The Japanese-language wikipedia page goes into it in more detail: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%AC%E5%A3%B0%E8%AA%9E

Abbreviation, repetition, and stacking bits of words together are a big difference between natural vs formal Japanese language skills. It's very Lego-like that way.

I find it very similar to english though. Cows don't actually make a sound anything like "moo", and birds don't "chirp".

I think you're right on when you say it's cultural.

Another important thing that shapes these things in Japanese is just how old the culture is. So much is inherited from ancient times...

To this day I still discover new ones that constantly amaze me someone was able to put a sound to it. I think my favorite to date is probably mozomozo. My wife used it to describe a baby flailing it's arms around. I was like ok... What do you mean? She repeated the action of flailing the arms around. I laughed. Oh the Japanese.

Japanese isn't generally considered to have the equivalent of the 'l' sound from most other languages, and it rather has a sound that's perhaps somewhere between 'l' and a rolling 'r'. In romanized text it's generally written as 'r'. Transliteration isn't really unambiguous in the end, though, and there are multiple ways of romanizing Japanese, so while romanizing くるくる as 'kulukulu' doesn't sound like a very common transliteration, it may be possible.

Also, 'kuru' means 'to come', but I don't know if that's related.

English has a huge variety of terms for extreme tiredness: whacked, bushed, wiped out, worn out, drained, burned out, beat, knackered, fried, shattered, frazzled, zonked... must be the puritan work ethic or something.

We've even got a few onomatopoeia of our own: feeling kinda.. ugh.. meh... bleugh... I mean, whew, yeesh. Just... phew.

Maybe being tired is just the global human condition.

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?

My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common root of word origins to help the way there is between say English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose. The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).

Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit.

Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in surprising ways.

Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".

In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.

In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do - if they mean "look", they will say 看, and if they mean "see", they will say 看到, inflecting the verb with a grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking the English distinction.

In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely different words.

I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they said 看 instead of 看到 while trying to speak Mandarin.

I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).

Have you tried doing this? In general you can't swap these verbs without the resulting use being ungrammatical. The problem is that "watch" is durative (it takes time) and "see" is punctual (it takes no time).

> In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.

Isn't that like 見る and 見える?

Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of Japanese verbs:

- "Thank you" in the past tense ("ありがとうございました") conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered and that you do not intend to impose further.

- "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("ありがとうございます") conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not yet completely rendered.

This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial the difference between a completed "look" and an incomplete "see".

Often in English, we have multiple words for sensory experiences to indicate how much focus is put into the action. “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture. “Hearing” a song is less focused than “listening to” a song.

Got to be good-lookin', 'cause he's so hard to see

According to Wikipedia, "The lyrics were inspired by his relationship with Ono,"

Isn't that backwards? Like in the phrase "they look but do not see", which was what I had in mind in my first comment. Isn't that something like "見るけど見えない" ?

So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking.

You can also use "look" to emphasize that focus does not exist; one of the sentences I've collected for interesting use is "He stared at the page, not seeing it."

In that case, there is no possibility of a page being overlooked or otherwise missed. What the sentence is telling us is that although "he" is directing his eyes at the page, his mind is on something else, so "seeing" never occurs.

The difference between "see" and "look" has nothing to do with focus. It is what I noted in the discussion of Mandarin - success. Seeing is the goal of looking.

Note that this phenomenon where native speakers have no trouble obeying a distinction that their language requires, but come out with total nonsense when asked why they choose one form or another, is completely characteristic of grammatical rules, and not characteristic of vocabulary selection.

I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it easier than Japanese.

I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand the grammar logic later on.

A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar notes I have from lessons - Various て forms, which have their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this - Volitional forms - X-なければ, conditionals, should/shouldn't - the "te-shimau" form - くれる / あげる - Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb categories...which were so hard to remember - しか - ばかり - ように - X-ところだ - X-ほうが-Y - Command forms, conjugations, etc.

Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.

I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.

In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.

Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.

There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.

Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".

I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.

Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.

Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.

I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.

Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.

This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.

So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.

However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".

Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.

What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.

But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.

The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".

The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.

In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:

三杯水 three glasses of water

十头牛 ten heads of cattle

两支铅笔 two rods of pencil

一条路 a strip of road

六只猫 six animal-units of cat

五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people

Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)

So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.

One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on politeness/formality.

There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form, causative, etc, etc.

The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.

In reality few people use half of these, I would think

My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese

I mean, I'm pretty much a Chinese/Cantonese native user, so I can't be sure about that since I never "learned" the language in a classroom setting, but my impression is that this short period of learning grammar for Chinese language leaners is quite typical.

Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.

This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:

1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.

2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).

3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".

> I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

Right.

You can get a sample of 80/20 here:

https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/

Pronunciation also isn't that hard (Kanto dialect, at least) compared to, say, French. The writing system is definitely the hardest part for me.

Your experience is not the norm, not according to research and not according to most people who've tried learning Japanese. Either you have a talent or you had a more effective method for learning, but it does undermine your judgement as something generalisable to others.

Let's hope it's the method and you share it.

I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.

If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win."

Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer.

Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese.

The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.

* note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.

For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin) characters' tones change when they form words. The number one (一) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?

Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.

Although I haven't put enough thought into the exact differences (and thus might be entirely wrong), I've felt the grammar is fairly intuitive (I presume due in part to my background of also speaking fluent Hindi).

I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.

"A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room" means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be parsed differently.

All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out which one is intended from context.

...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!

Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.

One way to ask this objectively is to ask, for every non-native speaker, which languages are easiest and which are hardest to learn?

You can set this as a questionnaire and ask people to rank.

You will find that Japanese is among the hardest to learn amongst nearly all cultures.

I press “doubt” on the entire comment just due to this statement. There is no “objectively more difficult” for most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first language.

Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first language. They will likely find Japanese language to be extremely easy compared to almost any other language. Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and pieces all the time.

Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it; cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at all), grammar overall doesn’t feel overly complicated, etc. However, from what I’ve observed, native English speakers seem to struggle with quite a few of those things, including pronunciation.

Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand at least half of what the other person is saying (despite speaking to each other in different languages, without having any prior knowledge of each other’s language).

All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing as “objectively easier”, unless we know the person’s first/primary language.

Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn.

Point being? I think it’s subjective.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test does not include a speaking portion, which is the part of Japanese that Chinese people usually struggle with most - being kanji masters, the rest looks a breeze, lucky them! That tempers the point somewhat (somewhat).

And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list. Sometimes with Arabic.

Maybe Japanese is a really hard language objectively, but these surveys aren't actually showing that. What they are showing is that the majority of organizations that are doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively" much harder than Spanish.

Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic sit on top of the list because they are the most isolated away from English.

Koreans find Japanese extremely easy to learn. Vice versa.

I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."

Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can use context to derive the plurality when none is given.

Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.

So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)

The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one word for.

Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?

Similarly Gödel speaks of consistent proofs in logical systems. His incompleteness theorem talks about either a system has statements it cannot prove (but they can expressed!), or is inconsistent. Since natural language is probably not that consistent, the whole issue is moot.

It should be possible to show under some loose conditions that all natural languages are "Turing complete". Even the halting problem does not impose a problem -- we're really not interested in telling whether long-running computation halts in natural language. The expressivity is guaranteed by not insisting on strict consistency in language.

(PS: the situation changes where there is a mandate to only speak things that are "correct", for example, censorship. Now you get into the realm where something might be technically "correct" but the decision algorithm is imperfect and does not allow you to speak that truth)

> is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

I don't think so as long as the concept is constructed from physical objects or shared emotions/feelings.

There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?

But this is kinda off-topic.

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it's an old philosophical chestnut in epistemology.

Godel and Russell are relevant because we can always look for meaningful statements that can be well formed under wone system but not under another.

> But this is kinda off-topic.

I had theory about that. It's so _on topic_ to be discussing the nature of language itself in a time when the biggest festival in town is "Large Language Models". Nobody so violently attacks a comment unless it hits a nerve, And I don't want to believe that my fellow HN commenters are simple racists. I think some people worry about basing the computing work on something as precarious and pluralistic as language. And they'd be right to.

If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions in another language, and have the listener, by imagining those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?

Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some concepts get attached to some words through ways other than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like, maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the human mind which one might intuitively associated with some combination of the previous two?)

But, outside of things like that, I would expect that meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable collection of people, can be explained in any of the most common natural languages.

(Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of meanings that are specific to one person.)

Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could be communicated from one person to another child-person, which can't be replicated with another language.

Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate ideas which they could learn words for, but which we would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing between different human languages.

We should still be able to describe the statistics of how they use certain words together though, and how this correlates to the world, or at least, the world as described through those concepts that we can comprehend. And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of what words they would use to describe the ways in which our description of how they use the words (including correlation with aspects of the world that we comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the words.

There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined except in terms of words that would be defined in terms of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some other collection of concepts as the base case instead?" and idk what the counterargument is), and which supposedly every natural human language has a word for each of these (though the word might not only mean one of these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other meanings as well).

The idea goes that every word in any natural human language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like 65).

If this is true, then no idea in any natural human language would be entirely untranslatable to any other human natural language.

But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar to the question you were raising)

I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?

That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.

It's true, there are a bunch of American idioms related to baseball. What's funny about this, however, is that baseball isn't very popular in America these days (American football and basketball are much more popular, and I think even hockey is now more popular), but baseball is actually quite popular in Japan.

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.

It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces.

>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)

1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese).

2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-)

As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English.

When I saw things like ㄱ for k/g or ㅏ for i I was in awe, like that's is so damn clever.

- 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!)

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.

The Chinese republicans looked towards Japan as a model for how to develop, and part of that was importing new lexicon wholesale, since Japanese scolars had already helpfully transliterated Western concepts into new compounds during the Meiji era.

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.

First revision had nobles speaking French when suitable, because “everyone” could still speak some French in Tolstoy's times (just like people in IT all across the world link to original English documentation every day without even thinking about it).

Then it was found that “everyone” meant “well-educated nobles like Tolstoy”. For second revision, Tolstoy rewrote all French utterances into Russian (and moved most of philosophical sections to dedicated postscripts).

Then it was reverted to original form (with later corrections), but with translations of French text in footnotes.

Second revision was printed in “cheap” editions, third revision was used in higher quality ones. Later Soviet prints follow Collected Works version based on French-enabled revision (and thorough comparison of printed editions and manuscripts).

Depending on the age of your translation and its source, you may find any of those. Some translators also chose to translate French instead of using footnotes.

I couldn't find anything about this on English wikipedia, but here's a rough translation from the Russian page:

Before the 1917-1918 language reform, "peace" was written as "миръ", and "world" as "мiръ". There's a legend which claims that Tolstoy initially intended to use the "world" meaning. Indeed, the second part of the epilogue has some thoughts about why the wars happen and how they affect the world as a whole.

Despite this, every edition of the novel published during Tolstoy's life was titled as "Война и миръ" (= peace), and the French version of the title as written by Tolstoy was "La guerre et la paix". There are different explanations of this legend. (explanations follow, can't be bothered to translate)

https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%...

So, in other words, adding in foreign words can add some je ne sais quoi

Amusingly, my English edition kept the French and didn't have footnotes. I read it as a kid and had no hope of understanding the French so I just skipped over it whenever it came up.

Claims that Japanese is inherently vague are often made by people who either don't understand the language fully yet, are frustrated at trying to translate expressions that have precise meanings in Japanese but no equivalents in another language, or are focusing on literary or creative language, which, yes, can be ambiguous and allusive.

When necessary, Japanese can be as clear and precise as any other language. The design, manufacture, and operation of the Shinkansen, for example, have been implemented through millions of documents and conversations that were nearly all in Japanese. In sixty years of operation, the train system has never had a major accident. That would not be possible if the language were inherently vague.

As an example, the author mentions otsukaresama, which is the set phrase to use if you've been driving for a long time with guests and have reached your destination (and many, many other situations). But having the driver thank their guests for their patience is basically not a thing in English, so how do you translate that? The literal translation, "honorable tired lord" (~ thank you for your effort/patience), is completely incomprehensible.

Depending on the context, you'd want either explanation. If you're learning Japanese you'd probably want the explanation of how and when it's used, and the literal words that compose it.

But if you were translating a manga book and it used that phrase, you would probably just put "Ahh, we're finally here!"

I think there's just something of a bastardized use of the word "untranslatable". As long as a language can convey abstract concepts, you should be able to translate anything into it.

I don't know that I would say this is a bastardization of the word, but I see where you're coming from.

But regarding translating it as "we're finally here", that's not what it means: it's not an expression of satisfaction, it's acknowledging that to others that it's been a long trip for them.

This is also why at its best, translation is a skill and an art. The same text can have significantly differing impacts readers depending on who’s translating.

You can explain the meaning of a text, sure, and for technical texts that may be all you need, but if the goal is not simply the transfer of dry information and the result fails to trigger the intended associations and emotions, your job as a translator is not yet done.

Personally I prefer footnotes in those situations. I'd rather have a few sentences that explain the nuance an author was trying to convey with their word choice that a native speaker would have picked up on rather than have a phrase thrown out entirely and replaced with some alternative localization that might be familiar in an effort to try to capture the same "feel" but barely comes close to what was actually said (if you're lucky).

To declare something "untranslatable" is essentially to imply that a non-native speaker is incapable of understanding it no matter how much they study the language. It deals in "touchy feely unquantifiable nonsense".

Noticed that everyone in here who proclaims that some things are untranslatable have yet to provide actual concrete examples of them (SRC LANG, TGT LANG, SRC SENTENCE)

The fact that you can have legal documents translated from one language to another is all the proof you need that if you're a good enough translator, all languages are interchangeable. You might need a whole lot more words or a whole lot less words depending on the source and target language though.

Here's an easy one: nearly any pun is literally impossible to translate while still being a pun. You can explain the pun by talking about the original language, but it can't be adequately translated.

I get your irritation but I think it's also a way of signaling to the reader that the difficult word is heavily freighted with meaning that would be blindingly obvious to a native/fluent speaker but require a small essay to convey in English (and still wouldn't have the emotional impact) - linguistic operator overloading, if you will.

Interestingly, Chinese colloquially refers to languages as the same as culture. For example, Chinese is 中文, literally Chinese culture; English 英文, English culture; Japanese 日文, Japanese culture. The suffix 文 signifies culture.

There is also the word 語 and 語言 to signify language; this is more formal but without the connotation of culture. But my point is culture is indelibly tied to language.

My understanding is that 文 (in this context) refers to the written language, whereas 語 and 語言 refers to the spoken language. Which is why we say 寫中文 instead of 寫中語. 語 and 文 often gets mixed up, but the nitty-picky-correct way should be what I described.

FWIW here in Hong Kong we have a term "兩文三語" which means two written (Chinese and English) and three spoken languages (Cantonese, Mandarin and English).

"You are shit" vs "You are the shit". Explaining "the shit" to someone who's fluent in English but not culturally fluent in American is almost impossible. There's a qualitative difference between "You are very good" or "You are the best" and "You are the shit". They're not exactly synonyms.

Another good example: Dude or Guy as used in Californian.

Or you skip all the context and just say it means "you're great", very easy translation.

"Eres el mejor" - I just translated it into Spanish

Different scenarios require different methods of translation, sometimes you'll want something literal, and sometimes you can just translate the intent behind the words. As long as you can do that, I would consider it "translatable".

A paragraph footnote might accurately convey the intended meaning but it won't evoke the same feelings. A good author or translator cares about both these things.

It's that emotional and cultural baggage layered on top of words that's hard to translate.

So for example in USA you can call someone "a benedict arnold". As an immigrant this means nothing to me. People tell me it means "bad". I understand the words, but there's no impact behind them because I lack the cultural background.

If somebody had first explained to you that Benedict Arnold was a well known traitor during the revolutionary war you'd have nearly the same context as your average American.

It's hardly what I would call untranslatable. I'm sure you could find some poor sod who the public education system failed so terribly that Benedict Arnold is as equally opaque in America.

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).

[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

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 seem to remember something similar from the Tarzan novel. He learns to read in English, but his first spoken language is French, so his understanding of how to make the words into sounds is all wrong.

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”?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4dysjr5-FE

> 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.

Does that also mean that Mandarin speakers will express themselves more or less the same regardless of the social status of the person they're talking to?

It's funny because I've had the opportunity to speak with a few Mandarin speakers, and sometimes when they were asking things in English, I felt something quite different. I wouldn't say that they were not polite, because that was not the case in their attitude, but the way they formulated their request was rather direct and as if the result of the request was a given.

It definitely feels more "straight to the point" to me than English, but I'm not the best person to ask. It definitely has some degrees of gradual politeness, not nearly as much as Japanese though.

