Comments on: Wait, so it’s the same word but… not? When does the madness end??

By: lenny

lenny — Fri, 12 May 2006 15:43:42 +0000

Actually, ATOK does support Osaka-ben, as well as quite a few other dialects.

These are all examples of 異字同訓. They can be a pain in the ass, but are useful once you figure out the differences. 収まる・治まる・修まる・修まる
If you study for the Kanji Kentei you will be forced to learn the difference. There is actually an official chart called the 「異字同訓」の漢字の用法 (produced in 1973) illustrating when to use which Kanji, or even just to write in kana.

By: Colin

Colin — Wed, 10 May 2006 07:48:20 +0000

Thanks for that post. Kanji is a powerful tool when you start to learn this type of thing. Another example I am familar with is 斬る which is to cut someone with a sword. This also means we need to be careful not to press the spacebar too many times when typing a word.

By: Tae Kim

Tae Kim — Wed, 10 May 2006 00:32:27 +0000

I tried resaving the post in UTF-8. If that doesn’t work, I have no idea.

By: Angela I.

Angela I. — Tue, 09 May 2006 18:54:39 +0000

Haha, this was probably one of the first things I noticed wheen starting to read kanji. But now, I’ve gotten used to all the madness of what the kanji does.

By: shadowsong

shadowsong — Tue, 09 May 2006 16:52:40 +0000

I syndicated your rss feed to livejournal as tae_kim. However, I'm having some encoding issues. The default page encoding is UTF-8 both on my home computer and on my work computer. At home, the Japanese characters all show up as western letters with diacritics. Shift-JIS encoding gives me what looks like non-simplified Chinese characters to my untrained eye - they're not the correct characters, at the very least. At work, all but your most recent post display correctly in UTF-8, but the most recent post displays the same incorrect way as they all do at home, with diacritic vowels. Here's Livejournal's copy of the post that's not working for me. Any idea what's going on?

By: Tae Kim

Tae Kim — Tue, 09 May 2006 00:22:02 +0000

By “not suck”, I was thinking more along the lines of “free”, “easy to use” and “doesn’t crash”. If it had support for Osaka-ben, I would upgrade that to pretty neat.

I heard atok was pretty good but somehow I just can’t convince myself that it’s worth paying $50-$60 dollars.

Of course, there’s also 留まる and 停まる too.

By: raize

raize — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:14:20 +0000

I’d just like to comment on the “ime – only MSsoftware that doesn’t suck.” thing. It actually kind of does, but no more or less than most. I recently had a chance to check out ATOK 2006, and it pretty much kicked ass. Google it up and check it out. And for kicks, see if you can type 聯絡 (れんらく) on your ime.

If you like, figure out the difference between it and 連絡.

Ooo, and how about 止まる and 泊まる?

Fun times.

By: Paul D

Paul D — Mon, 08 May 2006 13:22:16 +0000

I always get a kick out of how written Japanese imparts more information than the spoken language, and maybe even more than a typical passage in a Western language. Cool article!