronunciation. "You" sounds very little like "your",
"sew" sounds very little like "hew" - basically, there's no
consistency.

Japanese lies somewhere in the middle. Each of the kana (their
"letters") is the equivalent of an english consonant and vowel pair, so
the pronunciation is obvious for the most part. There are, however,
cases in which some sounds are silent which aren't intuitively obvious
until you get used to them. Take "Sugoi desu" ("I'm
Terrific/Terrible")
- it's pronounced "Sugoi des". Not to mention that it's a great
language for puns (as the double meaning of sugoi above suggests).

Estonian lies at the "clean" end of the spectrum. Every letter has a
specific pronunciation which *never* changes. It's a purely phonetic
language - you can read it with no accent even if you have no idea
what you're saying, and once you learn the alphabet you can write down
what somebody is saying (if they speak slowly enough :-) even if you
don't know how the words are spelled.

James Ojaste
Message no. 12
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 13:54:02 -0400
> Frankly, I think the Read/Write skills shouldn't be per language; they
> should be per alphabet. It's bad enough that the folks with
> skillsofts
> can run rings around the magicians when it comes to languages, but now
> with SR3 you have to spend karma on multiple skills!
>
Wah. This is ridiculous. I use the latin character set.
I can speak really sorry french after 3 years of trying because the
school system said I had to. I can't speak Spanish or German or Italian,
but they all use the same character set plus or minus a few accents.
This is just silly from a real life POV.
Message no. 13
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 11:08:02 -0700
At 13:54 8/20/98 -0400, bryan.covington@****.COM wrote:
>> Frankly, I think the Read/Write skills shouldn't be per language; they
>> should be per alphabet. It's bad enough that the folks with
>> skillsofts
>> can run rings around the magicians when it comes to languages, but now
>> with SR3 you have to spend karma on multiple skills!

> Wah. This is ridiculous. I use the latin character set.
>I can speak really sorry french after 3 years of trying because the
>school system said I had to. I can't speak Spanish or German or Italian,
>but they all use the same character set plus or minus a few accents.
>This is just silly from a real life POV.

Sorry, I may not have been clear in my writing. I did not mean to
imply that Read/Write is the only skill you need to read and write--
you still need a skill in speaking the language! I just don't think
you need to spend the extra effort on learning to read and write in
the new language if it uses the same alphabet.

My own experience from learning about the same amount of Spanish as
you did French :-) in high school, picking up the Greek alphabet
as part of studying physics, and learning a little Japanese from
a roommate, does support my premise. It's much harder for me to
sound out words written in Greek than it is those written in a
Latin alphabet, and looking up kanji in a copy of Nelson's is
quite a task all its own.

--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
Message no. 14
From: David Foster <fixer@*******.TLH.FL.US>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 14:23:25 -0400
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Max Rible wrote:

->Sorry, I may not have been clear in my writing. I did not mean to
->imply that Read/Write is the only skill you need to read and write--
->you still need a skill in speaking the language! I just don't think
->you need to spend the extra effort on learning to read and write in
->the new language if it uses the same alphabet.

As long as you're not saying that you have to be better in
speaking a language than you are in writing it, I'll agree with you. I
can't speak Spanish worth a flying flip, but I can read what someone has
written in Spanish and know what it means most of the time. The same can
be said for my French and German (only more and more less so). Using a
real-world example, the two skills are seperate, but whose bright idea was
it to make them to different skills rather than just one skill with two
specializations (Written and Oral)? No flamage, just wondering.

Fixer --------------} The easy I do before breakfast,
the difficult I do all day long,
the impossible only during the week,
and miracles performed on an as-needed basis....

Now tell me, what was your problem?
Message no. 15
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 14:25:02 -0400
> >> Frankly, I think the Read/Write skills shouldn't be per language;
> they
> >> should be per alphabet. It's bad enough that the folks with
> >> skillsofts
> >> can run rings around the magicians when it comes to languages, but
> now
> >> with SR3 you have to spend karma on multiple skills!
>
> > Wah. This is ridiculous. I use the latin character
> set.
> >I can speak really sorry french after 3 years of trying because the
> >school system said I had to. I can't speak Spanish or German or
> Italian,
> >but they all use the same character set plus or minus a few accents.
> >This is just silly from a real life POV.
>
> Sorry, I may not have been clear in my writing. I did not mean to
> imply that Read/Write is the only skill you need to read and write--
> you still need a skill in speaking the language! I just don't think
> you need to spend the extra effort on learning to read and write in
> the new language if it uses the same alphabet.
>
I disagree completely. I don't doubt that you can sound
out or even speak the word. That is not the same thing. I can read
French all day but knowing what the hell I am saying it a bit more
challenging. You have to know the LANGUAGE not just the words. You have
to know what they MEAN. It is pointless to be able to pronounce things
if you have no clue what you are saying.

