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JohnSan
Guest
Are there certain words that are only written in Kanji or Kana? Does each word have a Kanji and Kana alternative? When does one know which one to use?
Thanks.
Thanks.
- 22 Feb 2008
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J
JohnSan
Guest
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There's still a lot that page doesn't cover, such as...
"...inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs..."
Does it apply to all adjectives and verbs? Are there some cases where it may be written in Kana, rather than Kanji? Like I said, how does one tell which option is best? Is it purely based on choice?
Also, on the Katakana side of things, do words like "Toire" have a Japanese alternative? I mean, isn't there any other way to say "Toilet" in Japanese? Are there any words that only have a Katakana way of writing and pronouncing it? To put it in Layman's terms, are there cases where most Japanese people simply choose to use Katakana and the foreign pronunciation of a word, rather than its Japanese alternative?
"...inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs..."
Does it apply to all adjectives and verbs? Are there some cases where it may be written in Kana, rather than Kanji? Like I said, how does one tell which option is best? Is it purely based on choice?
Also, on the Katakana side of things, do words like "Toire" have a Japanese alternative? I mean, isn't there any other way to say "Toilet" in Japanese? Are there any words that only have a Katakana way of writing and pronouncing it? To put it in Layman's terms, are there cases where most Japanese people simply choose to use Katakana and the foreign pronunciation of a word, rather than its Japanese alternative?
- 22 Feb 2008
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Inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs, i.e., conjugation suffixes are ALWAYS written in kana. There is no kanji alternative for it. Therefore it's in the explanantion about hiragana.
There are alternatives for トイレ, such like 便所, 厠, 洗面所, お手洗い, 化粧室, etc. They have different nuance and appropriate context to be used. (Of course these words are all in the dictionary, so you can check it.) 電子計算機 is a Japanese word for "computer", but no one use it nowadays. There is no translation for "helmet". The transliteration ヘルメット is used. In conclusion, you need to learn it.
There are alternatives for トイレ, such like 便所, 厠, 洗面所, お手洗い, 化粧室, etc. They have different nuance and appropriate context to be used. (Of course these words are all in the dictionary, so you can check it.) 電子計算機 is a Japanese word for "computer", but no one use it nowadays. There is no translation for "helmet". The transliteration ヘルメット is used. In conclusion, you need to learn it.
Glenn
一切皆苦
- 8 Jan 2004
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I think you're confused about the term "inflection". It's essentially the parts of the words that change. E.g., atarashii becomes atarashiku and atarasikatta depending on function. The main meaning part is the kanji (新), and the part that changes is hiragana (well, that and a little before it) -- しい. So in actual Japanese text, what you'll see are 新しい, 新しく, and 新しかった, respectively. The same goes with verbs.
Katakana used to be used for this, but isn't so much anymore. You'll see it in historical shows sometimes, like in the 天剣の宗次郎 (Sojirou from Rurouni Kenshin) flashback scene -- 本当ハ泣イテイタンダ instead of 本当は泣いていたんだ.
Katakana used to be used for this, but isn't so much anymore. You'll see it in historical shows sometimes, like in the 天剣の宗次郎 (Sojirou from Rurouni Kenshin) flashback scene -- 本当ハ泣イテイタンダ instead of 本当は泣いていたんだ.
It sometimes seems to me that non-English speakers learning Japanese actually have to learn two languages!
OK, that's a slight exaggeration...
- 5 May 2013
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There are all kinds of cases, and you know which to use based on your preferred style and what other people are doing. You can make different choices depending on how polite you want to be, how avant-garde or conservative you want to be, what kind of 'age' you want to project in your writing. You can only tell this by reading a lot and imitating others. There's no short, easy answer or checklist. トイレ (toire) has synonyms, of course. お手洗い and 便所 come to mind, but the three words have very different politeness levels.
Glenn
一切皆苦
- 8 Jan 2004
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Well, there are the French- and German-derived words too, which aren't immediately obvious to native English speakers. カルテ and ビール come to mind. OK, so ビール comes from Dutch, and in a happy accident sounds pretty much exactly like the English word, but I'm not able to come up with good examples right now.
Glenn
一切皆苦
- 8 Jan 2004
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アルバイト⇒バイト German
コップ is I believe Dutch, not a bizarre vowel change from English. (At least when it means 'drinking glass'. I guess it is from English when it means 'policeman'.) カップ for 'cup' is English.
Mmm. There are several other Dutch and German ones that are common but hard to remember because they are near-English cognates so they just look like 'weird' choices for katakana spelling.
