12th Feb: A new policy is being put in place for TRS threads: If there is no evidence provided in the Opening Post that the page is broken, the thread will be nuked immediately. See Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Names for what constitutes evidence.
5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
Transliteration woes get me thinking: have the Japanese ever considered a way of writing kana that expresses zero vowel? Purely for example, one could write the a-series katakana with something like the dakuten or handakuten: カ with such a diacritic would read "k" instead of "ka." Something like this could help COUNTLESS words of non-Japanese origin be written in a way that does some vague glimmer of justice to the original pronunciation. Has anyone ever proposed such a fix?
Why exactly is doing justice to the original pronunciation an important issue? A loanword into Japanese becomes a Japanese word and needs to be pronounceable by native Japanese speakers first and foremost. Spelling won't alter the fact that Japanese phonology is not particularly accommodating towards consonant clusters and most native speakers will end up inserting those inter-consonantal U's and O's anyway.
Why is it "asoko" and not "ako", violating consistency with other ko-so-a-do groups?
"Ako" is used to mean "over there" in spoken Japanese in many parts of the country, but it is best not trying to apply common sense to any language. You'll just end up with a headache.
"Shojo." "Shonen." "Seinen." Okay, the pattern makes sense, even though I know essentially zero Japanese. So why "josei?"
Josei = 女性. Its male equivalent is dansei = 男性. The odd-one-out is actually "shonen" because it's written 少年, using the kanji 年 (toshi age) instead of 男 (otoko male). Both "shojo" 少女 and "josei", on the other hand, use the kanji 女 (onna female). "Seinen" (成年) means "adulthood" (literally "completed age") and is gender-independent. Therefore: "josei" = "female gender", "dansei" = "male gender", "shojo" = "young female", "shonen" = "young age". Don't ask how it makes sense.
This explains why shounen manga/anime has such a large female fanbase.
Think of shonen as meaning "youth", not "boy"; it's almost an exact replacement except that the noun form of "youth" meaning "adolescent (or at least older) boy" has almost disappeared from everyday spoken English.
So wait, if my (non-existant) grasp of Japanese is right, if they all fitted the pattern it would be josei, dansei, shojo, shodan? And if that is right, perhaps Japan made it shonen on purpose? I mean I know I wouldn't want the entire young male population turning into a evil supercomputer...
My understanding comes from mandarin which uses the same symbols in the same way. "Shonen" (少年) and "seinen" (成年) are technically gender neutral since the symbols themselves don't specify a gender, however, the mental image it triggers people to imagine is usually a male person, so thus something like "shodan" (少男) would be unnecessary. To get the image of a female version, you need to specify "female" so it wouldn't default to a male image (and hence terms shojo 少女 and josei 女性, both containing the kanji 女, meaning female/woman). This seems to be similar to how in the west "man" or "mankind" used to refer to humans in a gender-neutral way under certain context. Of course, nowadays for better or worse, we have political correct language, so maybe when east Asia catches onto this fad we'll see terms like "shodan" used instead of "shonen". This also sorta makes sense, seeing how many shonen/seinen products have lots of female fans, whereas the reverse (lots of male fans for shojo/josei products) is much less observed.
Shonen in Japanese isn't as exclusively male as you suggested. It is still used to refer to both genders in everyday life, c.f. the Shonen Laws which incidentally defined shonen to be anyone under 20 years of age. Shonen just carries a male connotation because Japanese society was (and still is, really) male dominated so that people would have had taken note when it was a girl by using shojo. The Japanese language have quite a bit of this, such as kyodai being a generic term for siblings (in contrast with Mandarin), while shimai specifically refers to sisters. But in more formal settings such the law or sporting events, shonen is still properly used to refer to the age group as a whole, e.g. shounen danshi 100 metres or shonen joshi 100 metres in track and fields as opposed to shonen 100 metres + shojo 100 metres. In manga terms, shonen is effectively a generic classification of works intended for teenage audiences as opposed to just boys. Similarly shojo manga arose not so much as "shonen manga for girls" as it was romance focused works designed to appeal to the teenage female demographics. Like chick flicks in films, if you will.
Can't we clear up this "R" and "L" confusion thing any time soon? "Arucard" my ass!
Search Youtube for "Corolla ad japan" sometime- bestselling car in the country for most of the last 40 years and Toyota's own pitchmen can't even pronounce it!
There is no L in Japanese, but there is one precedent for new katakana with a consonant that doesn't exist in the language: ヴ vu, which is a voiced version of ウ u (and derivations: ヴァ va etc). So who knows, they may well invent the katakana for L sounds (la, li, lu, le, lo) when they get tired of the R/L confusion. Except for the V thing, however, new katakana are generally based on existing consonants: ファ = fu + a = fa, トゥ = to + u = tu, etc.
Just because they can write it doesn't mean they can speak it. 'vu' usually still turns into 'bu' or 'bwu'. It takes more than letters to change someone's native phonology.
Knowing the pattern, they might just stick the dakuten on the R katakana to signify L, just like turning U into VU.
There's neither L nor R in Japanese. The syllables we usually write as ru, ri etc actually represent sounds beginning with a consonant that does not even exist in English, which sounds like an unholy mix of L, D, and R, and is actually pronounced differently by different speakers (in fact, most native Japanese in my experience pronounce it more like L than R). Seemingly simple names like "Ryoko" are actually unpronounceable to most English speakers. So instead of complaining about this L/R crap, perhaps we should be cleaning up our own act.
This Non-Japanese speaking Troper fails to see how difficult it could possibly be to pronounce an R and an L at the same time to imitate the Japanese pronunciation of "Ryoko" (it really isn't hard) - with that logic, we can still complain as much as we want....
This troper tries not to crack on them too hard for it. Babies are born having no preference for phonemes. When they begin to settle on a native language, the foreign phonemes' programming strength fades. That's why Japanese people have trouble with "l" (ul, or lll), while English speakers have to think when pronouncing "tsu", for example. It's just how the brain works.
Technically, it's the English 'r' sound which is the odd-man out in world languages. The phonetic inventory of English contains the Japanese 'r' naturally: in linguistic parlance it's called a flap and shows up when you say words like "pudding" (the sound written as "dd") at normal conversational speed. The English 'r' is this freaky alveolar approximant which is rare in world languages. There's a reason why children learning English natively have a hard time with it.
The "pudding" bit is only correct about some dialects, like the North American and Australian ones. The flapping D/T is totally missing from the British dialects. Also, some dialects, most notably Scottish, pronounce the R as a rolling sound, which is more similar, but still not quite the same as the Japanese R.
At any rate, the Japanese 'R' sound is indeed 'R'. It's quite close to the ones in Spanish and Russian, except that it isn't rolled. As the above troper said, the Enlish R is quite odd; to this non-English troper, it doesn't sound like an R at all and the only way she manages to pronounce it is by... well, not pronouncing it at all.
The Japanese language doesn't distinguish between what English notes as the difference between "R" and "L" sounds because it didn't need to, much like English doesn't formally have the sentence emphasizing suffixes (wa/da/yo/dayo/etc.) that the Japanese needed. It's a cultural thing.
"Da" isn't a suffix, it's a copula, similar to the English "is/are" in the sense of "A is B" (and its past form, "datta", is "was/were"). Its equivalent in polite speech is the well-known "desu/deshita".
I think a more apt analogy would be that Japanese doesn't distinguish between 'r' and 'l' for the same reason that English doesn't distinguish between the t in 'top' and the t in 'tree.' (Try sounding it out slowly. The two 't' sounds are actually quite different!) The two sounds are simply allophones in that language.
Somewhat dialect-dependent. American English has a retroflex "r" that drags the "t" back with it, so the "t"s in "top" and "tree" are quite different. British English has an alveolar approximant "r" that only slightly affects the position of "t". A better example would be the "t"s in "top" and "stop" — the first is aspirated, the second is not, and these are quite distinct sounds that are treated as separate phonemes in many languages, but English considers them to be essentially the same.
Listen closely to a native speaker; there isn't an L or an R sound, it's somewhere in between. Now say "R" and "L" and pay attention to how your mouth forms the letter and where your tongue is. With "L" your tongue ends up right against your front teeth. "R" the tongue curls up and doesn't touch any particular part of your mouth. I generally tell people that to pronounce the Japanese L/R combination you put your tongue right in front of the ridge on the roof of your mouth but not up against your teeth - somewhere between. Pair it with a vowel like 'a' to get 'ra.' Because it sounds like a combination but is really just a unique sound, people get confused on how to write it when translating names. On top of that, the way it is pronounced varies by person. Females will tend to make it sound more like an "l" while some guys will even roll it like an "r." It's still never one or the other, that's just the closest foreigners get to understanding the sound. Hope that helps.
An interesting exception is Yukino Satsuki (Chidori Kaname in Full Metal Panic!) she rolls her "R"s quite noticably. Especially when she's chewing out Sousuke.
That's probably a regional variant offshoot. Kansai has a more R-like (or D-like) form of the vowel, and given that Kansai also has a rude and rough image it makes sense for the voice actress to do that.
The Japanese pronunciation of the movie title Pleasantville, according to Yahoo.co.jp: "Purezantovuiru" No wonder they renamed it Color of the Heart in Japan.
Not really that hard to pronounce, speaking as someone who can at least read without a Gaijin accent. Though 心の色 looks prettier and fits better on a poster than プレザントヴィル...
It's not just R/L confusion. A and U get confused, too. I've been a Dangaio fan for years, and I still don't know if the villain is supposed to be The Banker or The Bunker.
This troper learned Spanish before he ever looked at Japanese, and just pronounces the Japanese "r/l" the same way he pronounces the Spanish "r". It doesn't seem to be too far off...
However, its extremely common for people with Spanish as a second language to roll the r instinctively, thus getting further off.
The R/L sound is what's known as a 'liquid' in linguistics. Japanese has no liquids, hence people tend to either use L, R, or that L-R hybrid when they try to use liquids, no matter what the word they're trying to say is supposed to sound like.
You mean Japanese has just one liquid phoneme. In consequence, native speakers find it difficult to make a distinction between what, to us, are two distinct liquid phonemes, the same way native English speakers find it difficult to distinguish aspirated and unaspirated "t".
Okay, fine, different Japanese people pronounce it differently. Take a thousand Japanese, sit them down, have them say the word ten times, figure out which pronunciation happens most often, and write that into the dictionary. Forget about one-to-one character substitution. And once that's done; standardize the Japanese/English dictionary with a notice saying "this isn't exact, but it's the closest we're going to get given inherent language barriers."
English has some of these too you know, and we make no distinction to help foreign speakers, nor do we care. Our voiced and unvoiced 'th' sound are both written exactly the same, and most people can't even tell the difference unless you tell them that there is one. Ironically, the Japanese can tell the difference and transliterate them differently (voiced becomes 'z' and unvoiced becomes 's', usually). This parallels the R/L situation pretty well, although not as precisely as I would like.
Speaking of which, how come Japanese people are able to pronounce Fs very well, but cannot pronounce Vs at all, instead choosing to make a B sound, followed by a U, then the vowel in question. A V is simply a voiced F, so... why is that so difficult?
Because they can't pronounce F's very well, or, they can't pronounce our Fs very well. The "fu" syllable, the only syllable to feature what is transliterated as an F sound, alphabetically falls in with the H syllables and is pronounced closer to an H sound; it ends up sounding much like Stewie Griffin's exaggerated pronunciation of the "wh" in "cool whip." This still sounds more like an F than to an H to our ears, which is why it gets transliterated that way. But since their F sound is more breath and less teeth than our F sound, voicing it is hardly possible.
Voicing it is possible - this is what you'll get. Seeing as how so many of the languages that have that sound treat it as an allophone of B (including Japanese), it isn't surprising that the Japanese don't bother with using it to pronounce the Vs.
The voiced version of Japanese "f" is pretty common in Western languages, actually—it's the "b" and "v" in Spanish cabo and nueve, and the "b" in Danish København (Copenhagen).
Every language has phonotactics, and English and Japanese are no exception. Most languages only distinguish a limited selection of all the sounds the mouth is capable of pronouncing. The sounds that are used don't always have exact fixed pronunciations, but have free variation with other similar sounds called allophony. R and L are allophones in Japanese. It's not that Japanese can't pronounce L, but they can't yet distinguish it from R according to their own language's phonotactics. In fact, the L sound can be heard for R in certain styles of singing. Distinguishing more unique sounds requires training and practice beyond native phonotactics, which most native language speakers (regardless the language) may not see fit to try. And it's not just a matter of learning how to pronounce the distinction — it's also a matter of learning how to tell the sounds apart when you hear them, which is not always as easy and trivial as we might assume.
What's with this whole gender-specific language thing?
Huh? What's gender-specific? First-person pronouns? Well, nobody's bothered by the fact that English has gender-specific third-person pronouns...
Since German, French, Spanish and a number of other languages all seem to have gender-specific nouns, it's English that's the odd one out!
What about he, she, it, his, her, and its?
I think they mean that while all nouns in English are neutral (the cat, the beach), in those languages they have genders (le chat, la plage) (la casa, el carro)(der Block, die Tafel, das Lineal).
If think what you mean is: わたし is non-gender specific. あたし is only used by girls. ぼく is used by boys, but can be used by girls, too. おれ can only be used by men, and only if they're higher in status to the person they're talking to. Japanese is so much fun.
That's it. Only a few scattered languages have specific vocabulary/grammar that may only be used BY a speaker of a particular sex, but Japanese is one of them. Others include Thai, Carib Indian, some Aboriginal languages, and classical Sumerian.
First, it's a grab bag of divided vocabulary — first and second person pronoun choices, sentence ending choices, frequency of longer/formal forms, and use of the "o-" honorific (the old style stereotype Japanese pidgin with "honorable" inserted before nearly every noun begins as an attempt at representing this aspect of effeminate Japanese). Second, a lot of people actually are bothered by the pronoun split in English, precisely because it makes a headache out of trying not to imply either gender is the "normal" one for a given context. But even aside from that, at least gender-references toward the topic of a sentence can on occasion serve a clarifying purpose; gender references to the speaker seem more about reinforcing a social role/expectation than providing extra lexical information.
Polite forms are an artifact of the society and its use of the language; one can hardly blame the language itself for that. As for pronouns, gender-neutral forms for first, second, and third-person pronouns do exist; they may be socially unacceptable in certain contexts, but at least the language provides a way for expressing the concept. English, on the other hand, doesn't provide one for third-person pronouns — and it's a feature (or lack thereof) of the language itself, not its cultural context.
In fact, English is arguably harder than Japanese in this respect. An English-speaker has to observe just as many social distinctions as a Japanese-speaker—we don't talk the same way to a repairman, our company's president, and our neighbor—but in English the distinctions are unwritten. To speak politely is a matter of feel, almost more musical/rhetorical than grammatical. Japanese, on the other hand, HAS actual rules that an outsider can theoretically learn without decades of trial and error.
This troper would much rather have the gender-specific pronouns in English than not. If some non-gender-specific thing comes up, simply use "they" or "them". Saying he or she in a context can clear up quite a bit confusion, given that many names can apply to both genders. For example, Finnish only has one third person pronoun, hän, for both genders. This can get very confusing, especially in written conversations or songs. Not to mention how many Finnish names for boys sound like girls' names to non-native speakers.
The gender-specific language thing is also a personal choice. No one has to speak in the stereotypical way that corresponds to their gender/age/birthplace; it is entirely possible to consciously do otherwise. See every anime character ever where this is done deliberately and more obviously than in real life.
Why...anything? Anything distinctive about the Japanese language - why is it so? Of course, you could say the same for English, or any other language...but still, why is any language what it is? Why, in general, do languages take the forms they do?
Because languages reflect how the people who use them think and see the world. Japanese has a lot of past conjugations, for example, because they're very traditionalist and they want to remember everything about their ancestors; it also has a big pronoun hell because of the rigid hierarchy that runs among the Japanese society. Spanish has a lot of present conjugations, because us Latin Americans tend to be more carefree and we just feel more like enjoying the present, which is also why there's pretty much just one pronoun for every person and number (being tú and usted the only exceptions). Germanic languages have a lot of future conjugations, because all these people had to plan in advance a way to survive the winter.