> My own experience from learning about the same amount of Spanish as
> you did French :-) in high school, picking up the Greek alphabet
> as part of studying physics, and learning a little Japanese from
> a roommate, does support my premise. It's much harder for me to
> sound out words written in Greek than it is those written in a
> Latin alphabet, and looking up kanji in a copy of Nelson's is
> quite a task all its own.
>
I am not saying you can't recognize the languages, or
maybe even manage a bit here or there. But seeing a sequence of letters,
even recognizable ones isn't that same as knowing the language.

Example: P - I - S - T - O - L

These six letters are identifiable. The trick is in
getting from six letters to, "A short-barreled handheld firearm".
Message no. 16
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 14:28:04 -0400
> real-world example, the two skills are seperate, but whose bright idea
> was
> it to make them to different skills rather than just one skill with
> two
> specializations (Written and Oral)? No flamage, just wondering.
>
They did. Say you had ooh a 2 in Japanese and you didn't
care so much for the writing but needed to speak it well. You
concentrate in Oral (to use your perverted term :). You get
Japanese(Oral) 1(3). Same as SR3. What they did away with was the
requirement of the 2 points of general skill and the option to do it the
other way (i.e. concentrate in written language), which we just put back
(unofficially).
Message no. 17
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 11:27:28 -0700
At 14:23 8/20/98 -0400, David Foster wrote:
>On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Max Rible wrote:
>->Sorry, I may not have been clear in my writing. I did not mean to
>->imply that Read/Write is the only skill you need to read and write--
>->you still need a skill in speaking the language! I just don't think
>->you need to spend the extra effort on learning to read and write in
>->the new language if it uses the same alphabet.

> As long as you're not saying that you have to be better in
>speaking a language than you are in writing it, I'll agree with you. I
>can't speak Spanish worth a flying flip, but I can read what someone has
>written in Spanish and know what it means most of the time. The same can
>be said for my French and German (only more and more less so).

I would say that has a lot more to do with your ability to speak English
and know the etymology of words than your ability to read and write it.
Alphabets just make it easier to figure things out because the accent
is so different when something is spoken in a different language.

> Using a
>real-world example, the two skills are seperate, but whose bright idea was
>it to make them to different skills rather than just one skill with two
>specializations (Written and Oral)? No flamage, just wondering.

I have no idea; I argued against it during playtesting...

--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
Message no. 18
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 11:33:39 -0700
At 14:25 8/20/98 -0400, bryan.covington@****.COM wrote:
> I disagree completely. I don't doubt that you can sound
>out or even speak the word. That is not the same thing. I can read
>French all day but knowing what the hell I am saying it a bit more
>challenging. You have to know the LANGUAGE not just the words. You have
>to know what they MEAN. It is pointless to be able to pronounce things
>if you have no clue what you are saying.

I said precisely that in the message you were responding to:
>> I did not mean to
>> imply that Read/Write is the only skill you need to read and write--
>> you still need a skill in speaking the language!

Do you have any problems with my premise that speaking skills should
be per language, and literacy skills per alphabet?

--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
Message no. 19
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 14:57:48 -0400
> Do you have any problems with my premise that speaking skills should
> be per language, and literacy skills per alphabet?
>
Ahhh...This is the clearest I have seen that premise
stated. I see now.

Although your point seems more relevant now, the issue
of meaning still remains. While the alphabet is the same and the words
may even be similar you still have do determine what the word means in
the respective language. The most I could see would be to make it easier
to learn languages from a family of languages you already know (e.g.
learning French if you know Spanish of Italian). But I think for game
purposes its simpler to do everything by language though.
Message no. 20
From: Max Rible <slothman@*********.ORG>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 12:55:26 -0700
At 14:57 8/20/98 -0400, bryan.covington@****.COM wrote:
>> Do you have any problems with my premise that speaking skills should
>> be per language, and literacy skills per alphabet?
>>
> Ahhh...This is the clearest I have seen that premise
>stated. I see now.
>
> Although your point seems more relevant now, the issue
>of meaning still remains. While the alphabet is the same and the words
>may even be similar you still have do determine what the word means in
>the respective language. The most I could see would be to make it easier
>to learn languages from a family of languages you already know (e.g.
>learning French if you know Spanish of Italian). But I think for game
>purposes its simpler to do everything by language though.

I agree that we shouldn't go overboard and do something like
Champions, where you have a half-page chart showing a whole bunch
of different languages and which families they belong to, and
tell how many experience points you need to buy them based on
the borderlines you cross getting from one language to the other.