> Does that also mean that Mandarin speakers will express themselves more or less the same regardless of the social status of the person they're talking to?

A little? There's definitely class consciousness, plus a whole slew of fun LARP words from the communist revolution, not that anybody uses that in Taiwan. Unsure about the PRC. But in any case people definitely talk to me differently when they find out I own a restaurant, which makes me a "boss," which makes me apparently worthy of some new form of address, usually more serious and having less of what I call "taiwan noises" (there's a proper linguistic term, I don't know it) aka the "aahs" and "oh's" that end a sentence, and the tendency to leave one's mouth open after speaking.

> I felt something quite different. I wouldn't say that they were not polite, because that was not the case in their attitude, but the way they formulated their request was rather direct and as if the result of the request was a given.

This could just be ESL stuff. I probably sound like this in Mandarin. In fact I'm sure I do, I don't make Taiwan noises and I don't hedge so I probably sound quite abrupt and possibly even rude. I've asked and nobody's complained but I suspect it.

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.

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.

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.

>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_...

At that point, it already was a looong time since the greek alphabet evolved - via a few other cultures in between - from hieroglyphs, so it went back to egypt the long way around

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).

TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?

Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will often use kanji for a concept but the sung lyrics are expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.

Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.

Bopomofo is not used outside Taiwan, though.

So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.

But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.

I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.

I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.

No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that feature either. Note that a written text displaying this feature has no spoken equivalent.

Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common in Chinese internet culture.

Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.

You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics are profoundly context-dependent.

But yeah, even taking that into account, Japanese is a trainwreck compared to Chinese.

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%9A%E9%9F%B3%E5%AD%97/108...

They are both felt to have gone through a lot of simplification. It isn't well known that they have similar grammars, for the fairly straightforward reason that they don't have similar grammars.

In Chinese though you find structures which are pretty regular such as "measure words" where you might write

  yi zhang zhi

  one (piece) of paper

Note that Latin is generally considered to have about four irregular verbs, possibly a few more than that depending on how you're counting.

A verb in Ancient Greek has six principal parts, which means that to correctly inflect it you need to memorize six more-or-less independent forms.† (They're often "less" independent, but sometimes they'll surprise you!)

By contrast, an English verb, except for the single verb be, has a maximum of five forms. (Not five principal parts - five fully-inflected forms!) So by the Greek standard, English has just the one irregular verb. That's not a correct application of the concept, but it is worth observing.

> I don't think French has examples as crazy as go -> went. I mean, there aren't even letters in common!

This is a suppletive verb. (That is, a verb in which some forms descend from one ancestral verb and other forms descend from a different ancestral verb.‡) Went was originally the past tense of the still-existent verb wend, in the same way that bent is still today the past tense of bend; wend has had to shift over to wended.

Not only does French have suppletive verbs, it has the same suppletive verb, aller [to go]:

    1sg pres.    je vais    [< Lat. vadere]
    1sg impf.    j'allais   [< Lat. alare]
    1sg fut.     j'irai     [< Lat. ire]

Circling back around, we can note that while fero is one of the rare Latin verbs that comes with a warning that its conjugation is irregular, that's not because its perfect forms are taken from an unrelated verb. By itself, that would barely be worth remarking on.

† And this is a convenience for modern students. Actual speakers of the language would have thought about their verbs a bit differently - in a number of common cases, one of the principal parts is a form that doesn't otherwise exist in the language, which native speakers would never have considered.

‡ Suppletion as a linguistic phenomenon is not restricted to verbs; compare person -> people.

I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.

> A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former. The object of study in linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object. But the written word is so intimately connected with the spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the principal role. As much or even more importance is given to this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign itself.

Edit: Apparently there's a term for this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism

Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA, naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g. cheese would be "çiyz".

Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here.

The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.

This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).

Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.

The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g. about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending on their context, because the last people who knew the complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are seldom completely certain.

In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the existence of native speakers who can always show the correct reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can have great difficulties in reading any book published before WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes, replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may not help enough a modern reader).

However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than the Sumerian writing system.

I mean, there are even ways how a bum refers to you, when they ask you for spare change.

Please original writer, either don't say anything about history if you don't know actual history or do better research.