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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Lmao, I just picked up learning Kanji again after like 3 years (never had time in grad school)
It is rough. But fierce repetition helps a lot. I can see the characters for "read a book" whenever I close my eyelids now hahaha
Once something turns into muscle memory you don't forget.
"Three, Two, One... NOTHING"
scratches head in Mandarin
No one has mentioned special 2, 两! It’s only for counting certain things.
I mean... in English we also use different words, such as "pair" and "dozen", for some specific numbers.
Two guys carrying a table?
What about accounting numbers? They'll make anyone cry
You don't divide by 0 in Chinese because he'll jump off the page and kick your ass.
Japanese enters the chat:
Left: numeral; middle: regular writing; final: certain formal and non-forgery usecases.
または in point 7 means either variant is OK
The last line says one can use the modern yen sign as well (though some would argue that it's bad manners in at least some situations, but I have no dog in that fight).
万 = 10k. Several countries use both 1k and 10k units (Japan traditionally was on the 10k side but had a lot of influence so now we see both a lot. A used car price might be 130万円 or something ( = 1,300,000 yen)
数字 通常の漢字 金額で使う旧字体（大字）
0 零 零
1 一 壱
2 二 弐
3 三 参
4 四 肆
5 五 伍
6 六 陸
7 七 柒（または 漆）
8 八 捌
9 九 玖
10 十 拾
100 百 佰
1k 千 仟
万 万 萬
円 円 圓（もしくは「円」のまま）
Chart from here that looks better: https://saiseich.com/business/kanji_kingaku/
We have a way of writing numbers in certain situations. Think of it like checks in the US where we write things in a certain way so that the numbers can't be easily changed to increase the value or something.
I see, the right column is used because they share their Chinese reading 音読み with the numbers, that makes sense. I don't know all of the Kanji, but the ones I know fit.
The concept of zero is scary, so it's a wizard shooting lightning from all orifices. Makes sense.
I thought it was a ghost
Three pigs
Two pigs
One pig
Zero pig ? Or zero pigs?
Honest question. Do we pluralize nouns of zero count? Or should they be singular?
It's plural, but not because there are many pigs.
"How many pigs are there?" And answering with "There are no pigs" use the noun "pigs" in the same way. They are referring to the "pig" category or kind. When answering knowing the actual count, it's a specific number or token.
"are" makes it plural
if the sentence had "is" instead, it would be singular: there is no pig
But they are asking with the number zero specifically. "There is zero pig" is not how we speak.
good point. "there is zero [noun]" doesn't work whether the noun is plural or not. only when you use "no" instead of "zero"
i've only ever spoken english and it still confounds me. why do we say "hands" but we don't say "foots"?
why don't "good" and "food" rhyme?
why does "feed" become "fed," but "weed" becomes "weeded"? meanwhile "wed" and "wedded" mean the same thing
lol
What about this one?
1 = 壹 2 = 貳 3 = 參 4 = 肆 5 = 伍
These exist as well.
They're used in places where numbers should NOT be forged(i.e. bank documents...)
This is how they got their numeric meanings btw.
Their math homework must take forever
So 伍 is not 5, but five.
correct
Lil fella with smelly armpits and the buttsquirts?
Yeah líng 零 is pretty annoying as a learner of the language.
The top character is yŭ 雨 which means rain. Confusingly, this is the semantic component - the part that contains the meaning of the character. Explained below.
The bottom character líng 令 means order/command as a noun and verb. This doesn't add meaning, it is the phonetic component: basically a pronunciation cue.
It originally meant "light rain"/"falling in drops, like rain", actually. It began being used to mean "fragments" or "leftover part", then as "remainder" in the mathematical sense. Then, eventually, to mean 0. Another form of líng is 霝 which means raindrops. It has 3 kŏu 口 ("mouth") characters on the bottom to visually represent drops.
So, like a lot of Chinese characters, it really only makes sense when you understand the etymology - and even then it's kind of a stretch
The fact that such intricate characters can even be displayed in such tiny fonts is nothing short of obscene lol, I wonder if chinese phones all have that Assistive / Readability Mode where the text is enlarged and high contrast by default, because I can't imagine reading texts like that haha
As someone who's learned Japanese a bunch: once you're very familiar with the symbols, you don't look at every little line to determine what character it is, just the general shape. The characters are built by combining a discrete and smaller set of "drawings" (called radicals). So the space of possible characters is limited to those combinations. On top of that, not every legal combination actually exists. You won't suddenly run into 鬱, but with a different radical in the bottom left, unless you're playing a trivia game of "spot the mistake" (which can even be difficult for native speakers, just in the same way it can be difficult for native English speakers to spell some words they'd have no trouble reading.)
I would wager some misplaced lines wouldn't hurt readabiliity much in the same way we, in English aren't usually struggling to read a sentence even if some of the letters are swapped/missing or a "the" is duplicated, etc. I'm sure you've seen examples of that before in English (or your own native language if it isn't English).
Of course in some instances, even a tiny difference can change the meaning of a sentence entirely. This is also true both in English and logographic languages. Luckily our brains do a lot of subconscious work here too and figure out where special attention is and isn't needed by using context and knowledge about the writing system.
(Small caveat: of course, especially in languages, there are always exceptions to every rule. And also the brain can be tricked, intentionally or not, in a variety of ways.)
Sure, when you mean "zero" it may look a bit excessive. But it's quite adequate if you want to express "Void, the Dark Realm of Nothingness and End of All Things".
ps: Glory to ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ.