Great irony with Japanese language

[Chris K]

I remember thumbing through my phrase book in preparation for a trip to Japan. It had a section on Japanese grammar and reading Japanese. Quickly browsing through I realised Japanese grammar is very simple, rather similar to English. Having a quick look at the scripts and trying to work out my name in Katakana I thought 'wow! this is a lot easier than I though, with characters for syllables theres no real issues in how to spell things as we do in English (the same syllable can be spelt numerous ways). Realised hiragana was the same and was overjoyed. Then I discovered Kanji and my heart sank
If the japanese just stuck to their two syllabic scripts it could well be one of the easiest languages in the world, paving the way for it becoming a true international language like english is.
Of course these are impressins of someone who barely knows a few words of Japanese and who's 'study' of th language is casual and breif. But what do you peeps more experiencd with the language feel??

 

[Mrjones]

Learning kanji takes lot of time, there is also lot of local dialect in many villages and rural areas what makes things harder. Even some native Japanese people have hard time to understand these dialects. It is possible to learn Japanese though, and many people do, it takes a lot of time to practise kanji though.

 

[nice gaijin]

Kanji is certainly one of the harder aspects of the language for students that are encountering it for the first time. The debate about abolishing kanji has been aired out before (elsewhere and on these boards), and kanji remains firmly planted where it is.

I asked myself this question when I was just starting; Kanji was interesting, but such a huge hurdle in the journey towards literacy that it would be so much easier if it were not there. However, having made considerable progress in the language and in my understanding of of kanji, I've realized that it is an extremely important part of the written language, and I've grown quite fond of it.

I do feel that I should point out that there are other written languages that operate solely on syllabaries and an even longer list of alphasyllabaries (also called abugida), and they have all so far failed to catch on as international languages. The path to becoming an international language seems to be a process that owes more to the political and economic climate than the ease of learning it.

Although it makes it easier to read aloud, syllabaries and variations thereof do not ensure that the reader understands what he is saying; kanji, while making it much more difficult to learn to read, makes it much easier to grasp the concept behind what has been written, as well as helps to set up visible boundaries between words (which is important in determining the proper intonation). At this point, reading a paragraph all in kana would probably drive me insane, even more than if it were written in romaji.

 

[hkBattousai]

Kanji is one thing, but the other hardship is absence of spaces between words in sentences. It makes Japanese texts harder to process with a computer program, for applications like searching algorithms or getting user input.

 

[Elizabeth]

I remember thumbing through my phrase book in preparation for a trip to Japan. It had a section on Japanese grammar and reading Japanese. Quickly browsing through I realised Japanese grammar is very simple, rather similar to English.

There are aspects that are similiar to English but many, many that are not....as for very simple, er....to me anyway, compared to English it's much more cumbersome, highly subjective and illogical. Making that determination after glancing at a phrase book is the thing that can rightly be called simplistic.

 

[Devious]

I don't think that if there weren't any Kanji, Japanese could become international lagnuage... I don't think English is an international language because it's easy there are other political and economical reasons... Also if Kanji were abolished, the part of Japanese culture would be destroyed... One of the main reasons why people are so amazed by Japanese and their culture is that they have such difficult writing system... and it's amazing

 

[Mrjones]

Well Japanese language is still among ten of the most spoken laguages, so its pretty well known still.

 

[tampopo]

kanji and that...

Chris K, yeah, in the beginning of your post I was agreeing with you. It would make it simpler, if only in thoery. You would of course lose a lot of...refinement that I presume kanji brings to the written Japanese language.
It's only practice that makes perfect. As a non speaker/non reader I am often amazed at the ease my wife can make sense of what, to me is the result of a spider crawling out of a bottle of ink and across a page/screen!
It doesn't happen often, but only yesterday or the other day my wife leaned over my shoulder to type some Japanese on the keyboard. I watched with utter amazement as she typed away. Those that do it every day of the week must take it for granted, but I only see it occurring once a year or two. It's amazing the way the text just morphs from one script to the other.
As for learning it...that's something else. An aside, I went to college as a mature student with the current school leavers about 10-11 years younger than me. During one class on Law, the instructor used some flowery language. One exasperated student was frustrated by this, but I explained to him by saying that if noone expanded their vocabulary, we'd all continue talking like 5 year olds.
While we were dating, my future wife and her Hong Kong friend were in my parents' house and my toddler nephew came in. They were both amazed that he was 'fluent' in English already. But he could only speak in the present tense, like most toddlers...so their perception of him as a fully fledged native speaker...was flawed. The more they speak in English the better they got, and the opposite is true, 'cept I'm not encouraged to learn Japanese!!! unfortunately...