Japanese verbs, like classical Semitic verbs, are generally vague about whether an action takes place in the past, present, or future.
Japanese society is rigid compared to America and western Europe, but not notably so compared to countless past & present societies whose pronouns lack ANY social distinctions.
Depending on how one defines "conjugation," Spanish has fewer ways of expressing a present, ongoing activity than English.
One Spanish pronoun per person/number? Introducing él vs. ella, nosotros vs. nosotras, and ellos vs. ellos. Moreover, consider the missing (in Latin America) vosotros/vosotras, and the complicating factor of dialectal vos.
Germanic is notable for being the one major branch of Indo-European THAT LOST ITS FUTURE CONJUGATION BEFORE ITS RECORDED HISTORY EVER BEGAN (pardon the shouting). Every Germanic language from Gothic to modern English has had to suggest the future with a compound expression such as "will" + infinitive.
Oh, and don't forget that languages have a certain tone. Japanese, for example, when softly spoken, sounds very poetic, just like Spanish; when yelled, it seems like that guy is possessed by a demon. German sounds very authoritarian, Finnish sounds like spoken by turkeys, Norwegian sounds like German but a little bit softer, French sounds harsh and at the same time sexy, American English makes you sound like in a hurry, British English sounds posh and intellectual...
When soft-spoken, German and Dutch actually sound quite soothing. Listen to "A Whole New World" in German and you'll see what I'm talking about.
None of this is actually true. This is a kind of linguistic determinism that is patently unscientific. Any language when yelled sounds like demonic possession; any language can sound poetic when softly spoken. The rest are just grotesque ethnic stereotypes. Languages develop pretty much by accident, with only a little bit of cultural influence on pronouns, word choice, and especially vocabulary. For example, just because Japan is a traditionalist culture doesn't mean that such attitudes influenced the language - Chinese, for example, is from a very similar culture, one that heavily influenced Japan, and yet it has none of the grammatical features you associate with Japan's traditionalism or culture in general. If Language was influenced largely by culture instead of simple sound shifts and gradual, undirected changes in the underlying grammar, then a language isolate should start to resemble those of the cultures around it. Basque should be slowly turning into a Romance language, as the Basque people live a life similar to those of people who speak Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Actually, grammatical convergence of neighbouring, but genetically unrelated (or distantly related) languages does happen. However, no matter how similar the cultures are, the convergence generally does not affect the fundamental grammatical structures of a language as long as said language has a continuous native speaker population.
And some Scottish and Inner London accents sound like you're about to be killed. :-)
What is the point of "nai" itself having a negative form (naku nai)? Is it used for anything, or is it a purely theoretical grammar curiosity?
I think you're thinking of naku as in the verb "to lose" "to pass away". It's not the same thing.
The "nai" form of words can be used when seeking agreement from the listener. Like "Isn't it?" in English. So while, for example, "yokunai?" means "Good isn't it?", "yokunakunai" means "This is no good is it?" or "This is bad, isn't it?"
Really? I'd probably just use a particle ("ne" or "na"), rather than the weird verb construction. Sore, yokunai naa...?
I'm pretty sure it also gets used in "must not do"
What, you mean "-nakereba naranai"? That's a conditional negative (if...does not happen) followed by the negative form of naru "become". The literal translation of e.g. "nenakereba narimasen" is "if you do not sleep, it will not become", which I find extremely cute. In general, though, forms like "naku nai" is snap-together morphology, which doesn't always work as you'd think.
Why can you say "that's not incorrect" in English, instead of saying "that's correct"?
Hey, you can say the former, but it sure as hell is going to sound awkward if you do.
What they said. Also, with regard to snapping together morphologies, this troper just recently read a story in which a character produced this gem: そんな事、無く無く無く無く無く無く無く無いよ! That's right, folks, this language is so badass you can spit out an octuple negative and leave your audience completely floored (or angrily retorting どっちだ?!)
This has more to do with Romanization than actual Japanese, but what's with all the silent "u"s? By the time I had figured out that koukou is pronounced more like "cocoa" than "cuckoo" and it's "Saskay" not "Sasookie", I had already embarassed myself several times over.
The "silent" 'u' sounds are actually devoiced vowels. Vowels are inherently voiced sounds (i.e. when you say them your vocal folds vibrate by default). Japanese de-voices 'u' between unvoiced consonants like p, t, and k. The issue of "koukou" and other 'u's following 'o's is one of orthography: those should be simply long vowels, which are written in Japanese sometimes with the vowel kana u, sometimes with the vowel kana o.
Specifically, I understand Hepburn originally used a bar over the "o", unrenderable on a standard keyboard without coding. But couldn't they have picked a vowel that doesn't affect pronounciation so much?
"Ou" (おう) is how the long o is rendered in Japanese itself, in hiragana (katakana uses the dash-like chouon: オー). And Hepburn transcribes words as they are written, with the exception of the "wa" and "e" particles.
Come now, far better an OU than an OO. And who are we to complain? In English orthography, OU can be OW, OO, OH, UH, or even the lax OO sound (loud, soup, though, country, would... I could probably find versions of OH and lax OO without extra letters if I thought about it long enough).
Put, cushion, any word ending in -ood, -ook, and sometimes -oot (soot).
"Ou" is probably better, since there are words that have "oo" when written in hiragana (For example Oosaka (the city)). "Ou" wasn't probably pronounced as long "o" at some point.
This is a case of syllables, actually. おう (ou) is a single vowel, or syllable where おお (oo) is actually two. There is a difference in pronunciation, but admitedly it is so light it might as well not be there.
Actually, they're both 2 syllables. A better distinction (from my experience) is that "oo" is what's used in native Japanese words while "ou" is what's used in words that were borrowed from Chinese or Korean.
Myself, I'm not going to gripe about the unique vagaries of Japanese, because every language has their own... but why *three* alphabets? OK, I get that Hiragana is phonetic, and Kanji is symbolic... but why Katakana? Why have a separate alphabet whose only purpose is to transcribe words from other languages?
Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, not alphabets. Kanji are not an alphabet.
Both hiragana and katakanaderive from kanji, but while katakana was first used by monks to provide a pronunciation guide for Buddhist texts and then in official documents, hiragana was the script used by women who weren't taught the thousands of Chinese characters. Women used to be a greater influence in the Heian court culture and literature than men, so eventually hiragana lost its dumbed-down, feminine connotations and earned some respectability. Nowadays, hiragana retains a cuter, more feminine image (so girls may write their first names in hiragana rather than kanji), while katakana are used for emphasis (somewhat like we'd use ALL CAPS or *asterisks*) and to look more futuristic. Writing the title of "Akira" in katakana instead of the many kanji that could have been read that way made the poster look a lot cooler.
Besides, hiragana and katakana are used to differentiate onyomi and kunyomi readings of kanji: if you look it up in a dictionary, you'll find that 水 (water) can be read as みず(mizu) when working as a standalone word, but in composite words from Chinese it will be read as スイ(sui), like in 水曜日 ("Suiyoubi", Wednesday).
Anyway, it's not that strange of a concept. English has capital letters, which is like a second alphabet that is only used for single letters at the beginning of important words.
Also cursive script. Which is mostly transparent, given the rule "connect everything together" ... but 'Z' and upper-case 'Q' are just weird.
Not sure of source but the this troper's heard that the original characters were chinese in origin, reworking the chinese writing system to fit to a diffrent language....Wouldn't that explain the three alphabets thing?
In the present day, Katakana is roughly equivalent to CAPITAL LETTERS, which one could argue are actually a "second" Roman alphabet. I mean seriously. R and r don't even look remotely alike.
Katakana are also used to write words that are foreign in origin.
In some circumstances, switching between katakana and hiragana is used to indicate word breaks where they would not otherwise be readily visible.
How is Japanese even grammatically structured? Coming from speaking English and learning French, it seems completely impenetrable and confusing.
Japanese is verb-final, with case-marking particles / postpositions on noun phrases to work out who is doing it to whom. What exact differences from English / French do you have trouble with?
The fact that someone asks this bugs me.
Japanese language structure is actually very simple. The problem is that when they actually speak it they often omit parts which are considered obvious (which may be non-obvious to a non-native speaker), especially when it comes to specifying what exactly it is they're actually talking about.
Like English speakers not saying "that" sometimes? I'm saying this because English is Subject (I) Verb (eat) Object (them) and French is Subject (Je) Object (les) Verb (mange), but I can't work out what system Japanese is structured on.
It should be noted that French SOV forms are limited to pronoun sentences. Declarative sentences are SVO, like English.
Japanese is SOV, too. Watashi wa (I) are o (that) taberu (eat).
Strictly speaking, it's free word order until you get to the verb, which must be final. Even then you can get away with a sentence like "Shitan desu ka, kare wa?" which transposes the subject after the verb.
This troper found Japanese grammar structures easy after taking Latin, which also has a similar "word order wherever the hell you want, since they have endings that show what they are, and the verb always ends" structure. So, it's not as unique as you might think.
Thank you for letting me know I'm not crazy to see similar patterns between Latin and Japanese. Additionally, I once tried to explain the particles system to a friend, whose reaction was "Oh, you mean declination." ... Actually thinking about it, is there any difference between declination and Japanese particles?
Although the above rules apply, there are simply some points where you need to know that some orders sound more natural than others. English: 'There are three pencils.' Japanese 「鉛筆が三本あります」 (The pencils are three). English and French are almost dialects of each other when you compare them to even German or Latin, according to some polyglots I've asked.
Dialects? English descended from German, and English only had bits of French and Latin put into it when the Normans invaded Britain in 1066. (This is also where most of our swear words come from. The Germanic words for certain things had suddenly become impolite in mixed company.)
"Bits of French"? The majority of Modern English vocabulary comes from Old French. That's certainly not "bits."
And from Scandinavian languages, and Celtic. English was a throwtogether of a lot of stuff over the course of over 1000Years.
Nevertheless, the above troper was essentially correct. English is a Germanic language and much closer to German than it is to French. Yes, it has borrowed much vocabulary from French (and Latin and other sources). You may even be right that the majority of English vocabulary is from Romance sources — if you count by the percentage of words that exist. Count instead by the percentage of words in a text, i.e. giving extra weight to each word the more often it's used, and you'd find Germanic-origin words would be in the majority.
I thought I'd test the above claim by looking up the origins of all the words the above troper used (with the exception of proper nouns and the word "troper"). English: (nevertheless, the, above, (to be), a/an, and, much, to, than, it, yes, borrow, from, other, may, even, right, if, by, in, give, word, weight, often). French: (essentially, correct, language, closer, vocabulary, source, majority, count, percentage, exist, text, extra, use). So, fair enough, Germanic words are in the majority, but look at the sorts of words that fall into each category: the native English words are the most common ones, and they tend to be things like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, whereas almost every single noun, adjective, and verb you used was French in origin. English might be closer to German grammatically and "genetically," but it's vocabulary that most lends itself to mutual intelligibility, and I think the person above was correct in stating that English and French are much, much more mutually intelligible than English and German.
Depending on your source, anywhere from 65%-85% of the 1000 most common English vocabulary words are Germanic in origin. That's not just articles, prepositions, and other function words, it's the most basic and often-used nouns and verbs. You can spend an amazing lot of time in workaday small talk without uttering more than a handful of Romance words. The more abstract or esoteric the subject, though, the greater the proportion of Franco-Latinate vocabulary, not to mention the occasional dashes of Greek. But that's true of many European tongues, Romance or otherwise. English is a thoroughly Germanic language that walks around in French drag for fun.
The proportion of Romance loanwords in English has been compared to the proportion of Chinese loanwords in Japanese.
I'm bothered by the fact that there are so many people here complaining about how hard Japanese is?
One word: Kanji. More detailedly: almost 2000 for reading a newspaper. Clear enough?
So? Here in the Netherlands, we routinely learn 2 foreign languages in high school. The way we learn them in the first two years is by rote memorization of words. After two years, we have memorized 2000 words easily. What's so different about learning 2000 words that are spelled in Kanji? Do remember that it is proven in cognitive psychology that we don't read words letter-for-letter, so in the end learning Kanji is as hard as learning a random assortment of roman letters, up to and including weird homophones (I had trouble the first time I ran into the alternative reading of 'see' in English, as the name of the office of the Pope).
In response to "One word: Kanji", that Troper confuses orthography with language. A language is not its writing system. English speakers would find Japanese just as difficult if it had a perfectly phonetic writing system. Having a phonetic writing system does not prevent Arabic, Korean, or Pashto from being DLI Category IV languages. Clear enough?
I don't think you're taking into account how similar Dutch and English really are. I (an American) have read Dutch websites through Babelfish, and the resulting translation is absolutely perfect English, like it was written by a native English speaker. The sentence structure, verb conjugation, etc., are identical as far as I could tell. And (minus accent marks added to some letters in some instances, which isn't even a concern for a Nederlander learning English) we use the same alphabet. So, of course it's relatively easy for you to learn English; all you really have to learn is what words to use. An American learning Japanese has to learn three writing systems and a totally different set of grammatical rules. And it really is essential (for a foreigner, at least) to learn how to read and write Japanese in order to say and understand more than a handful of rote phrases. Learning the kanji is what enables you to form and understand new words as needed. You're sort of comparing apples to piranhas here.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the kanji letters, for the most part, don't in any way shape or form resemble the stuff they're supposed to represent. 一, 二, and 三 represent 1, 2, and 3 respectively. That makes sense. But 帽 means "hat." What? Also, all the kanji have at least two different ways they can be pronounced. Japanese is, linguistically, an independent language—one not related to any other in the world.
We may not read letter for letter, but you're already familiar with roman letters and why they ought to sound like. We make greater associations between the actual sound of a word and its meaning than what it looks like written down, so the real difficulty is not remembering what a word in Japanese means but associating the word with the relevant kanji. Making the association of the word to the written shape is much easier when you can, with reasonable accuracy, deduce the sound from the written form. With kanji, it's nigh-on impossible to take any random character and figure out how it should be said, so you just have the make the association by rote. This is why JAPANESE KIDS learn Hiragana and Katakana first, and why it takes them most of their school life to be able to read a newspaper without a dictionary - not something required of most children speaking other languages. It's not that they don't know the words, they just don't know the kanji, the same problem that most people picking it up as a second language have.
Think of each Kanji pair as being a compound idea (simplifying), now if you know what both Kanji are you may be able to guess what they mean in combination (repeat MAY). Now imagine that you know what the idea is but you have no clue if it's a Germanic, Greek, or Latin root word. That's the "On" vs "Kun" reading issue. Once you start reading you hopefully have enough vocab to make guesses, but you still make lots of mistakes (Japanese people make fewer, but it isn't unknown for rough Kanji). Once you learn some Kanji, learning vocab gets a little easier, you can break an unknown word into likely Kanji. That's when all the homonyms get you. There are at least 3 Kanji that relate to machinery that are read "ki" good luck guessing which one is being used..
Reading Kanji isn't just about learning 2000 words. It's more like learning to read 2000 different letters.
2000 letters that regularly make different sounds. Not to mention that if you want to read anything other than a newspaper or Highschool level text books you might need to know closer to 10,000 of the things.
Response to all of the above: I don't buy it. Even Roman script has so many different ways to spell out phonemes that it can trap the unwary who just blithely assumes that they know how a certain combination of glyphs must sound. At most Kanji are slightly more difficult than learning whole new words in Roman script, but I still fail to see how they're that much more difficult.
Try it.
You can sound out words written in an alphabet. And I don't want to here this bullshit about English being so difficult you read. You can still try and largely succeed. And most other languages written with alphabets are more phonetic (personally, the bottom 3 phonetic alphabets IMO are - Gaelic, English, and Tibetan). There is still some information to be gleaned from a alphabetical word. On the other hand, you have to know a Kanji in order to get any meaning out of a Kanji. That's why they're so much more difficult than an alphabet. When a more phonetic language like Spanish gets involved, Japanese gets blown out of the water. Face it guys, it's a shitty way to write a language.
I agree here that kanji isn't too much harder than English spelling. English orthography is only about 25% "ideographic" if by "ideographic" you mean dependent upon arbitrary graph shape distinctions to make meaning distinctions. The rest of it is regular and therefore at least marginally phonemic.
It is harder. A lot. From a polyglot who loves all things japanese - Kanji sucks. The closest thing europeans have to kanji is math◊ - one symbol for one idea, travels great across languages, but good luck figuring out what the vertically elongated, sinuous thing is.
If you are reading a newspaper, in English, and come across a word you don't know, you can easily go to any dictionary and start matching up the alphabet to find the word. But you only have the 26 symbols of the alphabet to go through to find the first letter of the word. Now do the same with an unknown Kanji compound in Japnese. Good luck, if you aren't already at least somewhat familiar with how to read the Kanji. Granted, there are Kanji dictionaries, but if all you can go on is the number of strokes in the Kanji, you might have to trudge through a ton- a ton of kanji to just find the single one that fits 7 strokes and looks like that. Then, if you are using a kanji dictionary, it won't give you the definition of your kanji compound (unless it is really common), so you are going to have to find the other kanji in the multiple-kanji word in the kanji dictionary. Then you have to combine the kanji into the final compound- is it On-yomi or Kun-yomi? Is that 4 kanji compound really just one word, or two words? Providing you *think* you know how to read the compound, you now go trudging trough an actual dictionary looking for the word- only then you find out that you are reading it completely wrong as it's some guys' name, and names often take strange readings. Yeah, real simple. Any kid that has grown up with English from birth can go to a dictionary at age 4 and look up a word- granted, they probably won't be able to understand the definition, but they can at least look it up in a dictionary. A ten year old Japanese kid can't do that unless they already basically know what the word means, so it's pretty moot.
Keep in mind: Kanji (both Japanese and Chinese) is designed to be difficult to read. It was deliberately arranged like that in order to reinforce the caste system and keep people who couldn't afford education illiterate. They still use it today for the same reason most of us are still working on QWERTY keyboards, standardization.
Language, even written language, doesn't work like that. There are no Men in Black Suits or Space Bankers deciding how things will be spelled, or what the keyboard will look like. The Japanese and English writing systems are BOTH the collective result of local writers, scholars, and printers cobbling together the best and most communicative writing system they could manage, largely on the fly, from the most promising and logical sources near to hand (Chinese and Latin writing, respectively). In both languages, early design flaws would be patched up by modifications that helped in some ways, but at the cost of consistency and learnability. Over the centuries, phonetic changes and the need to write down borrowed foreign words would add more layers of difficulty and inconsistency.
Uh...I speak Chinese, I've taken a bit of Japanese. I'm working on my MA in Asian Studies right now. I've never heard anything about this.
Japan uses kanji because its history was also heavily influenced by Chinese culture. It's in the Sinosphere, so it has to deal with Chinese characters. Chinese uses characters both out of the accidents of history and because "Chinese" is a collection of barely similar languages that can all be intelligibly written with variations on one character set. If anything, court calligraphy influenced the development of Chinese characters more than classism. And with some exceptions, like Jews and some Semitic trading cultures like the Phoenicians, people of most cultures were largely illiterate due to simple lack of education throughout the history of the world. Nothing special about China and Japan's classism.
The difficulty of East Asian characters cannot be understated. This troper has always been simply amazed by how easy the English language is. When I was a child, I was almost kicked out of school because I had so much trouble with learning how to read and write and thus assumed to be too 'slow to be taught'. Obviously, I could speak, and I was learning how to write a few characters, but it was a painstakingly slow process that took an immense amount of effort. But in America, I was simply stunned by how easy the English language was in comparison. It was pretty much effortless learning. It took me four years before I was reading the Western Canon. Eight years after, I took the sats and scored a perfect score on the Verbal and Writing sections (although abysmally on the Math). I personally did find some aspects of English tiring, such as strange plurals (moose/meese, cactus/cacti, etc.) and making a few sounds (such as differentiating mary/merry/marry and caught/cot), but for the most part, fluency in English was extremely easy to attain, and wringing out a few minor oddities just took a bit of extra effort. Watching TV, reading books, and listening to other people on top of normal instruction was all it really took. I didn't really have to expend any extra effort. On the other hand, I'm STILL illiterate in my 'first language' despite how hard I tried back then. And anytime I try to learn it properly now, I fail completely again because of how difficult the characters are. While it's still quite easy to speak, I can barely remember more then a handful of characters and I certainly can't read a newspaper or any kind of book. Characters are difficult, and it's no wonder why even many people in East Asian countries, or this case, from them, are not particularly fond of them.
Wait "meese"? Where I'm from (I think it's called "Kansas") it's moose/moose.
We do have "goose/geese", so that may be where the confusion arose (and serves as an excellent example of the phenomenon).
Kanji has several (often at least two, not so rarely more) ways to read them. While a letter or diphthong in English tends to have several ways of reading, there are several dozen letters and diphthongs, while there are almost 2000 kanji's. So, in theory 漢字 (kan'aza?) isn't harder than letter (leet-tehr), in practise difference is notable.
You guys... I'm sorry, but kanji are not "inherently" any more difficult to learn than any other written script. If you're the type of person who struggles with memorizing new vocabulary, then you'll find kanji difficult. Seriously, as an English-speaker learning Japanese, I can tell you that memorizing kanji was one of the easiest parts of learning Japanese (after memorizing the kana), whereas grammar was where I struggled the most. Anyone who claims that memorizing kanji is like memorizing 2000 different letters fails linguistics forever, because that is not how languages work. And I don't buy the "but at least in English, if you come across a new word, you can sound it out!" argument because, even excepting the huge number of words like "though" and "yacht" that aren't pronounced anything like they're spelled, how exactly will the pronunciation help you if you still have no idea what the word means? At least most kanji (like, >90%) are made up of radicals that give some clue (however vague) to its meaning, so if you come across some new character, you can at least take a stab at the meaning based off of the radicals used, and the context.
Well, there are over 2000 kanji in common use, and they act a lot like letters...letters that are often crazily complicated, have multiple pronunciations with few consistent rules for choosing one in a given situation, have built-in meanings and primitives which may or may not have anything to do with the words they appear in, and so on. I don't think they're quite as impenetrable as they seem at first; mainly they just seem superfluous. English and other Western languages get by perfectly well with their kana-esque alphabets. All Japanese words can be written in kana, often with fewer strokes. What plausible excuse is there for not phasing out kanji entirely? It'd certainly free up a lot of time spent memorizing or struggling to remember obscure characters for more productive things. But I think they've actually been adding old kanji to their official usables list lately...
...It might not be as big, but Japanese also has a lot of piling postpositions. It isn't worse than in Finno-Ugric languages, but worse than English prepositions in my opinion. Verbs are especially brutal.
People can be lazy. I have a friend who was bitching about how hard it is expecting to learn it in a month through Rosetta. Gave up after two.
Also note that both the Japanese and the Chinese have simplified their written characters in the past century or so.
In fact, just about every country that still uses them to some extent has simplified them to some extent just by standardizing them. Some of them did it more conservatively (ROK), some of them aggressively (PRC), some of them somewhere in between (ROC, Japan), but all of them specified their preferred variants.
This is a misstatement, as the simplification process, especially in the PRC, was done not to make the characters easier to learn but to make them quicker to write.
The difficulty of finding good easy examples of Japanese for practice. Finally found two books and a small Grammar book... that uses Romaji. Zetta Sons of Digits.
Have you ever tried manga? This troper uses manga for reading practice all the time, because they're A) mostly dialogue, so easier to understand than a prose-heavy book, and B) the kanji usually have furigana. Also, look into children's books, though those usually lack kanji at all...
I hate the 'counters': -nen, -mai, -sai, etc. What the heck? "I have two cats" makes no sense, it has to be "I have two (word that means animal) cats"? "There are three sheets of paper" bad, "There are three (word that means flat object) sheets of paper" good?
Well, Japanese is a context based language. Hell, In your example I'm fairly sure the 3 sheets of paper sans the counter could potentially be misconstrued as 3 strands of hair or 3 gods.
Counter words are just a generalization of words such as "loaf" and "sheet" in "X loaves (loafs?) of bread" and "Y sheets of paper". You could interpret "kami sanmai" as "three flat atomic items of paper". If anything, it's consistency.
English has plenty of count words too. "Sheet" and "head" (as in "2700 head of cattle") are the only ones that come to mind right now, but surely there are others.
