[HN Gopher] The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language
___________________________________________________________________
The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language
Author : mrcgnc
Score : 218 points
Date : 2024-04-23 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aethermug.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aethermug.com)
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have
| been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse
| Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese) 7-9 tones, loads of characters,
| but after memorizing the first 2000-3000, you pick up on all the
| radicals, patterns, and meanings which help you fill in the gaps.
| Grammar is barebones: I only had to learn 5 to 10 different
| grammar rules for Chinese that I recall, and basically everything
| else is incredibly easy.
|
| Whereas in Japanese, I am learning 2-3 grammar rules per LESSON.
| Having each character pronounced a single way in Chinese is also
| super easy, and communication is even more direct than English.
| With Japanese, the cultural context, the phrasing, the end
| particles, and subtle vocab changes the meaning significantly.
|
| I think for me, it took 5 years to reach fluency in Chinese but I
| feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational
| fluency in Japanese. It just feels like an inefficient language
| for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?
| kingkawn wrote:
| Guess they weren't thinking of you when they made it
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Why does it have to be so complicated?
|
| I know nothing about Japanese, or Chinese.
|
| (Edit: actually that's not true, I learned this today [0])
|
| Maybe a little about language in general from studying
| linguistics (for compilers), but I think the answer to your
| question is;
|
| Because it is able to express things that we can't in English.
|
| That is beautiful, necessary and precious. The fact that groups
| of people exist in the world who can have whole ideas and
| worldviews that we barely conceive or express at all, seems so
| valuable.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457
| stickfigure wrote:
| I don't buy this at all. Maybe "can't express as concisely".
| bluepizza wrote:
| Exactly. Japanese _mostly_ doesn't have plurals in the
| English sense (it actually does have a few plural words),
| but you do use counters to specify quantities, which is
| just another way to express plurality.
|
| I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways
| gripping, but I find the realities of the language much
| more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways
| to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow,
| these people can build very reliable cars without
| expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Che haChe Lun gayoutsuarimasu.
|
| Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so
| the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can
| use context to derive the plurality when none is given.
| ropejumper wrote:
| My favorite simple example of this is exclusive "we". It's
| not a thing in most languages, but it allows a level of
| passive aggressiveness that you can't achieve without it.
|
| Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful
| as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we.
|
| As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique
| "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation
| that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity
| and resignment at the same time (besides other things.)
|
| The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to
| explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.
| eszed wrote:
| I'd push back on that, because you do get that passive-
| voice exclusive "we" in English, just as concisely -
| except it's expressed through stress pattern (as you
| indicate with your underlines), not vocabulary / grammar.
| I think that's exciting, because it gives English (as
| written) a lot of poetic ambiguity and (as spoken) a lot
| of performative - if you will - flexibility.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Why not "unable to express at all"?
|
| Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete"
| argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's
| incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped
| our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone
| literally _can 't think of_ an example.
|
| So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there
| any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could
| not be successfully communicated at all, say between a
| human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an
| advanced alien being?
|
| If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than
| literal depictions of physical reality, surely here _must_
| be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I
| am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)
|
| The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete"
| and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a
| Alpha-Centurion has one word for.
|
| Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for
| bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist
| thing here on HN?
| drdeca wrote:
| The issue I see with the "can't express at all" view, is
| that, if it can't be expressed, then how do newborns
| learn to speak the language?
|
| If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can
| learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why
| couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions
| in another language, and have the listener, by imagining
| those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?
|
| Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some
| concepts get attached to some words through ways other
| than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like,
| maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God
| intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for
| different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be
| formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense
| perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the
| human mind which one might intuitively associated with
| some combination of the previous two?)
|
| But, outside of things like that, I would expect that
| meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable
| collection of people, can be explained in any of the most
| common natural languages.
|
| (Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of
| meanings that are specific to one person.)
|
| Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could
| be communicated from one person to another child-person,
| which can't be replicated with another language.
|
| Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the
| Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate
| ideas which they could learn words for, but which we
| would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we
| were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't
| have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem
| likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it
| than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing
| between different human languages.
|
| We should still be able to describe the statistics of how
| they use certain words together though, and how this
| correlates to the world, or at least, the world as
| described through those concepts that we can comprehend.
| And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of
| what words they would use to describe the ways in which
| our description of how they use the words (including
| correlation with aspects of the world that we
| comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the
| words.
|
| There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly
| semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined
| except in terms of words that would be defined in terms
| of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some
| other collection of concepts as the base case instead?"
| and idk what the counterargument is), and which
| supposedly every natural human language has a word for
| each of these (though the word might not only mean one of
| these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other
| meanings as well).
|
| The idea goes that every word in any natural human
| language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these
| primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like
| 65).
|
| If this is true, then no idea in any natural human
| language would be entirely untranslatable to any other
| human natural language.
|
| But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if
| there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we
| (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar
| to the question you were raising)
| eloisant wrote:
| This is true for every language, you can never perfectly
| translate a text. Something is always lost.
| brabel wrote:
| I've studied translation and what was fascinating to me was
| all the terminology that a language uses that's totally
| linked to the culture in which it's used. For example, in
| Brazilian Portuguese, someone may say something like "show
| de bola" (literal translation: "ball show" using the borrow
| English word "show" for something like "great performance")
| even in seemingly completely unrelated context, like when
| you do well on your math homework :D. Because football
| parlance is ingrained so deep into the collective mind of
| the population that you can "transfer" what would normally
| describe a fantastic play by a football team to pretty much
| any other context you like.
|
| I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-
| specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try
| to give examples)?
|
| That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to
| translate... how would you translate that to English? You
| may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires
| you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA
| - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -,
| Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal
| translation may need to even consider recent (and not so
| recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious
| example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop
| references.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > know Americans have a similar relationship with
| baseball-specific words, right
|
| I'm not American either but a fairly obvious example is
| to "knock it out of the park".
| brabel wrote:
| I was thinking "in the ballpark" and "touch base" as
| well...
| arrowsmith wrote:
| In British English you can be "knocked for six", meaning
| you're stunned or shocked. It originates from cricket,
| where you score six points by knocking the ball out of
| the park.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| My point is that it doesn't need to be. Chinese is concise,
| simple, single pronunciation per character, very little
| grammar. It has no need for verb conjugations, tense markers,
| 3 different writing systems super-imposed into one like
| Japanese does, and can still express highly sophisticated
| thoughts and meaning that English cannot
| eloisant wrote:
| The Japanese grammar is pretty simple in fact, but it's very
| confusing coming from a European language because of how
| different it is. OK, once you get to the high level politeness
| (keigo) it can get pretty complex but you don't have to learn
| that until you're fluent in casual and neutral polite forms
| (teinei).
|
| I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-
| object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it
| easier than Japanese.
|
| I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year
| while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use
| it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand
| the grammar logic later on.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any
| of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day.
| There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese
| grammar in less than a week lol
|
| A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar
| notes I have from lessons - Various te forms, which have
| their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this
| - Volitional forms - X-nakereba, conditionals,
| should/shouldn't - the "te-shimau" form - kureru / ageru -
| Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb
| categories...which were so hard to remember - shika - bakari
| - youni - X-tokoroda - X-houga-Y - Command forms,
| conjugations, etc.
| eloisant wrote:
| Coming from French I don't consider there is any
| conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter
| what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you,
| they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of
| verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about
| gender and plural.
|
| Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the
| articles depending on their grammatical position in the
| sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)
|
| So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would
| still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple"
| grammar.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| There's conjugation but it's on different axes.
|
| One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on
| politeness/formality.
|
| There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can
| verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form,
| causative, etc, etc.
|
| The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.
| airstrike wrote:
| Portuguese has something like 50 different verb endings,
| Wikipedia tells me
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_conjugation
|
| In reality few people use half of these, I would think
|
| My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs
| entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian
| and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my
| (admittedly limited) experience with those languages,
| neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in
| Portuguese
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I don't know about Italian but the ser/estar distinction
| works in pretty much exactly the same way in both Spanish
| and Portuguese. I can't think of any difference between
| how Spanish and Portuguese treat those two verbs.
| airstrike wrote:
| You're right, I stand corrected. I guess I've been
| hearing too much Italian lately
| wk_end wrote:
| (background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read
| Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less
| so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish;
| Chinese not at all)
|
| Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.
|
| I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an
| inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to
| be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European
| languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely
| complex, weird language just isn't accurate.
|
| In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese
| grammar is _still_ relatively simple compared to most
| European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses,
| only two irregular verbs, a word order system that 's both
| pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of
| what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels
| more like what European languages would call idiomatic
| expressions.
|
| Even keigo, which _is_ definitely a pain point...English,
| for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating
| tone and politeness, it 's just not quite as explicit. In a
| way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese
| makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of
| any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and
| day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the
| Chinese grammar in less than a week lol
|
| What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional.
| It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with
| verb inflection.
|
| But Chinese _does_ have grammar, it 's just in the things
| that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese
| has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear
| corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the
| closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those
| silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows"
| which are more erudite wankfests than proper English
| grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know
| Chinese well enough to highlight them.
|
| The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European
| language (and you already know on), you can largely import
| your native language's grammar and expect things to work.
| Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's
| "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective.
| Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as
| word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is
| pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages)
| gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up
| some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and
| you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on
| teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be
| somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the
| grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we
| would say "it has been several days since I've seen you"
| whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense
| translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".
|
| The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are
| different from your native language rather than the ones
| that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what
| grammar is.
| dllthomas wrote:
| > I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of
| lions" or "murder of crows"
|
| Collective nouns.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Actually, from the Wikipedia article, it's specifically
| the "terms of venery"
| gtranger wrote:
| I'm extremely skeptical of your claims that you learned
| Chinese grammar in a week as a Chinese learner myself and
| I'm willing to bet you don't realize how much you don't
| know. The Chinese grammar wiki has 505 articles on grammar
| split across A1-C1 levels of the European Common Framework
| for language proficiency. This wiki is also non-exhaustive.
| This isn't even including the fact that Classical Chinese,
| which is a basis for many Cheng Yu used today, has a
| completely different grammar than modern Chinese.
| johngossman wrote:
| I haven't found Japanese grammar to be particularly complex
| either...at least compared to English or French. It is
| different. The 80/20 Japanese Book was a great help, as was
| "English Grammar for Students of Japanese" (the title is
| confusing, but it really is for learning Japanese, not
| English).
|
| You can get a sample of 80/20 here:
|
| https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/
|
| Pronunciation also isn't that hard (Kanto dialect, at least)
| compared to, say, French. The writing system is definitely
| the hardest part for me.
| ksdnjweusdnkl21 wrote:
| > I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach
| conversational fluency in Japanese
|
| Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress
| learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently
| in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation
| learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my
| mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in
| pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
| wk_end wrote:
| Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can
| learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native
| Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker
| would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that
| they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English
| speaker doesn't have with either.
| z2 wrote:
| The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that
| Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while
| Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g.,
| Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The
| three have an easier time learning any of the other two for
| different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending
| on the direction.
| rauljordan2020 wrote:
| What's hard about Mandarin aside from memorizing the
| characters and pronunciations?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Tones.
| gtranger wrote:
| The fact that it is a well-documented language that has
| evolved over thousands of years with almost no external
| influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of
| cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a
| majority of the western world. Many phrases used in
| Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that
| many people don't recognize is that a single character can
| embody many meanings depending on the context. It's not as
| simple as memorizing the character because you have to know
| which meaning a character is representing within a
| particular context.
| richarme wrote:
| Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to
| have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're
| missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)
| pm215 wrote:
| I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is
| an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching
| resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify
| as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar".
| For example, the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar
| lists ~niBi beruto as one of its grammar points, but this
| (meaning "compared to ~") isn't really new grammar, it's just a
| specific usage of particle ni, a particular verb and to for
| if/when (in the same way "compared to X" isn't new English
| grammar but is a pattern of use of a particular verb).
|
| My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly
| complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-
| European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common
| root of word origins to help the way there is between say
| English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose.
| The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and
| of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points"
| is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language
| teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you
| could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and
| taught as "grammar".
|
| Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in
| English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only
| determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it
| precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit.
|
| Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs
| the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't
| just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected
| forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an
| entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in
| surprising ways.
|
| Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".
|
| In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb
| and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not
| understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they
| struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.
