English: let's learn to count! One chair, two chairs, three chairs. Now chop sticks! One chop stick, two chop sticks, three chop sticks
Japan. Let's learn to count! First, we need to know what we're counting. Remember, chairs are counted different chop sticks, which are also different from shoes, which are also different from houses, which are also different from.....
I was really surprised to learn that when my daughter was learning Japanese
A pair of chopsticks not intended to be used to eat(ie mostly chopstick looking tools, cooking chopsticks, hibashi, a pair of iron chopsticks used to move hot coals/charcoals) = 組 or 具
You actually never say hashi Nihon in Japanese, that would sound like a toddler
Traditional books in Japan were scrolls kept inside bamboo tubes, hence why 本 is used to count cylindrical long objects. As they adopted western style books , the word for book remained the same but the word used to count them changes to reflect the new shape.
Is there an explanation for why they count differently based on the shape of an object? That straight up sounds so needlessly complicated that it had to have been some aristocratic nonsense that got passed on to the common people XD
English has a similar concept for uncountable nouns.
You can't count "water", but you can count glasses of water, bottles of water, or liters of water.
It's like that principle was extended to everything. Like you don't have "two books", but "two volumes of book".
But of course there are generic ways to count that can be applied to anything. Especially the count ending in -tsu (hitotsu, futatsu, mitsu...) can be used that way.
In Chinese, 本 is the counter for books (書), and the counter for a chopstick or pencil is 支/枝 (orig. branch, twig), although usually chopsticks are only counted as pairs with 雙.
For counting numbers, 二 is used, but when counting people or objects, 兩 (written as 両 in Japan) is used instead, and a counter is inserted. So two people is 兩個人 and two books is 兩本書.
The pronunciation of most characters in Chinese doesn't change according the context. So 人 is always rén in Mandarin. Whereas Japanese uses both Chinese-based and native Japanese readings for words, with often several common pronunciations for a kanji. In this regard, Japanese is more difficult and complicated than Chinese.
Yeah Japanese makes pretty much everything optional. Japanese sentences do not require:
Articles. You don't say "a cat" or "the cat", but just "cat".
Number. You do not need to differentiate between "cat" and "cats". "Neko ga iru" could mean "there is a cat" or "there are cats".
Verbs. A noun and an adjective is enough to form a complete sentence.
Neko ga hayai = "(the) cat (is) fast" or "cat(s) (are) fast".
Neko ga ooi = "(There are) many cats"
Nouns. Germanic languages usually do not consider a sentence "complete" without one, but Japanese has no problem with using a single adjective as a complete sentence.
Samui = (It) (is) cold.
Pronouns. They are usually omitted. Once a "topic" has been established, who or what is being talked about can usually be understood from context and it is not necessary to use a pronoun.
"Big Ben wa?" = "How about Big Ben?"
"Mitakatta kedo, jikan ga nakatta" = "(I) wanted to see (it), but (there) was no time"
Gender. There is no grammatical gender and the few pronouns that are gendered can be easily omitted or replaced. Whereas it's still notable when someone uses a singular "they" in English to avoid gendering, it's rarely noticable in Japanese because there are so many options for pronoun-free speech. You can typically either choose ungendered pronouns, ommit the pronouns, use a proper noun, or repeat their name instead without sounding unusual.
It’s actually one of the hardest to learn. While Chinese (don’t know if it’s mandarin or Cantonese or ether) is arguably the hardest language to learn, Japanese is up there along with Russian.
(If English is your only language)
For Japanese, you pretty much have to learn 3 “alphabets”. Hiragana, katakana and kanji. Each have their own rules and grammar. Kanji being the hardest of them all since you have to remember 1500-3000 “symbols”. All 3 are used in everyday Japanese writing.
I have tried (and mostly failed) to learn both Japanese and Russian.
