Firefox on iOS is Webkit wrapped in a Firefox UI shell. It does not use Gecko, and so is very different from desktop and Android Firefox, much more like Safari actually.
And the fullscreen mode of Firefox doesn't seem to be very well integrated to me. It's the only feature that is still superior with Chrome. I wish there was a way to maximise screen space used by the page displayed itself.
Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.
> A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."
A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri something ki." Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean you can't describe it. Children are also very likely to just sketch out a picture of what they remember, even if it's incorrect, and you can usually figure that out.
> Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.
You're missing his point and English is a crappy example because it's spelling is an unmitigated disaster. For example, if you can read and vocalize the Greek alphabet, you can just ask someone what "νόστιμο φαγητό"* means because you can vocalize it. You only need basic knowledge of the alphabet there. Where as with Chinese/Japanese you need to have a good base of characters to be able to potentially vocalize an unknown character which requires much more work than learning a new alphabet.
Similarly in Spanish, which has great consistency, in that if you see a word written, you pretty much know how to pronounce it, and vice versa. English is pretty bad in that department, but still much better than Chinese.
While many Chinese characters have a phonetic component (in addition to a component related to the meaning), it rarely corresponds exactly to the current pronunciation (in Mandarin).
Furthermore, you can very rarely conjure the right character out of pronunciation and and some aspect of the meaning.
What is the advantage of using a different symbol for each word, that offsets the huge disadvantages of having to learn and remember a different symbol for each word?
Especially considering that the spoken language already distinguishes between all possible words through pronunciation (and context in the case of homophones.)
It's hard to explain. In English, spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are all more or less interrelated, right? In Japanese, writing (kanji) correlates to pronunciation and to meaning, but pronunciation and meaning are mostly unrelated to each other. Kanji is what disambiguates them.
So, obviously learning 1000 kanji isn't easy. But doing that is what makes it possible to learn 100,000+ words whose pronunciations and meanings would be otherwise largely unrelated.
It's quite similar to the role that Latin/Greek roots play in English. When you see a word that includes "-graph-" you know it probably involves writing, and similarly when a student of Japanese sees a word with "間 (kan)" they know it involves an interval or space. Throw away the kanji, and your student now just sees "kan" - which means the word will probably involve an interval -- or a barrier, or emotion, or appearance, or a tube, or a building, a warship, a crown, an ending, China, a publication, a government ministry, or.. you get the idea.
A lot of people think that and personally as someone fluent in Japanese (as a second, well rather something like fourth, language) I also sort of feel the same way. However if you look at it without the learned biases, there is a great example where a country with fairly similar language in terms of grammar and sounds that had used to use chinese characters switched to a phonetic alphabet and are not noticeably worse off for it: Korea.
There are way too much homophones and you don't always have the luxury of the context. Learning a symbol for each root (not word!) is not that bad, English spelling is almost as bad, actually.
Spoken language is quite limited compared to written Japanese.
Assuming yes, do their users have significant problems understanding the written text when pronounced in an audiobook? Are there well-known conventions or shortcuts or explanations that audiobook readers insert into their speech to signal the correct meaning of the word?
Do Japanese audiobooks provide evidence for or against the idea that doing away with kanji in writing would not harm understanding significantly?
Fiction audiobooks do exists (although not nearly as common as in English-speaking countries), but audiobooks can't possibly work with non-fiction and especially technical texts unless you are going to use English words for literally every single term. I mean, Japanese has only about 100 moraes and way too much words are just 2-3 moraes long.
Not if you want lossless tracks. Beatport's lossless surcharge is absolutely insane.
A good example is 'Ils - Bohemia (Remixes & Exclusives)'. [1] This album consists of 35 tracks which in MP3 format is £18.35 inc. VAT ($20 USD).
However, should you want it in WAV or AIFF format (they don't offer FLAC) and the album suddenly costs £41.54 ($54.32 USD) due to the ridiculous £26.25 surcharge. After adding VAT @ 20% the total comes to £49.85! It would be over 7 times cheaper to buy the physical CD from Amazon [2] and rip it yourself.
I don't understand how Beatport can justify charging these exorbitant prices for lossless tracks? Even their MP3 prices aren't great compared to the competition. [3]
Their target audience is DJs, and a lot of their catalogue is only available there or on limited-print vinyls. If you can buy an album elsewhere or on CD, don't buy it on beatport.
I remember friend having a lot of trouble using Beatport without flash.
Same goes with Soundcloud - works well 80% of the time, but then some tracks wouldn't forward and just keep loading forever. Must be some DRM involved.
The article points out that Bandcamp is trying to expand their Editorial staff. I think that's akin to "mission creep" or dangerously close to opening up "payola" avenues. Beatport turned un-profitable when it tried to do more than just being a download site. Now, they've (allegedly) returned to good profitability by chopping off the unwanted appendages that SFX had pushed downward. Personally I'm happy that they went back to doing what they did best...and coupons!
Spotify seems to be partially gearing for that. A lot of reasonable sized artists' pages have an "Offers" section where they sell records and other merch.
Spaces carry a lot of semantic weight, as do other components such as capitalisation and punctuation (most of which in use in Japan is borrowed from romaji anyway).
Well, in English spaces certainly carry weight, partly because the word unit has so many characters. In languages like Chinese and Japanese, units /are/ the characters (or a few of them). Particles then make natural separators in strings of kanji.
That's exactly why you need more than just hiragana, it'd be too difficult to tell what each character was parf of at speed. Something like katakana replacing kanji and hiragana for particles would be perfect.
Modern Japanese could learn a few lessons from hangul imo.