English counters are typically for animals, so the equivalent would be for someone Japanese to say "Why is it a school of fish, a flock of geese, and a pack of wolves? Why is Crow a murder not a flock, but sheep are flocks and not herds?" The easiest thing to do is learn the Generic Counters (Hitotsu, Futatsu, Mittsu...) they exist so that you can say them instead of the complicated counting system, they only go up to ten though. But you aren't alone! There used to be a game show in Japan where contestants had to guess the proper word to count whatever they were shown.
"Sheets of paper" is a great example for disproving your point. Saying "I have 3 papers" is nonsensical in English (unless you're using the definition of paper that means essay). You need a counting word to give it context. I won't disagree that Japanese has more than English, but they exist. This is because paper is a weird noun that describes materials only (like wood). I don't know the linguistic word for that, but I sure it annoys English-learners.
I don't know there's a word for "material-only", but "wood" and "paper" are both in the uncountable category. You need to combine such words with countable ones (and then count them) to talk about quantity. Why Japanese would make something like 'cat' uncountable is beyond this troper.
Also, Japanese language lacks the concept of grammatical number, i.e. there is no grammatical distinguishing "singular vs. plural". And this makes all Japanese nouns actually uncountable. Which is perplexing to us Indo-Europeans, just as some non-Anglophone Europeans (e.g. me) are perplexed by the fact that "advice" and "information" are uncountable in English.
It has to do with a language's perception on what's counted vs. what's measured.
And don't forget the influence of Chinese-centric grammarians on the language - in the Chinese languages, you have to use a counting term for every single instance of a number-noun combination. Same way Latin-centric English grammarians prescribed that silly "you can't split an infinitive rule" - Latin couldn't do it, so English shouldn't.
I can understand why 木木木 (tree tree tree) becomes 森 (forest), but why does 女女女 (woman woman woman) become 姦 (rape)?
It doesn't. That character alone means noisy. It is used in several combinations relating to adultary etc (where it roughly means "wicked", but these are combos. The "noisy" reading is the Japanese one, the "wicked" one the Chinese.
The Japanese word for Japan is Nippon. Where did Japan come from?
China's reading of the symbols in the name, I think. Or Maybe the Dutch. Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong.
It came longer route; Chinese name (Cipangu) was borrowed to Malay (Jepang), where Portuguese brought it to Europe.
And at other times, it's called "Nihon." Never really figured out a reason for a language to have two names for its own country. Although, I've yet to hear "Nippongo" to mean the language.
At some point in the history of the language, "h" and "p" were considered to be the same consonant. This is why the p kana have their own special circular dot that none of the other voiced characters ever use. Nihon vs Nippon is one remnant of this, which is presently a matter of regional and personal preference. But it does always seem to be Nihongo for the language.
Changing an "h" to a "pp" (with the historical explanation above) is often used to make a word a bit more emphatic, like how "yahari" can also be pronounced "yappari". By extension, Nihon and Nippon are seen as almost the same word, but Nippon has a little more inherent fervor (for example, it's what people usually yell at sports events). Perhaps because of that, there is a VERY vague association of Nippon with nationalism and the pre-1945 era. I'm not sure either was "official" then; but since the war, Nihon has been used in all official / formal contexts, and Nippon is the less common version. But they're still seen as extremely close; saying Nippon on its own has zero nationalist connotations.
That's not true, both Nippon and Nihon are used in official contexts. Nippon Ginko is written prominently on Japanese banknotes, for example. The reason people may yell Nippon in sports might be because the Japanese Olympic Committee uses Nippon. In fact Nippon, being the original reading, is considered the more formal pronunciation. In any case the government's official stance is "both readings are so common that there is no need to unify them".
To demonstrate the whole Chinese for Japan being Cipangu: one of the readings for 日 is "jitsu". When you combine that with 本 "hon", you get Jippon. A lot easier to see the connection now, isn't it?
The titles! It seems there is a mandatory title for everything and his granny in japanese, whereas I wouldn't even say Mr or Ms in daily life!
Culture, Horatio, culture! Born a hundred years ago (fifty?) you would indeed have addressed most people outside your family/friends by Mr., Mrs., or Miss. Japanese stayed that way, with additional elaborations; English is the one that veered toward the informal.
This shift towards informality is extra amusing when you consider that we (English) actually lost our informal pronouns centuries ago, to the point where we now treat them as Japanese would treat their own extremely formal and archaic forms ("thou", anyone?). I think we just sort of misplaced them somewhere along with our thorns, datives, and most of our noun declensions...
Considering that most languages have both a formal and informal form of the word "you," English is one of the more relaxed of the Indo-European languages.
To be honest, I think you're kind of a jerk if you don't use titles like Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms, Dr, Professor, etc, in daily life, even today.
I absolutely agree with the above troper. It's rather unsettling that my lecturer (who has a doctorate) absolutely refuses to answer to anything other than his just first name. Then again, he is kind of a jerk.
Same here. If you're not a family member, friend, or co-worker, I'm MISTER (last name), thank you very much.
There was a The Economist article on how informal language is becoming. [1]
I was under the impression that suffixes like -san (さん), -sensei (先生), -sama (さま), etc were necessary to distinguish names from other words. Because the word "Tanaka" (田中) means "middle of the field", where as "Tanaka-san" (田中さん) means "Mr. Tanaka."
You can drop the -san in a colloquial setting as a sign that you are close/friendly with ie Tanaka. Reading it can be a pain, since it is relied on context.
"Tanaka" does not mean "middle of the field", at least not in modern Japanese. While the characters that comprise the name do mean "[rice] field" and "middle" respectively, to say "middle of the [rice] field" in Japanese you'd have to say something like "Tanbo no mannaka" (田んぼの真ん中), so there is no way to mistake the surname for the middle of the field. In fact, there aren't that many Japanese surnames that can be mistaken for grammatically correct common nouns. So the honorifics do help, but they are by no means essential to make that distinction.
Why do they still insist on using Chinese characters? Korea and Vietnam don't seem to have a problem using phonetic alphabets, why Japan? And, for that matter, China? They have already alternative ways to write them!
They're pretty.
Japanese is a very homophonic language and being able to say - exactly or poetically - what you mean is always a plus. NGE example: wrath, anchor, and squid-measure-of-distance are all "ikari" (well, the last one's "ika ri" and probably nonsensical). Also, considering the number of Engrish loanwords this is probably the least of language concerns in Japan.
If unambiguous kanji were really necessary to bring a message across, spoken interaction without showing a kanji would be impossible, though
The korean leader Kim Il Sung had a GREAT reason for adopting hangul (the Korean REAL alphabet) and dumping the hanja/kanji/whatever: "[It was an] artifact of Japanese occupation and an impediment to literacy." The man was a genius! (and a whole lot of less flattering things)
You (and Kim Il Sung) Fail History Forever. Hanja are part of Korean culture because Goryeo was a Chinese vassal state centuries ago. Nice copypasta from Wikipedia, though.
Funny side note: he's not entirely wrong, even in the former aspect. Hangul was phased (back) in during the late 19th century as a part of a growing modernization movement. Japan started teaching hangul alongside hanja after annexing Korea before banning it as part of their systematic suppression of Korean culture, but hanja (as kanji due to the same Chinese roots, and using Japanese rather than Korean readings) had no such limitation. It's not that Hanja was started by the Japanese occupation, but that its continued use was an artifact of that, as can be demonstrated by the gradual loss of hanja literacy even in the less-idologically constrained South. Not that he's entirely right, but...
Still, kanji IS rather inconvenient.
That's what I (and he) meant.
Homophony is not a good enough reason, by itself, as the examples the OP mentioned are just as homophonic (Korean) or even more so (Vietnamese).
Also, Japanese is technically a tonal language and uses pitch accent, which can be used to distinguish words, making Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable a syntactic nightmare. Example: Hashi. With accent on the first syllable, it means chopsticks (箸). With accent on the second syllable, it means bridge (橋). With no accent, it means edge (端). Note: English uses stress accents, which Japanese lacks. On the bright side, Japanese is a simple word tone language, with only two tones; Standard Chinese has four, Vietnamese has six, and the Chatino language uses 10 distinct tones.
The same reason we're writing in English rather than Lojban.