|
| In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin
| speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do -
| if they mean "look", they will say Kan , and if they mean
| "see", they will say Kan Dao , inflecting the verb with a
| grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although
| they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking
| the English distinction.
|
| In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the
| mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely
| different words.
|
| I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they
| mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the
| same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they
| said Kan instead of Kan Dao while trying to speak Mandarin.
| pm215 wrote:
| What I mean is that, to use an English example "in
| comparison to X, Y" and "in contrast to X, Y" are not
| grammatically different -- the words are all doing the same
| jobs in the same structure, it's just a different verb. But
| they're both useful idiomatic patterns to learn. It happens
| that the standard in Japanese as a second language teaching
| is to call (the Japanese equivalents to) these different
| idiomatic patterns different grammar points. Personally I
| don't care too much about the terminology as long as
| everybody is on the same page, and because this is the
| standard in the J2L communities it's generally fine; but it
| does mean that looking at the size of the volumes of a
| "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" is a bit misleading about
| how grammatically complex the language is.
|
| I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch"
| is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the
| wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg
| wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or
| getting subject and object the wrong way round).
| Izkata wrote:
| > Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and
| "see".
|
| > In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same
| verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not
| understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and
| they struggle to use the correct word when speaking
| English.
|
| Isn't that like Jian ru and Jian eru?
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| Jian eru only means "look" in the "to seem" or "to
| appear" sense.
|
| Often in English, we have multiple words for sensory
| experiences to indicate how much focus is put into the
| action. "Seeing" a picture is less focused than "looking
| at" a picture. "Hearing" a song is less focused than
| "listening to" a song.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I wonder if that inspired the lyric in "Come Together"
|
| _Got to be good-lookin ', 'cause he's so hard to see_
|
| According to Wikipedia, "The lyrics were inspired by his
| relationship with Ono,"
| Izkata wrote:
| > "Seeing" a picture is less focused than "looking at" a
| picture.
|
| Isn't that backwards? Like in the phrase "they look but
| do not see", which was what I had in mind in my first
| comment. Isn't that something like "Jian rukedoJian enai"
| ?
| chaorace wrote:
| My understanding is that in many (but not all) cases
| they're gramatically interchangeable, but imply different
| levels of directness. Something like the difference
| between "I see you" (direct) and "I can see you"
| (indirect), with a general preference for the latter in
| polite conversation. It's not a perfect comparison
| because in English both usages of see are transitive, but
| hopefully the general idea comes across.
|
| Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that
| it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of
| Japanese verbs:
|
| - "Thank you" in the past tense ("arigatougozaimashita")
| conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered
| and that you do not intend to impose further.
|
| - "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("arigatougozaimasu")
| conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when
| the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not
| yet completely rendered.
|
| This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a
| simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial
| the difference between a completed "look" and an
| incomplete "see".
| bloppe wrote:
| I don't speak either, but would posit that the status of
| Chinese as an East Asian Lingua Franca caused it to trend
| toward simplicity, whereas Japanese insularity (physical,
| cultural, and political, especially during the Edo period)
| provided far less incentive to simplify.
|
| I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.
| yongjik wrote:
| "Complicated" is in the eye of the beholder. It looks daunting
| to someone who didn't grow up using a heavily inflected
| language, but also consider the reverse direction.
|
| "A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading
| person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room"
| means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used
| as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading
| the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a
| progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it
| with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be
| parsed differently.
|
| All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out
| which one is intended from context.
|
| ...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English
| speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!
| j7ake wrote:
| I disagree that complicated is subjective.
|
| Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English
| objectively.
|
| One way to ask this objectively is to ask, for every non-
| native speaker, which languages are easiest and which are
| hardest to learn?
|
| You can set this as a questionnaire and ask people to rank.
|
| You will find that Japanese is among the hardest to learn
| amongst nearly all cultures.
| gtranger wrote:
| Anecdotally speaking, my spouse is from China and she
| thinks it was easier for her to learn Japanese than English
| despite learning English from a young age and not having
| any formal Japanese education until college by which point
| she was already fairly conversational in Japanese from
| having watched variety shows and anime. We met while I was
| studying Japanese at college so I have a pretty good idea
| of where her Japanese ability stands.
|
| Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college
| just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese
| education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and
| video games. He says although he thinks his English is more
| fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier
| for him to learn.
|
| Point being? I think it's subjective.
| yongjik wrote:
| What you're proposing is not an objective measure, it's a
| popularity contest.
|
| And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find
| Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list.
| Sometimes with Arabic.
|
| Maybe Japanese _is_ a really hard language objectively, but
| these surveys aren 't actually showing that. What they are
| showing is that the majority of organizations that are
| doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of
| western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively"
| much harder than Spanish.
| filoleg wrote:
| > Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English
| objectively.
|
| I press "doubt" on the entire comment just due to this
| statement. There is no "objectively more difficult" for
| most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially
| not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first
| language.
|
| Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first
| language. They will likely find Japanese language to be
| extremely easy compared to almost any other language.
| Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge
| of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and
| pieces all the time.
|
| Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was
| signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the
| aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat
| functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-
| past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how
| to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it;
| cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at
| all), grammar overall doesn't feel overly complicated, etc.
| However, from what I've observed, native English speakers
| seem to struggle with quite a few of those things,
| including pronunciation.
|
| Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for
| a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For
| any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only
| Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks
| only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand
| at least half of what the other person is saying (despite
| speaking to each other in different languages, without
| having any prior knowledge of each other's language).
|
| All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing
| as "objectively easier", unless we know the person's
| first/primary language.
| nialv7 wrote:
| Does Chinese really not have that much grammar though? I think
| it may have fewer _formalized_ grammar, but there are a lot of
| rules that are difficult to pin down. And if you don't follow
| them, your Chinese will sound wrong to native speakers, even
| though _technically_ the grammar is fine.
|
| For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin)
| characters' tones change when they form words. The number one
| (Yi ) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't think Japanese is really any more grammatically
| complicated than any other language (the writing system is a
| different story but if you're comfortable with Chinese you
| already have an appropriate degree of Stockholm Syndrome on
| that front anyway). Different languages just move the
| complexity around to different places rather than getting rid
| of it. For instance, Japanese has only 3 irregular verbs in the
| entire language. Singular and plural need not be marked. Verb
| and adjective agreement aren't issues. And so on.
