Japanese Language - Television Tropes & Idioms

Japanese Language

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.
- 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...
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.
- La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo?!? That's not possible!!
- 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 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".
- 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...
- 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.
- 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."
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 pronouns, 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- You've clearly never been Oop North.
- 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"?
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).
- "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.
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?
- Both hiragana and katakana derive 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.
How the goddamn hell 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.
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 memorisation of words. After two years, we have memorised 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).
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - 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.
  - 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.
- ...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.
Also note that both the Japanese and the Chinese have simplified their written characters in the past century or so.
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 a Digits.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
  - 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)
  - Still, kanji IS rather inconvenient.
  - That's what I (and he) meant.

Internet

« It Just Bugs Me »

Knights and Samurai

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys