As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese) 7-9 tones, loads of characters, but after memorizing the first 2000-3000, you pick up on all the radicals, patterns, and meanings which help you fill in the gaps. Grammar is barebones: I only had to learn 5 to 10 different grammar rules for Chinese that I recall, and basically everything else is incredibly easy.
Whereas in Japanese, I am learning 2-3 grammar rules per LESSON. Having each character pronounced a single way in Chinese is also super easy, and communication is even more direct than English. With Japanese, the cultural context, the phrasing, the end particles, and subtle vocab changes the meaning significantly.
I think for me, it took 5 years to reach fluency in Chinese but I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese. It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?
I learned both Japanese and Mandarin over the last 15 years and I gotta say, this was an interesting article, but I'm mildly disappointed.
> In particular, a whole realm of consciousness exists in the sphere of Japanese speakers that's perhaps truly unique in the world, more so than the sushi and the nature and decorum. It even allows for new literary techniques that are unimaginable in any other language.
I was expecting some kind of insight into the super complex multitude of ways to say something as simple as "thank you" in Japanese, complex not only today but also historically. The linguistics tie into socioeconomics, class, and history, in a really fascinating way. A highly educated person has, in my opinion, a far greater "resolution" with Japanese than with English, in terms of what they can convey with a simple "thank you." Though I think English has the best "resolution" in most cases out of the three languages. It's extraordinarily difficult in Mandarin (especially if you aren't fluent and educated on top of that) to for example speak subtle differences such as "how would you feel about helping John with the dishes tonight?" vs "can you help John with the dishes tonight?" vs "It would mean a lot to me if you could help John with the dishes tonight" vs "I think John would appreciate if you helped him with the dishes tonight" vs "I need you to help john with the dishes tonight."
Especially in sales and marketing, I really want that kind of granular resolution in Mandarin. It's a little possible of course, but you'll simply lose your audience. 99.99% of the time Mandarin speakers will expect to hear "tonight can you please help me with the dishes?"
The notes about combining kanji and root characters to construct larger complex characters e.g. cousins male/female is interesting, but really in the brain of a native reader it just doesn't work like that, you simply memorize the meaning and move on. It takes the same sort of education to learn latin roots and the attention to notice them in English, as it does in Japanese / Mandarin.
I'm a Korean currently learning Japanese, and while I do understand that this mash of Chinese characters and kana writing system can be appreciated for its exoticness, as a learner I can't help but feel it's more of a hassle resulting from it being a not yet fully optimized writing system. (I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana?)
I'm definitely not claiming that Korean is a more "optimized" language overall, but at least when it comes to the writing system, we had exactly the same problem as the Japanese (if you look at Korean newspapers just a few decades ago they are littered with Chinese characters), and at some point we fully ditched Chinese characters and have no problem going on with our lives. In fact, it made our lives easier in many cases, especially in keyboard typing.
As a side note, we obviously have some side effects from switching to entirely phonetic alphabet system. For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車). I'm not sure how this side effect propagates into some sort of sociolinguistic phenomenon, but at least for average people it doesn't seem to have much significance.
One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text.
- Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to introduce a clarification without breaking the flow of the text, essentially a more concise form of parenthetical or footnote.
- In classical poetry it is used for a variety of effects, for example novel synecdoches. One side of the gikun might refer to a season, and the other side might refer to a key detail the poet idiosyncratically associates with that season.
- But the contemporary Japanese learner usually notices them the most in fantasy/sci-fi manga and novels. In this genre it's used to introduce in-universe jargon while showing its meaning in parallel. At the extreme, it can allow writers to go over-the-top with how much special jargon the universe includes, without slowing down the pace of storytelling. (This can pose quite a challenge for translators!)
> Japanese has a lot of compound words of Chinese origin, where two or more kanji appear as a set.
In the original Chinese language, a "word" mostly consists of a single character. Interestingly, many of the compound words commonly seen in modern Chinese were in fact coined by the Japanese scholars during their attempts to translate western writings around the 19th century and were later "imported" back into Chinese language. Interestingly, the two examples in the article, "art" (美术) and "science" (科学) are both of Japanese origin, though one can still tell whoever coined the terms chose the individual characters due to their meaning being relevant to the concepts the words are describing.
Re: Anomaly 6 -
Providing two versions of the same sentence bit is not that uncommon in non-Japanese literature as well. For example, War and Peace in its original (Russian) language is sprinkled with French words and phrases, all duly translated via footnotes. This might not be as user-friendly as gikun as it requires glancing down and up the page a lot, but the idea is the same.
Even in spoken language mixing in foreign words often helps conveying nuances of what's being said. Some words don't exist in some languages or require longer phrasing or don't mean exactly that, etc. This sort of thing a very common in multi-lingual families.
So that "Anomaly 6" is not that much of an anomaly if you think about it.
PS. It was a good read regardless.
For an alternative viewpoint on the supposed “vagueness” of Japanese, I would recommend “Gone Fishin: New Angles on Perennial Problems,” by Jay Rubin, from the Power Japanese series.
As the creator of Japanese Complete I would like to mention on this article about Japanese that we're hard at work making a multiplayer version of our curriculum to add to the excitement of learning Japanese intuitively. I really appreciate discussions about the beauty of Japanese and its contextually-dependent vagueness, as it is a wholly new way of framing the world when the situation itself is a memetic moment of dynamism, where the ongoing vibrational nature of phenomena is highlighted constantly via active verb endings similar to how we use -"ing" in English. I must apologize (as would be custom in Japan) for the delay in offering our multiplayer version of our award-winning curriculum. I am looking forward to helping the world master Japanese, and get an insight into a new way of framing the world and our experience of it.
I get hung up when people say there are terms that are "untranslatable". What does that mean? Is it just a series of sounds that people use in a certain context to convey a certain meaning, but the greater phrase can't be broken down into individual words, tokens, or concepts? Do we have anything like that in English?
It's admittedly less common, but also in Chinese lots of characters have multiple pronunciations. Sometimes they are associated with different meanings. Even if the other pronunciation is just considered formal or poetic, it can carry a different shade of meaning.
By the way, Japanese with Anime (cited in the article) is an absolutely great resource for digging into the fine details of language and language use, without the pomposity that often infects technical discussion coughStackExchangecough*
Nice article, but if I were writing it[1] I'd list having subjects, topics, and objects as first class nouns in sentences rather than just subjects and objects of sentences as a big fascinating difference from what I was used to[2]. And also the role of timing[3] in pronunciation with cases like Yuki being a common girl's name meaning "snow" and Yuuki being a less common boy's name meaning "courage" distinguished only by how long you hold the first vowel.
[1] My Japanese is terrible and I couldn't come close to writing it, but lets leave that aside.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_and_comment
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)#Japanese
Another interesting "anomaly" is that the same concept can be expressed both with 漢語 (kango: Chinese-origin vocabulary) and 和語 (wago: Japanese-origin vocabulary). Kango is mostly nouns but one can easily add する (to do) and turn a noun into a verb. So, for example, if one wants to say "to compare" there's both kango version: 比較する (hikaku suru) and wago version: 比べる (kuraberu).
Usually kango sounds a little bit more formal and used in writing more often but plenty of them are also used in casual contexts. However, even though they often share a common character, the reading is different (onyomi for kango and kunyomi for wago). Non-native speakers need to basically learn both versions separately and one cannot easily deduce one from another (which is the case for example in English: comparison - to compare; or Polish: porównanie - porównać).
>Mottainai
Que aproveche/aprovéchalo from Spanish. (May you take advantage/do benefit from something). Aprovechar it's the literal opposite of desperdiciar, to waste.
>Exotic subject-object-verb
Not for a Basque.
Good article, but misses one very interesting detail.
E.g. in the example with 司る (tsukasadoru "be in charge"): the article says they "gave" the phrase a kanji. I would however assume that it happened the other way: the kanji was approximated with two Japanese words.
What's the difference? Let's go back to when kanji was adopted. The article notes Japanese writers approximated sounds with Chinese kanji readings, but there's another overlooked part: they also approximated Chinese text with Japanese words.
That is, traditionally they would often write in classical Chinese, but read it out loud in Japanese. Indeed, they developed a system[0] that let them retrofit an entire language, with a completely different sentence structure, phonetics, etc. into their own. Or, in short: they could read Chinese in Japanese.
This is likely where 司る comes from; some classical text using 司 in a way that was at some point best approximated by the Japanese word tsukasadoru in that context.
[0]: Example from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun (abridged):
> 楚人有(下)鬻(二)盾與(一)(レ)矛者(上)
> [...] the word 有 'existed' marked with 下 'bottom' is shifted to the location marked by 上 'top'. Likewise, the word 鬻 'sell' marked with 二 'two' is shifted to the location marked by 一 'one'. The レ 'reverse' mark indicates that the order of the adjacent characters must be reversed.
> Following these kanbun instructions step by step transforms the sentence so it has the typical Japanese subject–object–verb argument order.
> Next, Japanese function words and conjugations can be added with okurigana, [...]
> The completed kundoku translation reads as a well-formed Japanese sentence with kun'yomi:
> 楚（そ）人に盾と矛とを鬻（ひさ）ぐ者有り
Obviously, the system comes with limitations; it's more of a system to analyze classical Chinese text than a way to magically translate it into Japanese. Still, I find it the most fascinating part of the language, because you can view it as a sort of "machine translation" from a millennium before computers existed, simply by abusing the fact that they used the same sort-of-semantic alphabet.
This is also where the "many readings of a single word" property of kanji comes from. Modern Japanese writing is the fusion of the phonetic and semantic interpretation of kanji - kana being the simplification of phonetic forms, and kanji's weird readings being derived from kanbun-kundoku.
I really liked this article. I really love the examples given. The part about names and pronunciation, and the manga examples actually reminded me of a anime scene that appears confusing at first.
In the scene, there’s a character that receives a business card from another and he ends up pronouncing his name incorrectly.[1] I guess it does seem weird that a written name can be mispronounced, but isn’t the same kind of phenomenon as when you have an artificial English word like “ghoti” which is meant to be pronounced as “fish”?
Most surprising for me is the humor part. Let a normal everyday Japanese person watch ANY of the greatest US comedians of all time (translated or not) and they just won’t find it funny. Now use the techniques in the article with ambiguous meanings and they will be rolling on the floor laughing. This works in the reverse too, westerners won’t find everyday Japanese comedians funny (it is pretty much untranslatable though).
One interesting thing I observed is that many talk shows will have something akin to subtitles to things being said in order to bring the power of quickly getting the meaning from Kanji to the spoken language.
Once you understand the meaning of some Kanji, turning on subtitles feels like a superpower on understanding what is going on even for people still learning the language.
Some people think things are more fun if they are more complicated. The only thing I want to do is learn the damn language already, but study is just no substitute for actual usage with Japanese (like author says, since the pronounciation is often 10x simpler than figuring out all the different readings).
Wonderful article. The author really nailed it. Reminded me why this stuff is so interesting, and reminded me to not be so frustrated with the difficulty it can pose sometimes. It really is one of the reasons I fell in love with written Japanese in the first place, and I should remember that.
Off topic. I'm learning Korean and I am really fascinated by the fact that Korean language and communication are deeply intertwined with Korean culture
What a great article.
I've long since given up on trying to learn( Mandarin is slightly easier for me, while Korean is even harder) , but I'll always be fascinated by Japanese.
Here is a nut:
糾す (tadasu) ascertain; confirm; verify; make sure of
糾う (azanau) twist (something)
Interesting article. The history of the various scripts actually does have at least a limited parallel in the world - Ancient Egypt.
>Although many people think of Egyptian hieroglyphs as logographic or pictographic, it actually combines symbols for entire words with symbols for individual sounds. That is, it is a system that is partly logographic and partly alphabetic. It can be called logophonetic. [0]
This evolution continued for a while yet! The monumental hieroglyphs into a more easy to write cursive called "hieratic". The hieratic script further evolved into "demotic" - this was closer to a real alphabet, with directionality and ease of writing driving this change. The hieroglyphic roots are essentially lost at this point. Demotic then mixed with the greek alphabet by the Coptic community into the Coptic script!
> Generally, Hieroglyphics were used for monumental inscriptions and decorative texts, and Hieratic was used for administrative texts which placed more importance in content than appearance, which were written by hand, and which needed to be written quickly. Demotic writing developed around 600 BC. It was derived from Hieratic writing, but developed into a highly cursive form so that the pictographic element of some symbols was lost. Although many single symbols were still used to write whole words or concepts, the symbol did not necessarily visually resemble the concept it represented. [1]
Script comparison (see page 5): https://www.egyptologyforum.org/bbs/Stableford/Roberson,%20A...
Hieratic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
Demotic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
Coptic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script
[0] https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm#:~....
[1] https://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_...
Cool stuff but I found hard to have to waddle through all the cutesy story telling (techie? really?) to get to the point. Poetic wordplay based on meaning vs sound is quite interesting but not that deep.
Has anyone looked into Woshite?
Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author with the very wide variety of languages and writing systems (the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language).
For example, they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana). There are many examples of similar use in the languages, one that I'm familiar with is the use of determinatives in Ancient Egypt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinative). Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. If you want phonetic clarification, examples are even more numerous, e.g. the use of shaddah in Arabic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaddah).
The idea expressed in the "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc.
The part that I find really interesting about Japanese is it's well-developed system of honorifics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese).
pretty big death note spoiler
Kanji is believed to be introduced by Korea, and Katakana is originated from Korean Buddhism monks' scripting system for representing grammatical particle of Korean language in Korean Silla kingdom period.
Please original writer, either don't say anything about history if you don't know actual history or do better research.
Super interesting article, as a native english speaker who lived in Japan for many years and speak Japanese fluently, he pointed out a lot of things I always took for granted in Japanese (and never recognized as unique). One things I was hoping he would point out, and that I always found extremely unique in Japanese, was the giyongo (basically onomatopoeia). Japanese uses these extensively and the sounds can have extremely sensory driven meanings. They use these giyongo to describe physical textures (tsuru-tsuru is something smooth and slippery), hard to describe souns (pera pera is the sound of speaking a foreign language), flutently), actual sounds (tatata is the sound of fast running), a general feeling (bisho bisho is the sound of being soaked), specific actions (gussuri is the sound of being out cold), even specific emotions (zukizuki is the sound of extreme pain). There are hundreds if not thousands of these and I think they also make the language, as the author describes, 'rich and quirky and different'.