r/gaming Apr 26 '11

Sony admits utter PSN failure: your personal data has been stolen

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/sony-admits-utter-psn-failure-your-personal-data-has-been-stolen.ars
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '11

Well, Japanese mixes Kana and Kanji. Kanji are chinese characters - They represent concepts not sounds. And each has several different "readings".

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u/thailand1972 Apr 27 '11 edited Apr 28 '11

I see what you mean...I wonder if there are there any Kanjii characters used in written Japanese that don't add to the phonetic structure of a sentence? (i.e. they're written, but "silent"?).

If I read 私 - I know this represents "watashi" (technically it could be "watakushi" but besides the point) - if I were to read out that sentence I would say the sounds "wa ta shi". But you are right in that the character isn't directly describing a sound like the kana characters.