| komali2 wrote:
| I learned both Japanese and Mandarin over the last 15 years and I
| gotta say, this was an interesting article, but I'm mildly
| disappointed.
|
| > In particular, a whole realm of consciousness exists in the
| sphere of Japanese speakers that's perhaps truly unique in the
| world, more so than the sushi and the nature and decorum. It even
| allows for new literary techniques that are unimaginable in any
| other language.
|
| I was expecting some kind of insight into the super complex
| multitude of ways to say something as simple as "thank you" in
| Japanese, complex not only today but also historically. The
| linguistics tie into socioeconomics, class, and history, in a
| really fascinating way. A highly educated person has, in my
| opinion, a far greater "resolution" with Japanese than with
| English, in terms of what they can convey with a simple "thank
| you." Though I think English has the best "resolution" in most
| cases out of the three languages. It's extraordinarily difficult
| in Mandarin (especially if you aren't fluent and educated on top
| of that) to for example speak subtle differences such as "how
| would you feel about helping John with the dishes tonight?" vs
| "can you help John with the dishes tonight?" vs "It would mean a
| lot to me if you could help John with the dishes tonight" vs "I
| think John would appreciate if you helped him with the dishes
| tonight" vs "I need you to help john with the dishes tonight."
|
| Especially in sales and marketing, I really want that kind of
| granular resolution in Mandarin. It's a little possible of
| course, but you'll simply lose your audience. 99.99% of the time
| Mandarin speakers will expect to hear "tonight can you please
| help me with the dishes?"
|
| The notes about combining kanji and root characters to construct
| larger complex characters e.g. cousins male/female is
| interesting, but really in the brain of a native reader it just
| doesn't work like that, you simply memorize the meaning and move
| on. It takes the same sort of education to learn latin roots and
| the attention to notice them in English, as it does in Japanese /
| Mandarin.
| spidersouris wrote:
| So does that mean Mandarin can be considered as more "straight
| to the point" and as not featuring a system of "gradual
| politeness" compared to other languages?
|
| Does that also mean that Mandarin speakers will express
| themselves more or less the same regardless of the social
| status of the person they're talking to?
|
| It's funny because I've had the opportunity to speak with a few
| Mandarin speakers, and sometimes when they were asking things
| in English, I felt something quite different. I wouldn't say
| that they were not polite, because that was not the case in
| their attitude, but the way they formulated their request was
| rather direct and as if the result of the request was a given.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese
| (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing
| the ignorance of the author with the _very_ wide variety of
| languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on
| language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the
| spoken language).
|
| For example, they mention _furigana_ , characters that aid in
| reading Kanji characters
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples
| of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is
| the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is
| similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional
| semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification,
| examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of _shaddah_ in
| Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
|
| The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section
| sounds interesting until you learn that _all_ alphabetic systems
| arose from a similar process, e.g. _aleph_ was a drawing of an ox
| 's head, etc.
|
| The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's
| well-developed system of honorifics
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).
| bradrn wrote:
| > the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot
| in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language
|
| I'd frame this a little differently: the vast majority of
| languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists
| _must_ focus on the spoken language. For languages which are
| written more often, linguists can and do focus on the
| relationship between the written and the spoken language.
| keiferski wrote:
| Philology tends to be more focused on texts than spoken
| languages, too.
| Jun8 wrote:
| That's correct. A fascinating topic is how the written
| representation shapes the user's language, and, by
| association, their thinking - a written word version of teh
| Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you will. For example, for the
| aliens in the (story and) movie _Arrival_ , was their
| superior all-temporal thinking capability due to their
| language, or their interesting written form?
|
| Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in
| school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very
| good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've
| seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their
| pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative
| phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA,
| naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic
| and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was
| kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g.
| _cheese_ would be "ciyz".
| aragonite wrote:
| There's an case that can be made that "written language" is
| somewhat of a misnomer and that spoken language is to
| "written language" somewhat as music is to sheet music (or as
| chess is to chess notation), and so spoken language alone
| belongs to the proper subject matter of lingusitics. E.g.
| Saussure:
|
| > A language and its written form constitute two separate
| systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the
| latter is to represent the former. The object of study in
| linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the
| spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object.
| But the written word is so intimately connected with the
| spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the
| principal role. As much or even more importance is given to
| this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign
| itself.
|
| Edit: Apparently there's a term for this view:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism
| fenomas wrote:
| > they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji
| characters ... There are many examples of similar use
|
| TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's
| occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author
| having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader
| that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar
| features?
| brabel wrote:
| That felt to me to play the same role as "local footnotes"
| (those footnotes that sometimes appear not at the end of the
| page, but at the end of a short section or paragraph)?!
| fenomas wrote:
| The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking
| about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is
| speaking has _said_ one word but _pronounced_ it like
| another. That doesn 't really make sense in English but
| with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a
| normal way to think.
|
| So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote -
| e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where
| dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack
| in", and the effect is that the character has _said_ the
| in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a
| sense for what the slang means.
|
| But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has
| the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes
| very different. You can think of it as one word being in
| the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth,
| or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author
| telling us another.
|
| I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's
| how it works in my mind.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I think they are completely different.
|
| I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is
| a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note
| that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the
| text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's
| the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to
| another word.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yeah the Chinese language simply uses parentheses for that
| purpose. The convention is that each Chinese character is
| placed into its own parenthesis unlike a regular
| parenthetical remark. For example, if the one thing being
| said is ABCD but the other meaning, most likely an ironic
| one, is WXYZ, the author simply writes A(W)B(X)C(Y)D(Z). Of
| course this requires the two to have the same number of
| characters, which is reasonably easy to do.
| NoToP wrote:
| Tones in non tonal languages do this, which can make tonal
| languages very difficult because instinctively you aren't
| used to tones being used for in-band communication.
| fenomas wrote:
| Every language has various out-of-band features (gestures,
| etc). I was asking if any of them are similar to the
| (written) furigana usage described in TFA.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Do other languages have similar features?
|
| No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that
| feature either. Note that a written text displaying this
| feature has no spoken equivalent.
|
| Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common
| in Chinese internet culture.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| As others have said, this is common in Chinese writing. The
| unique thing about furigana is that it's typeset above/beside
| the kanji for the second meaning.