Also you could as well say that you have to learn Greek, Latin, German, and French as well as English, if you learn English and don't already speak those languages. (Plus a smattering of other odd loan words, of course.) There's very little English left in English except for some grammar and a smattering of core words. Nobody else steals from languages quite so blithely and thoroughly as English.eeky said:
Not an exaggeration at all. When you use Classic Chinese as your official written language for more than 1000 years, it will eventually grow on you.
Forget about these recent loan words or even 漢語 vs 和語. You got Chinese grammar sprinkled all over Japanese. Words like 読書 doesn't even follow Japanese verb order. You got the verb 読む in front of the object 書. Then you get modifiers like 不 (否定)、被(受け身)、非(否定) etc which are basically Chinese constructs. Lots of the time, these are hidden within words so nobody have to worry about it until they really have to.
The 訓読み for 不 are pure grammatical constructs. ーず、あらず etc. 不知 would be read as しらず。
Essentially Japanese have always been at least 2 languages before invasion of 横文字.
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A good example of what I mean is the page at QVCジャパン｜世界最大級のテレビショッピング・通販 . The number of English words is just bonkers. There are almost as many English words as Japanese! Do Japanese people get annoyed about this?
Can't imagine so. Japanese is very flexible and take in a lot foreign words. Besides its a website so it targets a particular user base. These would presumably be educated and know a bit of English anyway from school.
Japanese education in English may be hopeless but it's easy to pick up words. Also a lot of these words have no alternatives like fashion etc.
Every year there are trendy words that gets introduced to the language anyway. Not necessarily foreign. A lot of it is just non sense Japanese but it's all culture based. East Asian languages changes a lot more than English I find.
Japanese education in English may be hopeless but it's easy to pick up words. Also a lot of these words have no alternatives like fashion etc.
Every year there are trendy words that gets introduced to the language anyway. Not necessarily foreign. A lot of it is just non sense Japanese but it's all culture based. East Asian languages changes a lot more than English I find.
FinancialWar
Sempai
- 19 May 2006
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nekojita
先輩
- 14 Jan 2009
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What people get annoyed about occasionally is newly-coined 外来語 (same as in English with certain types of buzzwords). I doubt there are many people who don't recognise コーヒー these days. It depends a lot on the target audience and genre - anything aimed at the younger crowd and/or in certain genres (e.g. IT) will have loads of katakana including relatively newly-invented words (and non-katakana words which are newly-coined or genre specific as well).
A shopping website has to keep its customers/potential customers happy. So as long as their target audience (i.e. the sort of people who would buy clothes/jewellery/makeup online) is okay with it, it's fine. If you looked at something aimed at a different audience, for example 和菓子 you'll see a different balance.
I think it helps to stop thinking of katakana words as "English". Even if they're from English originally, the native speakers aren't deriving their meaning by learning the word in English and then translating - they're learning them from having read about this stuff in a fashion magazine or whatever.
A shopping website has to keep its customers/potential customers happy. So as long as their target audience (i.e. the sort of people who would buy clothes/jewellery/makeup online) is okay with it, it's fine. If you looked at something aimed at a different audience, for example 和菓子 you'll see a different balance.
I think it helps to stop thinking of katakana words as "English". Even if they're from English originally, the native speakers aren't deriving their meaning by learning the word in English and then translating - they're learning them from having read about this stuff in a fashion magazine or whatever.
But Japanese people know that they are from English, right? Or are you saying that they don't?
nekojita
先輩
- 14 Jan 2009
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Of course people are aware that many katakana words dervive from English, as well as that a lot of 和製英語 don't necessarily make sense when back-translated. (バックミラー etc). However, I doubt the average person reading a fashion magazine will know or care whether a given katakana word is from English or French or Italian, what the English spelling/pronunciation actually is, how close the meaning in Japanese is to the original, or if it's a direct transliteration or two words smushed together or really only half a word (メーク). (And nobody in the UK really cares that calling a single sandwich a "panini" is weird given that it's a plural word in Italian, and "paninis" is an even odder construction).
Your average 16 year old is definitely not thinking "oh, I know this word from English class" and working out what it means from there. They simply learn the words as they would other new words/slang that aren't from English - and if the word gets popular/wide-spread enough it will eventually become as well-embedded in the language as something like パン, which I'm pretty sure nobody would argue is not a Japanese word. Others will be dropped/forgotten after a short period, and some will remain specialised vocab or slang that only certain segments of the population know.