 

[Mycernius]

Well Japanese language is still among ten of the most spoken laguages, so its pretty well known still.

Depends on which list you look at. It ranges from 9th down to 11th. The only reason is because of Japans large population, same with Mandarin.
Outside Japan you will have more difficulty trying to find a speaker than a Hindi, Arabic or English speaker.

 

[Ewok85]

I would not agree that Japanese grammar is similar to English, I cannot think of any situations where it is even close.

Hiragana and Katakana appear simple because its just written characters - learning your ABC's is simple. Making words and remembering them is hard. Reading is hard. Reading massive chunks of text in Japanese with no Kanji is hard because Japanese does not use spaces to mark out where one word ends and another starts.

Kanji is what makes Japanese easy. Once you get to that stage you know why.

 

[yukio_michael]

Japanese doesn't have word boundaries because the concept of the 'word' much like in languages such as Korean and Chinese is a little more fuzzy than in romantic languages which do separate words with spaces.

I am not a linguist, but I have spoken to Japanese speakers who ARE linguists, and they tend to agree with this point. Computer assisted parsing of Japanese (JKC languages in general) phrases is done not with a lexicon (some thing that is very impractical, even with languages with word boundaries), but with something called n-grams... which parse based on common occurances of overlapping phonemes...

There are aslo aspects to Japanese language that involve "stopwords" or words so common that they don't really need to be parsed--- these would be closer to particles than any other thing, I believe.

I used to dread Kanji, but recently its been a great joy for me to study, and I take a lot of pride in being able to understand even what some Chinese means simply because I can guess the meaning based on the character...

Writing Kanji is a great way to learn it... though I'm lazy to practice in my Showa notes books... since, like even many Japanese, I rely on my computer to type most of my Japanese... Many Japanese are losing the ability to write Japanese properly, for this very reason.

To the OP, Kanji came first, as a direct use of Chinese characters, hiragana followed as a sort of cursive short-hand that reduced the number of strokes required to just a few, katakana afterwords used a particular element of a character to represent a sound.

Like many other posters in this thread, I loathe sentences all in hiragana... maybe not as much as I seem to have a problem w/ roumaji.... I honestly have more dificulty reading a sentence written in roumaji than one writen in Japanese, complete w/ Kanji... Meaning, not pronunciation that is.

Kanji is probably the biggest hurdle in Japanese, but once you get a feel for it, and get rolling, it becomes a passion to learn as much as you can... I hope some day I'll be able to write it freehand, but it will take some time and practice... The fact that I love the Japanese language makes this struggle seem less like a chore, and more like an engaging challenge.

 

[Elizabeth]

I would not agree that Japanese grammar is similar to English, I cannot think of any situations where it is even close.

Some aspects of word order are similar -- subjects generally speaking come at the beginning of the sentence, adjectives and adverbs come before the parts of speech they modify, both use prepositions/postpositions to mark the relations between words or clauses, in cause/effect type structures, the reason, often followed by 'because', 'and' or a related term, usually gets placed before the outcome...there are other patterns to word placement that may or may not be roughly the same depending on the exact sentence.

But I agree certainly most things are very different, especially with the verb phrase.

 

[nice gaijin]

Kanji is what makes Japanese easy. Once you get to that stage you know why.

This sums it up quite nicely.

 

[Ewok85]

Some aspects of word order are similar -- subjects generally speaking come at the beginning of the sentence, adjectives and adverbs come before the parts of speech they modify, both use prepositions/postpositions to mark the relations between words or clauses, in cause/effect type structures, the reason, often followed by 'because', 'and' or a related term, usually gets placed before the outcome...there are other patterns to word placement that may or may not be roughly the same depending on the exact sentence.
But I agree certainly most things are very different, especially with the verb phrase.

The one similarity I can think of is that like English, Japanese can be flexible in the structure of a sentence. While its more natural in say "The red roses are cheap today", its also possible to say "Today the roses that are red are cheap" or "Cheap today are red roses".