|
| Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will
| often use kanji for a concept but the sung _lyrics_ are
| expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| How is that common in Chinese writing? I haven't seen
| anything similar to gikun in Chinese. Outside of graded
| readers, I've not seen the pronunciation written above a
| character and in the case of graded readers, it would
| always be the expected pronunciation not a different
| pronunciation that carries a different sense. That's
| something I agree with the writer as being unique.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I definitely found Chinese was much easier to learn to read at
| a minimal level.
|
| Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are
| very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking
| characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually
| composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar
| is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.
| canjobear wrote:
| > Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics
| are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking
| characters up in the Unihan database.
|
| You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The
| characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics
| are profoundly context-dependent.
| kfk34k wrote:
| The characters are mostly 1-1. There are a few exceptions,
| but usually one is a lot more typical than the other, so
| reading it with the typical reading won't usually get you
| in trouble
| gtranger wrote:
| While not as egregious as Japanese where characters can
| have 15+ readings, the number of exceptions certainly are
| not few. Below is a link to the official table of words
| with multiple pronunciations in standard Mandarin.
|
| https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E8%AF
| %9D...
| Asraelite wrote:
| 872 in that list. It would be interesting to see how many
| of those exceptions are actually common and relevant to
| everyday speech.
|
| But yeah, even taking that into account, Japanese is a
| trainwreck compared to Chinese.
| gtranger wrote:
| It's worth noting that the aforementioned list is the
| unified pronunciation list that was published in 1985 by
| the Ministry of Education. The reason why you see some
| words only having a single (unified) reading in that list
| is due to the necessity of having to unify them in the
| first place, although there are still quite a few words
| with multiple readings. Keep in mind that there was no
| official language of China until 1932. Without going into
| detail about how pronunciations evolved with the change
| of dynasties and how China actually has 300+ spoken
| languages, the need for a unified pronunciation stems
| from the fact that many people in China, historically and
| even today, do not speak standard Mandarin as their first
| language. In other words, prior to 1985 it was much more
| chaotic. If you want a more up-to-date comprehensive list
| of words with multiple readings (Duo Yin Zi ) you can
| find it below (although this is not an official
| government list). I've linked directly to the common
| words of which there are 106 (although the page does not
| define what is considered "common").
|
| https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%9A%E9%9F%B3%E5%AD%97/
| 108...
| housel wrote:
| While I couldn't find any characters with more than three
| or four readings in this list, the Taiwan list (https://l
| anguage.moe.gov.tw/files/people_files/%e5%88%9d%e7%...)
| has one character with five readings (Zhu ) and one with
| six (He ). Still a long way from 15, though.
| canjobear wrote:
| The multi-sound characters are common in usage. For
| example Chang can be chang meaning "long" or zhang
| meaning "to grow". Xing is xing "to walk" or hang with
| no real single coherent meaning, appearing in compounds
| like Yin Xing yinhang "bank" and Xing Ye hangye
| "profession". All of these are very common usages. In
| context they are essentially never ambiguous, but if you
| are going through character-by-character it's not going
| to make sense.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think GP's assessment that Chinese is semantically clean
| and regular might not be completely correct, rather it's
| quite close to his primary that friction is much reduced
| compared to Japanese, or many others for that matter. It's
| very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to
| English for whatever reasons.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super
| close to English for whatever reasons.
|
| They are both felt to have gone through a lot of
| simplification. It isn't well known that they have
| similar grammars, for the fairly straightforward reason
| that they don't have similar grammars.
| BalinKing wrote:
| I imagine the parent is referring to both languages being
| analytic (although, IIRC, Mandarin is a fair deal more so
| than English).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| I think they meant there is only one syllable per
| character.
| gwervc wrote:
| Yes, author of the article obviously never tried to learn
| Sumerian, because the Japanese written system is quite regular
| and easy to deal with in comparison.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the Sumerian writing system presents some of the same
| difficulties of the Japanese writing system, like many signs
| that have multiple possible readings and a combination of
| semantic signs and phonetic signs, the total number of signs
| and the number of possible readings for them are far greater
| in Japanese, so the Sumerian writing system is easier and
| more regular than the Japanese writing system.
|
| The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due
| to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g.
| about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending
| on their context, because the last people who knew the
| complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are
| seldom completely certain.
|
| In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the
| existence of native speakers who can always show the correct
| reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can
| have great difficulties in reading any book published before
| WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes,
| replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for
| many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may
| not help enough a modern reader).
|
| However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates
| the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that
| still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than
| the Sumerian writing system.
| dduugg wrote:
| > "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until
| you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar
| process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
|
| My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design
| is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics,
| category, etc. of the letters themselves:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design
|
| This is known generally as "featural writing system":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
| yencabulator wrote:
| Hangul is an exception to many similar "historically true"
| patterns mostly because it was created so late. Hangul is
| more a single person's well-educated effort, not something
| that emerged over time from various local customs. The castle
| I grew up near is easily 150+ years older than Hangul.
| canjobear wrote:
| Chinese also has furigana-like characters that can be written
| next to characters, bopomofo or zhuyin fuhao
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo, although only taught
| and used in Taiwan as far as I know.
| refactor_master wrote:
| In fact, in Taiwan you're more likely to see Japanese in the
| wild than bopomofo.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While, as you say, there have been and there still are other
| writing systems that mix semantic elements with phonetic
| elements, or in which what is written does not determine
| completely the intended pronunciation (like in the systems that
| write only the consonants), there has been no other dead or
| alive writing system where these features are so extreme,
| causing a complexity and ambiguity even remotely comparable
| with the Japanese writing system. There is nothing romantic
| about this.
|
| Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be
| unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially
| in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of
| words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the
| native words, which is also a consequence of the writing
| system, through which these words had been imported.
| Chathamization wrote:
| > Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to
| provide additional semantic clarification.
|
| Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi
| (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese
| characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters.
| Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You
| occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana
| underneath characters in books that are used to teach children
| how to read. But it's not nearly as common as in Japan, and
| it's only (from what I've seen) used as a study aid for kids,
| not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.
|
| The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in
| Chinese isn't part of the language itself. It's like IPA (the
| dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they're used to tell you
| how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana
| (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the
| Japanese language.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Furigana are frequent in many technical and scientific texts,
| not only in children books, because such texts may include
| many words that would not be used in normal conversations.
|
| This was already true for the books published before WWII,
| i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained
| much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing
| reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be
| written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for
| which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the
| complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing
| style may reduce the need for furigana).