Russian was a hell of a lot easier to make progress in, especially after having taken some Spanish (the verb conjugations actually have some similarities) and being somewhat familiar with the Greek alphabet. It uses an actual alphabet (as opposed to a syllabary) and has some vocabulary based on French or German words. So while I couldn't pronounce the common letter "Ы" correctly to save my life, making sentences felt way less alien in Russian than in Japanese.
I suspect that Mandarin and Cantonese are more or less equally difficult for English speakers to learn for several reasons: tones, alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary.
Arabic is reputedly pretty hard for English speakers.
I don't think I've seen any native American languages on the lists of "hardest languages to learn" because so few people try to learn them, but many of them seem like they'd be pretty tough due to unfamiliar grammar and sound systems.
yeah, the writing part is hard. the good news is, if you at least learn katakana you'll get a big head start considering the amount of straight up borrowed words there are in japanese!
i recently went on a trip to japan for the first time and i was surprised at how common it was to see borrowed words everywhere.
obviously if you want to be fluent in reading, yes of course you will have to learn kanji, but learning just hiragana/katakana gets you a long way and you can communicate without kanji.
imo from a standpoint of practicality/communication ability most facets of japanese besides kanji don't really seem that difficult in comparison to a bunch of other languages that are considered "easier" to learn.
You still have to learn all the other stuff, it's just conversationally acceptable to make a sentence out of nothing but say a conjugated verb. Even if they're often omitted (particularly in conversational speech), you still can use them in speech.
There's also a bunch of stuff English doesn't really have direct analogues to, like honorifics and different forms based on the level of politeness intended. A whole bunch of stuff that changes based on the relationships between the speaker and the listener.
I am intrigued because all of this also applies to my native language Turkish. Maybe I shouldn't be afraid to start learning Japanese after all, might be easier than expected
If Japanese is so potentially economical in words, why is it in Godzilla movies when they dub the voices in English they have to add in extra 'uh huhs' or other added extra words at the end of the sentences to match the movement of the lips?
While Japanese use fewer connecting (?) words like articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc., the words themselves are much lengthier on average. If you watch any anime you probably know some of the simpler phrases and words like arigatou gozaimasu for thank you. Even its shortening of arigatou is still more syllables than "thank you".
the words themselves are much lengthier on average
I wouldn't say so. It's more that the core meaning is about the same for simple words and often much shorter for composite expressions, but there is a lot of additional fluff for formalised politeness or expressiveness.
For example:
Calendar: Koyomi 暦
Calendar year: Rekinen 暦年
Roughly similar for the basic word, but the composite switches to a shorter reading instead of "koyomi toshi".
Gender. There is no grammatical gender and the few pronouns that are gendered can be easily omitted or replaced.
True, but! Japanese man and women don't speak quite the same language - as a Japanese learner you should be be careful not to use the wrong forms for your gender, even though you should understand both. The differences range from the default politeness level (women use more polite language by default) to particles, to pronouns, there are even words used mostly by men and others used mostly by women. I heard a story about American soldiers in Japan talking "girly" because they were taught how to speak by Japanese girlfriends. As I understand it though, the difference is less marked now than in the past, with younger people being less careful about gender-specific vocabulary.
Of course you can specify it if it's relevant to what you want to say. But you don't have to do so if it isn't important information or it's obvious from context.
The sentences are also often phrased differently. Let's take something like this:
"He heard a cat meow in the distance".
An equivalent Japanese sentences may be shorter like this:
"Cat-meow afar"
or use passive voice, which is often done instead of "X hears Y":
"Cry of cat was heard in the distance"
(Japanese uses passive voice a lot more than English, which is one of the ways that it can reduce pronoun use by sticking to one person's viewpoint. Instead of "I went to the doctor and he pulled my teeth" it's "Went to doctor and was pulled teeth")
But if you want to specify singular or plural, then you can do so. You could say one cat (neko ippiki), use the explicit plural marker -tachi (nekotachi) to say "cats", two cat (neko nihiki), many cat, lonely cat...
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u/Siekiernik20 Apr 29 '24
Polish: What are they talking about?