One common argument (that makes sense) is that it's extremely hard to parse words without kanji. A text written only in hiragana is like writingenglishwithnospacesandnocapitallettersoranything. Of course, personally I think adding spaces is easier than learning kanji, but it'd still be a pretty major change to their writing system.
This has been discussed between ~1868 and the 1940s in Japan - the reasons why japan is stuck with kanji are partly cultural (to distinguish Asia from the rest of the world) and partially because they couldn't even agree on a common transcription system for the first few decades. Some people even advocated replacing the whole japanese language with english in the first few years to be on par with the West.
You have NO idea how much easier kanji makes learning Japanese when you speak and read Chinese. It certainly isn't a 100% match in meaning, but they can be adapted to. Besides, Chinese is pretty homophonic too, we need characters to make up for that.
RE: Vietnam: the reason why Vietnam has a Latin alphabet is because Europeans (mostly Portuguese) came along in the 17th century. And then this little thing called "the French invasion and colonization of Vietnam" happened in the 19th century. The short of it is that France more-or-less conquered the country and enforced a change in the writing and language (Vietnamese has a lot of French (loan)words). Japan has never (at least, to this Troper's knowledge, and I'll be the first to admit my lack of education with regards to Japanese history) had such a thing happen to it (the closest equivalent being losing the Second World War, I think? And that happen in the mid-20th century).
It isn't that easy to change the writing system of a language, especially when natives don't see a reason to. This troper doesn't have a single native tongue so the languages she knows - Hebrew, English, Russian and German - all seem quite unpractical to her, but just because English pronounciation doesn't make any sense (though admittedly, it's still an extremely easy language to learn), would anyone change it to a more consistent alphabet? Would German change its horrible pronouns into a consistent 'the' form that doesn't require you to learn the genre of each word one-by-one even though that genre has nothing to do with the word (a table is 'he', a mouse is 'she' and a girl is 'it'... yeah)? Would Hebrew, where you have a better shot at learning how all the words are pronounced than actually understand the writing system, use a decent alphabet instead of that, erm, non-decent alphabet? No, because to native speakers, those things are completely legitimate. The problem is that English or my oh-so-favorite Hebrew have at least a guideline of how to pronounce a word, and even if the result might be off.
In Vietnam's case a major contributing factor to the legitimacy of the move from Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet may have been the fact that the level of literacy was low. Illiterate people, if they wish to become literate, would presumably choose a writing system that is easier to learn, regardless of its disadvantages. Many literate people must have objected to the latinization, but they were outnumbered. On the other hand, Japan had a highly literate populace ever since the Edo period, thanks to the institute of the Terakoya. Of course, their writing system was reformed significantly after the War, but they never got rid of the Chinese characters completely, and all the later revisions of the list of characters taught in school only increased the size of that list.
Why would you even ask something like that? What do you think is going to happen, the president will say "oh no, a couple of American teenagers think Japanese is hard, clearly we need a complete overhaul of our writing system"? They use it because it works just fine for them, and they don't care what some dumb foreigners think!
The Chinese (at least in the PRC) have multiple, mutually non-intelligable spoken languages that are grammatically similar enough to be represented with a (more or less) single system of ideograms. Incidentally, one of these FORCES the use of separate counters, as it has no concept of plurality in it. (If you've ever heard a native Chinese speaker failing to use plurals in English, particularly when excited, this is probably why.)
Pronoun dropping. I mean, I understand that Japanese pronouns are pretty long (plus they need a particle) and that Japanese is hardly unique in this regard, but really, "shiranai"? Who doesn't know?
It is not uncommon for English speakers to answer questions simply with "dunno" rather than "I don't know". The omitted pronoun should be clear from the context, Japanese speakers just do it more frequently.
This troper never understood why it's so confusing for English speakers. Sure, it would be grammatically wrong in English to say 'went to the park' instead of 'I went to the park', but as long as the conversation was about "me" until now then it's obvious who went to the park.
It's common in internet abbreviations (status messages etc) and SMS messages to topic-drop. Eg "See you at party later?".
This one was going to come up sooner or later, but...what is Japanese related to? Chinese is completely different, despite many Westerners' stereotypes. One likely candidate is Korean, but even then it's unclear. This Troper hasn't heard much Korean, but I think they do end a lot of sentences in "da", so one wonders.
I don't know anything about how language evolves but is it possible that the language modern Japanese evolved from is now a dead language?
The only connection that is universally recognised is the so-called "Japonic family" which includes Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages (e.g. Okinawan), although some view the latter as dialects of the former. The Korean connection theory is less widely accepted, since the similarities between the two languages can be explained by both relatedness and cultural exchange (like how modern Hebrew shares a lot of features with Slavic and Germanic languages, despite not being an Indo-European language). Another popular theory connects Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, Tungusic, Turkic and occasionally Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages into a larger Altaic family. The connection is based on a few common features, such as vowel harmony, SOV order and agglutination. This theory is also highly disputed.
I've actually found Cherokee to be oddly similar to Japanese, probably in the same way that Altaic family theory was formed. There's no way Cherokee and Japanese are related, though.
No, there isn't, but nicely spotted. Cherokee does have a lot of shared traits with Japanese: simple, consonant-verb syllables, agglutinative grammar, etc. However, these are common traits found in TONS of world languages; they're linguistic "habits" that widespread, unrelated languages have a documented tendency to fall into. So you can find lots of American Indian, African, Asian, and Polynesian languages that will remind you of Japanese to this extent.
Not even scholars are sure.
Considering Japan is and historically always has been an insular island nation, it's quite possible that the language simply isn't greatly related to any other language in the region, and developed almost entirely on its own.
You're correct. Japanese is considered an "independent language." I study linguistics, and when I started I was confused as to how it's not related to Chinese but still uses Chinese phonetic pronunciations for some of the kanji, and what I found out is that Japanese is to Chinese as English as to French: English has many Latin-derived words, but is considered a Germanic language.
I assume that by "independent language" you mean language isolate. Technically, Japanese is not an isolate, since it is a member of the Japonic family and thus related to the Ryukyuan languages, of which Okinawan is the most well-known one. According to various linguists' definitions the total number of Ryukyuan languages is somewhere between five and eleven, but the consensus is that they are languages in their own right and not dialects of Japanese.
The modern scholarly consensus is loud and clear: "beats us." If Japanese & Ryukyuan ARE distantly related to an existing language family, so much history and language change has happened since they split off that the evidence can't be reconstructed at this point.
However, there are a few hypotheses that are plausible, though almost certainly not provable. Several linguists have suspected connections to Korean, the Tungusic languages of Manchuria and Siberia, and even Turkic. There are also hints of influence from Austronesian, a family that includes Malay, Javanese, Polynesian, and Formosan (the original language of Taiwan). One especially plausible suggestion: Japanese might have begun as a Tungusic/Austronesian creole.
Why do names in Japanese language resemble Western names (several syllables possible, definitive given name and family name, etc.) more than Chinese or Korean names? This Troper often ends up preferring to say Japanese names in Western order.
Original Korean names may have been like that as well, but, since they were less isolated from the rest of Asia, Koreans were under a greater Chinese cultural influence and all their names eventually became based on Chinese hanja (kanji) readings. At one point, when Mongols ruled both China and Korea, the Korean aristocrats all adopted Mongolian names in addition to the Chinese ones. Japan, being an island nation that was never conquered by continental Asians, could afford more cultural independence from them.
Korean does have distinct surnames/forenames - in fact more so than Japanese (since when someone has a kanji name and it's clumped together, it's often hard to tell). In fact there's a definitive list of surnames, there are so few surnames in existence. Almost surnames are one-syllable, so it's almost a given the first syllable will be the surname. The two-syllable surnames are so few/rare that when they're seen, they're easily identified. Also, Korean has stop consonants (so syllables can end in stuff like "t" or "k") whereas Japanese does not (syllables can only end in "n" if it's not a vowel). Most Western names don't have that many stop consonants (at least not in the middle of the name).
It's because Japanese is a completely different language from both Korean and Mandarin (a.k.a. Chinese). I am not familiar with Korean but Chinese names would sound jarringly out of place in Japanese, since Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language whereas the best linguist can do is speculate that Japanese is Altaic. This really isn't about names and more because the languages are inherently incompatible. Chinese is mostly mono-syllabic whereas Japanese is mostly polysyllabic.