In the end, language is communication. If someone is overusing katakana words to the point that it impedes communication, that's an issue - but so would be using obscure kanji compounds or specialist vocabulary in a text aimed at the general public. If someone is using internet slang it probably has a lot of katakana in it, but there can be kanji/hiragana words in there that are just as obscure and opaque in meaning to someone outside that in-group as any of the katakana (うぽつ、米鯖, etc). That is, you cannot judge solely by the percentage of katakana whether someone is writing in a way that is clear to their target audience or not.
There are definitely some cases of overuse. I have seen around some lists of "recommended not to use" katakana with suggested rewritings - i.e. words that are known to be not widely understood or which are unclear but used by some people anyway (similar to some of the business/management lingo in English that people love to hate). Plus the "insert some cool sounding English words here" school of lyric writing.
Your average 16 year old is definitely not thinking "oh, I know this word from English class" and working out what it means from there. They simply learn the words as they would other new words/slang that aren't from English - and if the word gets popular/wide-spread enough it will eventually become as well-embedded in the language as something like パン, which I'm pretty sure nobody would argue is not a Japanese word. Others will be dropped/forgotten after a short period, and some will remain specialised vocab or slang that only certain segments of the population know.
In the end, language is communication. If someone is overusing katakana words to the point that it impedes communication, that's an issue - but so would be using obscure kanji compounds or specialist vocabulary in a text aimed at the general public. If someone is using internet slang it probably has a lot of katakana in it, but there can be kanji/hiragana words in there that are just as obscure and opaque in meaning to someone outside that in-group as any of the katakana (うぽつ、米鯖, etc). That is, you cannot judge solely by the percentage of katakana whether someone is writing in a way that is clear to their target audience or not.
There are definitely some cases of overuse. I have seen around some lists of "recommended not to use" katakana with suggested rewritings - i.e. words that are known to be not widely understood or which are unclear but used by some people anyway (similar to some of the business/management lingo in English that people love to hate). Plus the "insert some cool sounding English words here" school of lyric writing.
The difference I see with modern Japanese borrowings versus modern English borrowings is that Japanese uses borrowed words for established and fairly basic concepts that already have good indigenous words, which rarely happens in English. Most modern English borrowings are words for items belonging to or imported from other cultures, or newly introduced concepts or inventions. I wonder if there are other languages in the world that borrow basic words to the extent that Japanese does.
nekojita
先輩
- 14 Jan 2009
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You'd be surprised how often there's actually a subtle difference. ショッピング is not quite the same as 買い物する. Korean also has a lot of loanwords (including 쇼핑/syoping for shopping), in a similar way to Japanese.
On the European side, the French language purists have been up in arms over things like "le weekend" for some time, to little effect on the younger generation (they haven't managed to get rid of "e-mail" and never will). My favourite is "un relooking" (means makeover).
If you count British English and American English as two different languages, there's also a lot of movement between the two, mostly driven by media consumption. Many of these are basic concepts (like "ginger" for someone with red hair, which apparently we gifted to the US via Harry Potter).
Words from English into other languages are probably more common in modern times then the other way around, though, just because it's used so widely as a second language.
On the European side, the French language purists have been up in arms over things like "le weekend" for some time, to little effect on the younger generation (they haven't managed to get rid of "e-mail" and never will). My favourite is "un relooking" (means makeover).
If you count British English and American English as two different languages, there's also a lot of movement between the two, mostly driven by media consumption. Many of these are basic concepts (like "ginger" for someone with red hair, which apparently we gifted to the US via Harry Potter).
Words from English into other languages are probably more common in modern times then the other way around, though, just because it's used so widely as a second language.
So, going back to the QVC website that I linked to, would you say that the copious use of words from English where Japanese equivalents also exist is a deliberate decision intended to give the website a certain "feel", maybe a chic or modern feel, or something like that?
nekojita
先輩
- 14 Jan 2009
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Some of the katakana words are just there because they're the most common words and I'm not suggesting they picked every word out on purpose, but you definitely see a denser concentration of katakana words in areas like fashion where they want it to be trendy and modern, and foreign-ness is not seen as a bad thing.
A site selling kimono might go for more of a traditional feel - for example compare 鈴乃屋.
Now "QVCお米倶楽部" - that has to be on purpose.
A site selling kimono might go for more of a traditional feel - for example compare 鈴乃屋.
Now "QVCお米倶楽部" - that has to be on purpose.