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Re: Anomaly 6 -
|
| Providing two versions of the same sentence bit is not that
| uncommon in non-Japanese literature as well. For example, War and
| Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French
| words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes. This might
| not be as user-friendly as _gikun_ as it requires glancing down
| and up the page a lot, but the idea is the same.
|
| Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps
| conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in
| some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly
| that, etc. This sort of thing a _very_ common in multi-lingual
| families.
|
| So that "Anomaly 6" is not that much of an anomaly if you think
| about it.
|
| PS. It was a good read regardless.
| senkora wrote:
| > For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language
| is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated
| via footnotes
|
| Amusingly, my English edition kept the French and didn't have
| footnotes. I read it as a kid and had no hope of understanding
| the French so I just skipped over it whenever it came up.
| basscomm wrote:
| >Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps
| conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist
| in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean
| exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-
| lingual families.
|
| So, in other words, adding in foreign words can add some _je ne
| sais quoi_
| ogurechny wrote:
| "War and Peace" has more complex history.
|
| First revision had nobles speaking French when suitable,
| because "everyone" could still speak some French in Tolstoy's
| times (just like people in IT all across the world link to
| original English documentation every day without even thinking
| about it).
|
| Then it was found that "everyone" meant "well-educated nobles
| like Tolstoy". For second revision, Tolstoy rewrote all French
| utterances into Russian (and moved most of philosophical
| sections to dedicated postscripts).
|
| Then it was reverted to original form (with later corrections),
| but with translations of French text in footnotes.
|
| Second revision was printed in "cheap" editions, third revision
| was used in higher quality ones. Later Soviet prints follow
| Collected Works version based on French-enabled revision (and
| thorough comparison of printed editions and manuscripts).
|
| Depending on the age of your translation and its source, you
| may find any of those. Some translators also chose to translate
| French instead of using footnotes.
| qweqwe14 wrote:
| There's an interesting piece of trivia regarding the title "War
| and Peace". The title in Russian is "Voina i Mir", where "Mir"
| can mean both "peace" and "world", depending on context.
| However, there's some debate regarding which meaning was
| intended by Tolstoy.
|
| I couldn't find anything about this on English wikipedia, but
| here's a rough translation from the Russian page:
|
| Before the 1917-1918 language reform, "peace" was written as
| "mir'", and "world" as "mir'". There's a legend which claims
| that Tolstoy initially intended to use the "world" meaning.
| Indeed, the second part of the epilogue has some thoughts about
| why the wars happen and how they affect the world as a whole.
|
| Despite this, every edition of the novel published during
| Tolstoy's life was titled as "Voina i mir'" (= peace), and the
| French version of the title as written by Tolstoy was "La
| guerre et la paix". There are different explanations of this
| legend. (explanations follow, can't be bothered to translate)
|
| https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%...
| kazinator wrote:
| Here is a nut:
|
| Jiu su (tadasu) ascertain; confirm; verify; make sure of
|
| Jiu u (azanau) twist (something)
| anthk wrote:
| >Mottainai
|
| Que aproveche/aprovechalo from Spanish. (May you take
| advantage/do benefit from something). Aprovechar it's the literal
| opposite of desperdiciar, to waste.
|
| >Exotic subject-object-verb
|
| Not for a Basque.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| pretty big death note spoiler
| samus wrote:
| It's admittedly less common, but also in Chinese lots of
| characters have multiple pronunciations. Sometimes they are
| associated with different meanings. Even if the other
| pronunciation is just considered formal or poetic, it can carry a
| different shade of meaning.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Nice article, but if I were writing it[1] I'd list having
| subjects, topics, and objects as first class nouns in sentences
| rather than just subjects and objects of sentences as a big
| fascinating difference from what I was used to[2]. And also the
| role of timing[3] in pronunciation with cases like _Yuki_ being a
| common girl 's name meaning "snow" and _Yuuki_ being a less
| common boy 's name meaning "courage" distinguished only by how
| long you hold the first vowel.
|
| [1] My Japanese is terrible and I couldn't come close to writing
| it, but lets leave that aside.
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese
| 999900000999 wrote:
| What a great article.
|
| I've long since given up on trying to learn( Mandarin is slightly
| easier for me, while Korean is even harder) , but I'll always be
| fascinated by Japanese.
| worldsoup wrote:
| Super interesting article, as a native english speaker who lived
| in Japan for many years and speak Japanese fluently, he pointed
| out a lot of things I always took for granted in Japanese (and
| never recognized as unique). One things I was hoping he would
| point out, and that I always found extremely unique in Japanese,
| was the giyongo (basically onomatopoeia). Japanese uses these
| extensively and the sounds can have extremely sensory driven
| meanings. They use these giyongo to describe physical textures
| (tsuru-tsuru is something smooth and slippery), hard to describe
| souns (pera pera is the sound of speaking a foreign language),
| flutently), actual sounds (tatata is the sound of fast running),
| a general feeling (bisho bisho is the sound of being soaked),
| specific actions (gussuri is the sound of being out cold), even
| specific emotions (zukizuki is the sound of extreme pain). There
| are hundreds if not thousands of these and I think they also make
| the language, as the author describes, 'rich and quirky and
| different'.
| wulfeet wrote:
| I remember talking to a Japanese coworker about some pain I was
| experiencing, and they asked if it was like zukizuki or - some
| other word.
| worldsoup wrote:
| ya there are many different giyongo to describe various
| states of exhaustion...probably due to the workaholic culture
| that is prevalent in Japan
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| I think there are different onomatopoeia for different
| kinds of pain. English equivalent is probably when a doctor
| may ask if a pain is sharp, dull, pulsating, burning, etc.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| I've started to suspect recently that an important secret of
| being able to sound natural in conversational Japanese is using
| a LOT of onomatopoeia words. I've considered mining all of them
| from jmdict and studying them specifically.
| worldsoup wrote:
| definitely, you really need to master these to be anything
| close to native level
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's a great idea. I love them because many of them are
| evocative of either an actual real sound, or play with some
| loan word. This makes them easier to remember, plus they
| don't need any kind of special conjugation.