Korean is also fundamentally different from Chinese and also speculated to be Altaic. It is somewhat similar to Chinese phonetically (for example, in distinguishing between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, as opposed to voiced and voiceless consonants in English and Japanese), but its grammar is actually quite similar to Japanese and native Korean words are also quite polysyllabic. Japanese has much fewer names derived from Chinese kanji readings than Korean, but they do exist, both as given names (Junpei, Shin'ichirō, Kana, etc.) and, less frequently, as family names (Kan, Satō, the first syllable in Honda, etc.). Just like the kanji readings in loanwords from Chinese, the Chinese readings in these names were changed to fit Japanese phonetics, so they do not look "jarringly out of place".
And above all, why doesn't anyone on the internet seem to know or agree on what the shit desu means?
Desu literally means, "it is". I suppose it's a way of confirming your sentence? I don't know. It's best not to think about it. Desu is just something you tack on the end of polite sentences that don't end in a "-masu" verb to make them polite.
Think of "desu" as the Japanese equivalent of saying "there is ..." in English. By itself, it doesn't really mean much. When you say "There's a book called American Psycho," you aren't referring to an actual physical location, right? In Japanese, you could say "hon [book] no American Psycho desu", which means the same thing as the English sentence. It's usually translated as a form of "to be," and in Japanese, the verb is (almost) always last, so it ends sentences. It sounds kind of weird if you use it a lot, though.
Just to point out the example isn't really correct here. When you say "There's a book called X." what you are actually saying is "There exists a book called X." which is "hon no X ga arimasu." Saying "hon no X desu." is saying "[previously alluded to item] is a book called X." It's true if you are, for example, saying while pointing at a book "There's a book called X." because you are ascribing the description to a specific object "[that object over] there is..." rather than stating its general existence.
You don't translate words; you translate utterances. Desu on its own could mean lots of (related) things. English is means several things as well; "he is hungry" relates to a temporary state, "she is in Tokyo" relates to a location, "a tiger is a kind of cat" relates to a categorisation.
Why is wa (わ) written as ha (は) when used as a topic marker?
The same reason as with the vast majority of "irregular" spellings in most languages - it used to be pronounced as "ha" at one point.
Same reason why ch is christmas, cherry, and champagne.
Japanese used to have very irregular spelling. The few exceptions left today are what remained after reforms.
Early on (as in Heian period "early"), the は row was pronounced with an "f" sound. In the 11th century or so, the は row also came to represent "w" (with this pronunciation, it was used to conjugate what are now う verbs but used to be ふ verbs). It was probably sometime in the Edo period when the "f"s turned into "h"s (except for "fu"). The particle was never actually pronounced "ha". The particles は, へ, and を are the primary remnants of the pre-reform orthography (and I suppose they were kept that way to be easily identifiable in writing, as under the current orthography those kana are not used in, say, verb conjugation).
This is more meta than a complaint against the language itself, but why are so many posters here completely ignorant of linguistics, and of the workings of languages other than English. Many of the complaints against Japanese are also present in European languages, like French, Spanish, or German, yet either no one has a problem with that or they think that these "unusual features" (like gender-specific language, SOV word order, et cetera) are unique to Japanese, when they are not. Is it too much to ask not to fail linguistics forever?
I'm going by my own education here, but in American schools (at least for me), learning a language at the earliest stages (elementary) teaches you nothing about the language. You just learned some nouns, a few sentences, and replace a few nouns for each sentence. Can you say "I would like some water" and "I would like some steak" in Spanish? Congrats, you passed 6th grade Spanish. Not everyone took high school whatever.
In addition to the above troper's comment, this troper thinks it might have something to do with many people in Western countries learning these other Western languages at the elementary/middle school level without much of a real interest in the languages in question and the cultures behind them (they probably took them because it was compulsory, or it was an easy "A", or because "you have to be bilingual these days", etc.). So they tend to take the similarities to their own language for granted while paying little attention to the differences. If they happen to become very interested in the Japanese culture later in their lives all the minor and major differences between Japanese and their language can be a lot more noticeable. And, as the "Why...anything?..." question above seems to show, to some people exposure to Japanese is a revelation of just how different two languages can be. Despite the fact that there are lots of similarities between Japanese and English as well (they are both nominative-accusative, unlike Basque and Tagalog; they both lack noun genders/classes, unlike Russian and Zulu; they both have relatively few consonants and are not consonant-cluster-heavy, unlike the languages of the Caucasus and the Na-Dene languages, etc.).
It always bugs me when people pull the "omg, Chinese is so hard, you have to memorize 5000 different characters!!" card, as it shows a complete ignorance of linguistics on their part. Seriously, no language makes you memorize thousands of completely arbitrary pictographs for every possible word in the language. The human brain isn't capable of remembering that many! Instead, the vast majority of Chinese characters (like, >90%) are made up of combinations of a few hundred radicals. For example (yeah, I'm using traditional Chinese here as I've only taken Chinese linguistics, but I'm assuming Japanese isn't too different), take the word 媽 (pronounced mā, meaning 'mother'). It's made up of two parts (女, pronounced nǚ, meaning 'woman' and 馬 pronounced mǎ, meaning 'horse'). Thus, when you see 媽, you shouldn't be thinking "oh, a completely arbitrary character that somehow represents the concept of 'mother' that I have to memorize" but "oh, a character pronounced 'ma' that has something to do with women." Basically, written Chinese is no different from any other written language: it's a visual representation of spoken Chinese words. You look at 媽, you think of what spoken words you know pronounced 'ma' that are related to women, and you think "oh, this character must mean 'mother'" (only this process is pretty much instantaneous with native speakers).
Because in English, the meaning that you see is in a word made from the set of under 30 characters. English spelling isn't that consistant, but generally in languages that use alphabets, you have to know the sound attached to the meaning, and the written word represents the sound. In Japanese, you have to know the meaning, the pronounication and the way it's written. Of course it's more logical than those evil westerners (Americans aren't interested in learning languages? How dare they?! Of course, say, German students who have no plans whatsoever to leave Germany learn English for the delight of knowing a language and not at all to get a decent mark!) make it seem, but it's still extremely hard for a foreigner who isn't Chinese or Korean to learn.
Part of it seems to stem from expectations that all languages follow the same rules as their native language failing to realize that, dear Lord, there are multiple branches of languages!
Why do some translators use lord/lady as a translation for sama?
Because it's a term of respect? I know, it sounds very feudal when translated into English, but the only other option is leaving it untranslated, which not everyone likes.
Lord/Lady can also be "-dono." -Sama is more respectful, as in Jesus-sama. Although, -sama is WAY too overused in anime(by extension Fan Fiction), despite it actually is correct. Best example I can think of is Aizen-sama. The Espada, at least, would refer to Aizen as "-sama" but since is repeated enough that meaning is lost. The word "epic" is probably an English equivalent.
All right, I admit to being an ignorant Anglophone here. But anyway, the graffiti in episode 30 of Death Note is variously translated as "Kira, please kill them", "Kira, please kill me" and (in the official translation) "Kira, please kill." So... does that mean that when someone says "kuroshite", you're just meant to figure out who you're supposed to kill from context? That's distressing.
Yes, you are meant to figure out from context. If the speaker thinks that the context is sufficient for you to understand whom to kill they will simply say "kuroshite". If not, they can specify: "kare wo kuroshite" (kill him), "watashi wo kuroshite" (kill me), "minna wo kuroshite" (kill everyone), etc. My interpretation of the Death Note example is that the graffiti was not a plead for Kira to kill someone in particular, but a statement of support for his aims and methods.
It seems odd that someone would declare support for Kira by defacing a building. But yeah, I'm glad that there's room to specify.
I also want to add that both posters really fail here in the way they most probably aren't even suspecting. "To kill" would be "korosu" in Japanese, not "kurosu", which means "cross".
Second poster here: <Face Palm>. In my defence, the OP started it, and "korosu" isn't a verb I get to use very often when speaking or writing in Japanese. And I sure hope it stays that way :)
Using what I learned as "-te" form at the end of a sentence is a frequent abbreviation for "X-te kudasai" meaning "please do X".
