On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, Ohshima, Yoshiki wrote:

>   Edmund,
> 
> > Hmmm, the one thing an english-speaker needs to know about nihongo is that
> > nihongo is reverse polish while english is more like infix. This solves a
> > lot of the syntactic difficulties one may have with a particle-based
> > grammar. After that, there are serious fundamental semantic issues - In
> > particular, I seem to see meanings jump between "as", "in order to",
> > "because" etc. whenever I attempt to read japanese texts - cause and
> > effect are not clearly separated.
> 
>   I'm not sure what you meant by the word "issues", but the
> texts you have chosen must be written in that way, then.
> And I don't think it necessarily means bad.  I can't say
> more "because" I have no idea what you have read and I
> couldn't figure out from your article that you're saying
> that the issues are related to the Japanese language itself
> or not.
What I call cause/effect conflation is a recurring sensation I get when
reading (attempting to read) text written in Japanese. Even when I have a
translation, and look at the nihongo original I often still wonder how
accurate the translation is. Note that I can read at least 10 languages
well enough to get the bent of say a computer product description,and am
well aware that meaning does not always transpose perfectly. 


 > 
>   The concepts like the causality or the dualitism are not
> the only things that explain things.  Thinking about the
> complex systems where it is impossible to mathematically
> state the cause/effect chains, there can be an approach
> where people understand the things as a whole entity, rather
> than to be too analytic in detail.
Of course.

>   It seems to me that it is true that Japanese education
> system are not doing well to let the people to learn the
> latter approach, but I always want to be able to think in
> both ways.
I cannot say anything about the Japanese educational system -
I think every educational system serves to turn human beings into bonsais,
but that is necessarily off topic.

>   This is now completely off-topic.  So, what do you think
> about the eToy system?
If I could get a live demo of Squeak I might actually use it. I just
bought some more books, have done some tutorials, and love the ideas of
Smalltalk, but SOMETHING is missing. I need some *live* demos.


> 
> -- Yoshiki
>