 

[dogcountry]

I haven't been in here to reply to a post for some months. I've been way to busy trying to get my novel ready for publishing. I'm having problems trying to find an available person to do an edit. I took 500 hours of Japanese at Berlitz in Boston many years ago. No English is spoken from the moment you enter the classroom. I never agreed with that system. Kanji was difficult for me, though I did fairly well with it. Each character is memorized. If you are bad at that just forget it. Kanji is of course learned by strokes of the pen, steps, step 1, step 2 etc. I was taught this way and I know of no other method. I was pretty good with Kanji but today in my senior years all is forgotten in the Kanji department. I still do fairly well with simple spoken Japanese. Living in So. Central Florida I don't have occasion to use it. Thinking back I lived close to three years in Japan and got through very nicely without using Kangi...Russ [email protected]

 

[GaryGreen]

I remember thumbing through my phrase book in preparation for a trip to Japan. It had a section on Japanese grammar and reading Japanese. Quickly browsing through I realised Japanese grammar is very simple, rather similar to English. Having a quick look at the scripts and trying to work out my name in Katakana I thought 'wow! this is a lot easier than I though, with characters for syllables theres no real issues in how to spell things as we do in English (the same syllable can be spelt numerous ways). Realised hiragana was the same and was overjoyed. Then I discovered Kanji and my heart sank
If the japanese just stuck to their two syllabic scripts it could well be one of the easiest languages in the world, paving the way for it becoming a true international language like english is.
Of course these are impressins of someone who barely knows a few words of Japanese and who's 'study' of th language is casual and breif. But what do you peeps more experiencd with the language feel??

It is possible to speak Japanese at a high level without being able to do Kanji but it also possible to be great at Kanji but poor at speaking. That's why you sometimes see people having passed written tests at a high level but their speaking ability no way reflects this level. Yes you haven't really mastered the language until you do the all 4 skills well. 1 Reading 2 Writing 3 Speaking 4 Listening. No question it takes years to master Kanji. Just look at how long it takes a native to learn it. As for speaking Japanese I think it is easy to speak it but not easy to speak it at a high level. Due to Kanji there is alot more vocabulary you have to learn compared to English to be able to speak it at a high level.

 

[loquela]

Of course

Well Japanese language is still among ten of the most spoken languages, so its pretty well known still.

That is simply because the population of Japan is so large! Japanese is not spoken outside the archipelago. And I know of absolutely no other country in the world that has adopted it as a second language. Furthermore, the Japanese expat population is probably among the smallest in the world meaning that Japanese is probably one of the languages least spoken in the world outside its own borders.

 

[loquela]

I also feel that Japanese seems on the surface very simple indeed. But in reality no language is in essence more or less simple than another. Regardless of how difficult/easy/simple/complex such things as grammar, vocab, spelling may appear, languages are used to express thoughts and communicate ideas.

And herein lies the key. English may sometimes appear complex because of the vastness of its vocabulary. Its grammar may be simple in terms of verb conjugation. But English is also a very precise and unambiguous language unlike Japanese that uses apparently simple and limited words and phrases to express numerous ideas. For Japanese context is more important, for Chinese intonation is crucial.

To learn the phonetic script of Japanese is relatively easy, the grammar simple and at the end of the day kanji can just be boiled down to a memory game. But to understand nuances of meaning and to grasp inner thoughts expressed in few words. That is the difficult part for non Japanese.

Being an insular homogeneous nation, the Japanese have evolved without the need to express themselves verbally with the same precision as the English for example (a language that is shared for the most part among non-native speakers). The Japanese have the ability to understand each other without the need for such verbose use of language. Of course completely ignorant of this westerners describe this uniquely Japanese communicative ability as 'Japanese Telepathy'. Of course, it's not telepathy at all, its just very sensitive communication. And you can study the language all you like but you need to go a step further if you are going to have the ability to communicate in exactly the same way as a native Japanese.

 

[dogcountry]

Japanese From A Computer

You guys often speak of using Japanese from your computer. This is new to me. Using a computer are you using a CD that is downloaded? Please, someone enlighten me so I may use my computer for typing out Japanese.

 

[loquela]

Using computer for writing Japanese

These days it should be quite easy to type and read japanese on your computer. Unfortunately, my experience is limited to the PC (Microsoft) but I beleieve the Unicode standard is now universal.

If you are running Windows Xp you have everything you need to read and write Japanese characters, you just need to adjust your regional settings. There are also many websites out there that offer free downloads of Japanese fonts. Windows has unicode fonts that can handle 2-bit characters pre-installed.