|
| Abbreviation, repetition, and stacking bits of words together
| are a big difference between natural vs formal Japanese
| language skills. It's very Lego-like that way.
| tarentel wrote:
| I read a lot of manga and they often have a lot of hyper
| specific sound effects. I don't speak Japanese but always found
| this interesting. I guess this explains it. Thank you.
| zenogantner wrote:
| "Fifty Sounds" by Polly Barton is a book-length essay about
| this. Very entertaining read. Plus some Wittgenstein thrown in
| ...
| frereubu wrote:
| I bumped into another English guy who was teaching English in
| Japan and he made me laugh when he told me that the name of my
| favourite conveyor sushi restaurant in London - Kulu Kulu -
| meant "round and round". Sounds like it might be similar to
| these phrases.
| Delk wrote:
| kurukuru (usually romanized as 'kurukuru') does seem to mean
| going round and round: https://jisho.org/search/kurukuru
|
| Japanese isn't generally considered to have the equivalent of
| the 'l' sound from most other languages, and it rather has a
| sound that's perhaps somewhere between 'l' and a rolling 'r'.
| In romanized text it's generally written as 'r'.
| Transliteration isn't really unambiguous in the end, though,
| and there are multiple ways of romanizing Japanese, so while
| romanizing kurukuru as 'kulukulu' doesn't sound like a very
| common transliteration, it may be possible.
|
| Also, 'kuru' means 'to come', but I don't know if that's
| related.
| frereubu wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I'd heard about the r / l
| issues with romanizing Japanese but hadn't made the link.
| sova wrote:
| As the creator of Japanese Complete I would like to mention on
| this article about Japanese that we're hard at work making a
| multiplayer version of our curriculum to add to the excitement of
| learning Japanese intuitively. I really appreciate discussions
| about the beauty of Japanese and its contextually-dependent
| vagueness, as it is a wholly new way of framing the world when
| the situation itself is a memetic moment of dynamism, where the
| ongoing vibrational nature of phenomena is highlighted constantly
| via active verb endings similar to how we use -"ing" in English.
| I must apologize (as would be custom in Japan) for the delay in
| offering our multiplayer version of our award-winning curriculum.
| I am looking forward to helping the world master Japanese, and
| get an insight into a new way of framing the world and our
| experience of it.
| shiomiru wrote:
| Good article, but misses one very interesting detail.
|
| E.g. in the example with Si ru (tsukasadoru "be in charge"): the
| article says they "gave" the phrase a kanji. I would however
| assume that it happened the _other way_ : the kanji was
| approximated with two Japanese words.
|
| What's the difference? Let's go back to when kanji was adopted.
| The article notes Japanese writers approximated sounds with
| Chinese kanji readings, but there's another overlooked part: they
| also approximated Chinese text with Japanese words.
|
| That is, traditionally they would often write in classical
| Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. Indeed, they developed
| a system[0] that let them retrofit an _entire_ language, with a
| completely different sentence structure, phonetics, etc. into
| their own. Or, in short: they could read Chinese in Japanese.
|
| This is likely where Si ru comes from; some classical text using
| Si in a way that was at some point best approximated by the
| Japanese word tsukasadoru in that context.
|
| [0]: Example from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun
| (abridged):
|
| > Chu Ren You (Xia )Yu (Er )Dun Yu (Yi )(re)Mao Zhe (Shang )
|
| > [...] the word You 'existed' marked with Xia 'bottom' is
| shifted to the location marked by Shang 'top'. Likewise, the
| word Yu 'sell' marked with Er 'two' is shifted to the location
| marked by Yi 'one'. The re 'reverse' mark indicates that the
| order of the adjacent characters must be reversed.
|
| > Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the
| sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject-object-verb
| argument order.
|
| > Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added
| with okurigana, [...]
|
| > The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed
| Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:
|
| > Chu (so)Ren niDun toMao towoYu (hisa)guZhe You ri
|
| Obviously, the system comes with limitations; it's more of a
| system to analyze classical Chinese text than a way to magically
| translate it into Japanese. Still, I find it the most fascinating
| part of the language, because you can view it as a sort of
| "machine translation" from a millennium before computers existed,
| simply by abusing the fact that they used the same sort-of-
| semantic alphabet.
|
| This is also where the "many readings of a single word" property
| of kanji comes from. Modern Japanese writing is the fusion of the
| phonetic and semantic interpretation of kanji - kana being the
| simplification of phonetic forms, and kanji's weird readings
| being derived from kanbun-kundoku.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > That is, traditionally they would often write in classical
| Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese.
|
| I seem to remember something similar from the Tarzan novel. He
| learns to read in English, but his first spoken language is
| French, so his understanding of how to make the words into
| sounds is all wrong.
| hbn wrote:
| I get hung up when people say there are terms that are
| "untranslatable". What does that mean? Is it just a series of
| sounds that people use in a certain context to convey a certain
| meaning, but the greater phrase can't be broken down into
| individual words, tokens, or concepts? Do we have anything like
| that in English?
| Swizec wrote:
| > Do we have anything like that in English?
|
| "You are shit" vs "You are the shit". Explaining "the shit" to
| someone who's fluent in English but not culturally fluent in
| American is almost impossible. There's a qualitative difference
| between "You are very good" or "You are the best" and "You are
| the shit". They're not _exactly_ synonyms.
|
| Another good example: Dude or Guy as used in Californian.
| hbn wrote:
| I wouldn't really say that's untranslatable though. I feel
| like you could pretty easily translate something like "you
| are poop" into any language and explain that in the English
| phrase, adding "the" is modern cultural slang that means it's
| "the best" instead.
|
| Or you skip all the context and just say it means "you're
| great", very easy translation.
|
| "Eres el mejor" - I just translated it into Spanish
| TillE wrote:
| Every language is built on a mountain of cultural context
| and assumptions. That's the part which is impossible to
| translate. You can translate the words but you're missing
| layers upon layers of subtle meaning.
| hbn wrote:
| Perhaps I'm just taking the word "untranslatable" more
| literally than some, but I think if you can explain the
| surrounding cultural context, you've translated it.
|
| Different scenarios require different methods of
| translation, sometimes you'll want something literal, and
| sometimes you can just translate the intent behind the
| words. As long as you can do that, I would consider it
| "translatable".
