only in japan can 千 be pronounced "sen" and mean 1000 when its alone, and when you make it 千尋 its pronounced "chihiro" and its a girls name......wtf
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Anonymous2007-09-10 5:05 ID:dx0tHz4h
Swedish has some funky tricks with numbers too. "Sex" in Swedish means both "six" and "sex" in English.
"En miljon" means one milion, but "en miljard" means one billion and "en biljon" means one trillion.
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Anonymous2007-09-10 6:29 ID:mQNjR8Cn
My favourite is 八百万. It can be read as 8 million but it can also be read as やおよろず which means myriad... But meh at the same time having a meaning attached to individual syllables can be really helpful for remembering words.
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Anonymous2007-09-10 8:08 ID:Jh7x1uWk
>>2
That's the same in Hungarian with the billion thing.
>>2
The OP has nothing to do with counting. The point is the character
for 1000 has a completely different onyomi depending on where it is used. Not that uncommon.
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Anonymous2007-09-10 11:02 ID:Jh7x1uWk
y, hanzi's a lot better in that aspect, btw
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Anonymous2007-09-10 11:23 ID:D3r3bClO
Well, this is common in any language.
In English, the character "o" is pronounced differently in "sofa", "couch", "bog" and "women" for example.
Other languages have other kinds of weird things, but since the kanji pronounciations are a different kind of weird thing in languages than we are used to it seems to seem worse to some people.
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Anonymous2007-09-12 15:13 ID:5Hxqv5z5
>>25
Yes dumbass. You gotta stop thinking of Kanji as the MAJIKAL RUNES OF WAPANESE WISDOM and understand they are simply symbols that represent words. Just about every other alphabet in the world has evolved from this same basic concept, the Japanese simply chose to preserve the ancient tradition.
>>27
Okay, now without all the "dumbass" stuff. If we suppose that each kanji represent segments of words, just like letters do in English, still it's an awful lot of mind-boggling pronunciation variations (with English is pretty easy to get a taste of pronuncation btw). Just for the sake of comparison: Chinese, which uses an eerily similar system of hanzi, is a lot more consistent about its pronuncation, even though it has to deal with the same set of ideographic stuff (and even more).
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Anonymous2007-09-14 2:04 ID:U1cy5ca6
>>28
Wapanese = White + Japanese
WTF would be the point of 和 + Japanese -_-
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Anonymous2007-09-14 12:04 ID:AK+A3mNG
Stop comparing it to English, retards. It's as if in FAGGOT, the GOT-part was pronounced "paint", while in FORGOT it was pronounced "zebra". And every syllable would be like that.
There is (almost) no relation between how a kanji looks and it's pronounciation.