I'm advocating that Read/Write tests are useful for:
* sounding out words in your head (at low levels)
* deciphering someone's bad handwriting
* figuring out a badly eroded inscription

Language tests, on the other hand, are for figuring out *meaning*.
If I were a linguist, I could probably come up with better
examples than these:

So, let's say Nick Nightmare just came out of the sewers of Madrid
and is looking for a bathroom where he can wash enough muck off
himself so he can pull the Really Big Guns activesoft out of his
chipjack and swap in his Spanish Speaking and Literacy linguasoft.
He spots a sign reading "Ban~os", and rolls his English skill
against a base target number of 2 ("bathroom" is a simple, basic
word), with a penalty of +6 for only knowing a moderately related
language. If he knew Italian, where the word is "bagno", it would
only be at +2 to target numbers.

Now, if he had been in Athens, he would've been in even worse
trouble. He might be able to make the leap from "loutro" to
"lavatory", but without any knowledge of Read/Write Greek,
he's going to have a lot of trouble figuring out that the
character that looks like a "p" is supposed to sound like "r"!
If he had a Read/Write Greek of 1, left over from physics classes
he took in high school, he just might have a chance to decoding
the foreign script.

(Disclaimer: I just pulled the word off a dictionary site at
http://www.kypros.org/cgi-bin/lexicon and may have transliterated
it incorrectly. I don't speek Greek...)

--
%% Max Rible %%% max@********.com %%% http://www.amurgsval.org/~slothman/ %%
%% "Ham is good... Glowing *tattooed* ham is *bad*!" - the Tick %%
Message no. 21
From: bryan.covington@****.COM
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 16:07:01 -0400
> >> Do you have any problems with my premise that speaking skills
> should
> >> be per language, and literacy skills per alphabet?
> >>
> > Ahhh...This is the clearest I have seen that premise
> >stated. I see now.
> >
> > Although your point seems more relevant now, the
> issue
> >of meaning still remains. While the alphabet is the same and the
> words
> >may even be similar you still have do determine what the word means
> in
> >the respective language. The most I could see would be to make it
> easier
> >to learn languages from a family of languages you already know (e.g.
> >learning French if you know Spanish of Italian). But I think for game
> >purposes its simpler to do everything by language though.
>
> I agree that we shouldn't go overboard and do something like
> Champions, where you have a half-page chart showing a whole bunch
> of different languages and which families they belong to, and
> tell how many experience points you need to buy them based on
> the borderlines you cross getting from one language to the other.
>
> I'm advocating that Read/Write tests are useful for:
> * sounding out words in your head (at low levels)
> * deciphering someone's bad handwriting
> * figuring out a badly eroded inscription
>
> Language tests, on the other hand, are for figuring out *meaning*.
> If I were a linguist, I could probably come up with better
> examples than these:
>
<snip example>

Sounds like anything more than the standard system is
gonna get real complicated real fast.
This sounds like something that should be left up the GM
to determine modifiers on the fly rather than trying to quantify it in
any sort of rule.
Message no. 22
From: "Ubiratan P. Alberton" <ubiratan@**.HOMESHOPPING.COM.BR>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 21:33:14 -0300
> I'm still not sure whether to make kana (as in hiragana and katakana,
> the Japanese syllabic alphabets) part of Read/Write Kanji or not...
>

I think it should be a separate skill... AFAIK, the two kana
alphabets are phonetic and have 50 symbols each. Kanji represents
ideas and concepts instead of sound and has around 4000 symbols
(!!!). Many young people in Japan have to read manga with a
dictionary :) .

Bira
Message no. 23
From: "Ubiratan P. Alberton" <ubiratan@**.HOMESHOPPING.COM.BR>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 21:36:57 -0300
David Foster wrote:
>
> On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Max Rible wrote:

> Using a
> real-world example, the two skills are seperate, but whose bright idea was
> it to make them to different skills rather than just one skill with two
> specializations (Written and Oral)? No flamage, just wondering.
>


It's like that because you can speak a language and still be
illiterate
in it...

Bira
Message no. 24
From: Oliver McDonald <oliver@*********.COM>
Subject: Re: [SR3] Languages
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 20:13:15 +0800
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998 21:33:14 -0300, Ubiratan P. Alberton wrote:

>> I'm still not sure whether to make kana (as in hiragana and katakana,
>> the Japanese syllabic alphabets) part of Read/Write Kanji or not...
>>
>
> I think it should be a separate skill... AFAIK, the two kana
>alphabets are phonetic and have 50 symbols each. Kanji represents
>ideas and concepts instead of sound and has around 4000 symbols
>(!!!). Many young people in Japan have to read manga with a
>dictionary :) .

I would argue that, yes, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji are all different, but to read
japanese you need all three, as all are used intermingled. Your numbers by the way are
a little off. The two Kana's have 45 symbols, plus modifiers, and Kanji has in excess of
40,000 characters. Literate is defined as knowing a significant subset, 1940 IIRC.

However, that not withstanding, to require three different read and write skills would be
not be correct, because unlike the romance and germanic languages, the two kana's are
essentially phonetic, and all kanji characters are made up of radicals, and once you
know the radicals you can usually puzzle out the meaning of an unfamiliar kanji
character (or so I am told by those who can).



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