| Swizec wrote:
| I don't speak Spanish so can't judge your translation, but
| I know that "you're great" and "you're the shit" feel
| different. The simplification drops a lot of implicit
| information and social signaling.
|
| It's that emotional and cultural baggage layered on top of
| words that's hard to translate.
|
| So for example in USA you can call someone "a benedict
| arnold". As an immigrant this means nothing to me. People
| tell me it means "bad". I understand the words, but there's
| no impact behind them because I lack the cultural
| background.
| compiler-devel wrote:
| Writers use "untranslatable" as a device to evoke a vague
| mysticism surrounding a language. IMHO it lends a flavor of
| superiority over the reader which I find gauche.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Phrases have properties other than their literal meaning.
| These can be both important to an author's intent, and hard
| to get across; in the same way that when someone fails to get
| a joke, you can likely explain it to their satisfaction but
| it's much harder to get them to actually find it funny - the
| punchiness and associations are part of what makes one laugh,
| and these become lost during extended explanation.
|
| You can explain the meaning of a text, sure, and for
| technical texts that may be all you need, but if the goal is
| not simply the transfer of dry information and the result
| fails to trigger the intended associations and emotions, your
| job as a translator is not yet done.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I was reading the making of at the end of Roadside Picnic and
| the authors wrote there was no word stalker in the Russian
| language until they wrote their book and introduced the concept
| and word to Russian language. Maybe more properly a neologism.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Everything is translatable, but some concepts are difficult to
| convey in a compact way in other languages, and Japanese has a
| _ton_ of set phrases for situations that don 't really have
| obvious counterparts in other languages.
|
| As an example, the author mentions _otsukaresama_ , which is
| the set phrase to use if you've been driving for a long time
| with guests and have reached your destination (and many, many
| other situations). But having the driver thank _their_ guests
| for their patience is basically not a thing in English, so how
| do you translate that? The literal translation, "honorable
| tired lord" (~ thank you for your effort/patience), is
| completely incomprehensible.
| hbn wrote:
| I think that explanation proves perfectly that it can be
| translated.
|
| Depending on the context, you'd want either explanation. If
| you're learning Japanese you'd probably want the explanation
| of how and when it's used, and the literal words that compose
| it.
|
| But if you were translating a manga book and it used that
| phrase, you would probably just put "Ahh, we're finally
| here!"
|
| I think there's just something of a bastardized use of the
| word "untranslatable". As long as a language can convey
| abstract concepts, you should be able to translate anything
| into it.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I think when people say "untranslatable", there's an
| implied "without breaking the flow or losing nuance" there.
| Of course you can in principle translate anything into any
| language, it's sometimes impossible to translate something
| without either a lengthy digression, or giving up on
| translating the full nuance. Poetry is notoriously hard to
| translate because of stuff like that.
|
| I don't know that I would say this is a bastardization of
| the word, but I see where you're coming from.
| jasonjei wrote:
| I think what the writer means to say is there is a cultural
| aspect to language for words that don't have direct equivalents
| in other languages.
|
| Interestingly, Chinese colloquially refers to languages as the
| same as culture. For example, Chinese is Zhong Wen , literally
| Chinese culture; English Ying Wen , English culture; Japanese
| Ri Wen , Japanese culture. The suffix Wen signifies culture.
|
| There is also the word Yu and Yu Yan to signify language;
| this is more formal but without the connotation of culture. But
| my point is culture is indelibly tied to language.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| > Japanese has a lot of compound words of Chinese origin, where
| two or more kanji appear as a set.
|
| In the original Chinese language, a "word" mostly consists of a
| single character. Interestingly, many of the compound words
| commonly seen in modern Chinese were in fact coined by the
| Japanese scholars during their attempts to translate western
| writings around the 19th century and were later "imported" back
| into Chinese language. Interestingly, the two examples in the
| article, "art" (Mei Zhu ) and "science" (Ke Xue ) are both of
| Japanese origin, though one can still tell whoever coined the
| terms chose the individual characters due to their meaning being
| relevant to the concepts the words are describing.
| bluquark wrote:
| According to this paper
| https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf the natural
| linguistic evolution towards compounds in Chinese was well
| under way by the time of Middle Chinese (~800CE). And most of
| the cultural exchange with Japan happened after that.
| bluquark wrote:
| One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms
| it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text.
|
| - Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to introduce a
| clarification without breaking the flow of the text, essentially
| a more concise form of parenthetical or footnote.
|
| - In classical poetry it is used for a variety of effects, for
| example novel synecdoches. One side of the gikun might refer to a
| season, and the other side might refer to a key detail the poet
| idiosyncratically associates with that season.
|
| - But the contemporary Japanese learner usually notices them the
| most in fantasy/sci-fi manga and novels. In this genre it's used
| to introduce in-universe jargon while showing its meaning in
| parallel. At the extreme, it can allow writers to go over-the-top
| with how much special jargon the universe includes, without
| slowing down the pace of storytelling. (This can pose quite a
| challenge for translators!)
| t3rra wrote:
| Kanji is believed to be introduced by Korea, and Katakana is
| originated from Korean Buddhism monks' scripting system for
| representing grammatical particle of Korean language in Korean
| Silla kingdom period.
|
| Please original writer, either don't say anything about history
| if you don't know actual history or do better research.
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| Ah yes, katakana was invented by The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il.
| On behalf of the author, please accept the apology.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| For an alternative viewpoint on the supposed "vagueness" of
| Japanese, I would recommend "Gone Fishin: New Angles on Perennial
| Problems," by Jay Rubin, from the Power Japanese series.
|
| https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5609329W/Gone_Fishin%27
| emodendroket wrote:
| Quick, amusing read and well worth the time.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually
| does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient
| Egypt.
|
| >Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as
| logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for
| entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a
| system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can
| be called logophonetic. [0]
|
| This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental
| hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic".
| The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was
| closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of
| writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are
| essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek
| alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script!
|
| > Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions
| and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative
| texts which placed more importance in content than appearance,
| which were written by hand, and which needed to be written
| quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived
| from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form
| so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost.
| Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words
| or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the
| concept it represented. [1]
|
| Script comparison (see page 5):
| https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A...
|
| Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
|
| Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
|
| Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script
|
| [0]
| https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~....
|
| [1]
| https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...
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