The fact that English is all over the place in Japanese culture always seems to surprise native English speaking people, but no one else (because it's all over the place in our cultures too). Bergalad and Sumez got it right, though it's about culture imperialism I say (which is something Japan also are often "accused" for, what with anime and video games and the like, but they are still way behind US in that regard).
Great Hierophant wrote:
I know the Zelda 2 U.S. manual tells the story in a grammatically correct and perfectly intelligible manner, I assume the Zelda 2 Japanese story does the same for speakers of that language.
It does, and the English translation of it is very accurate too from what I can tell. Other than the fact that it changes temples to "palaces" and guardian deities to just "guardians".
ccovell wrote:
tepples wrote:
Even with only kana, Japanese still takes fewer characters than English to express the same idea.
Sorry to butt in here, but I have to add an asterisk (*) to this oft-mentioned fallacy.
The Japanese language tends to disregard concepts/grammatical features that are necessary in English. eg: singular/plural, continuous/perfect aspect, passive voice, conditional, and the clear "
who does
what to whom" sentences that we usually expect, and more.
Take a look at the classic phrase "Ouch! What do you do?" in Goonies II and wonder why it came out this way.
So, yeah, Japanese is shorter than English because it is
not expressing the same idea. It is expressing a shorter & simplified idea, and expecting the reader/listener to fill in all the gaps under ideal circumstances, with the attendant comical mistranslation and misinterpretations
But besides the fact that Japanese sentences often can be kept short, I think that since kana have more characters and each character contains more sound than latin letters does, must play a part in making it shorter too. I mean you can express (very roughly) the same sounds with less characters. Now of course Japanese sometimes has quite long words, so I'm not sure how much it actually saves, and it can't be compared to kanji which of course do save a lot of space when long words can be written with just one or two characters.
Bregalad wrote:
Quote:
Kanji usually takes a 16x16 cell to display legibly
Ninja Gaiden games has 8x8 kanji, although I don't know how legible they are since I don't read them ^^
They are quite hard to read because 8x8 requires sacrificing many details in most kanji. Ninja Gaiden gets away by only using either less detailed kanji like 木 (tree) that doesn't suffer from the low resolution, or by using only very common kanji that are easy to recognize despite lots of details are missing. The brain kind of fills in all the missing details automatically. When I was a beginner student of Japanese, I had a very hard time reading 8x8 kanji, and because you can't see all the details exactly, I couldn't look them up in dictionaries either.