Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You are now talking about the written Japanese language, with all the (real) problems with Kanji, an imported writing system. True enough, but that has little to do with the Japanese language.

If you look at verbs, and ignore the rubbish written in most textbooks about "conjugations" (which for the most part aren't conjugations), you'll find one of the most logical and consistent systems on the planet. There are only two exceptions. How many exceptions are there in English?

EditAdd:

What English does have is a lot of redundancy, which can cover up tons of grammatical mistakes and still deliver the meaning. This makes it an excellent language, in many ways, for international communication. If you try to speak someone else's language, and that person knows just a little bit of English, that person can make a lot of mistakes and the meaning is still clear enough, particularly if you're a little practiced in listening to non-native English. Whereas you may make a small little mistake when trying to speak that person's language, and suddenly the sentence totally changes. Heck, even Italian.. use the wrong verb form and instead of saying what you meant "Ah, I'm stupid" you're saying "Ah, you're stupid". But it's hard to mess up English that way so easily.

But what is a language without its written form?

I mean, fine, if we are going to contrive a comparison where we are only comparing spoken forms, well…English is still going to come out on top, because - exactly as you explained in your edit - its grammar is simple enough that almost anyone can have a go at it. Stick some words together and you’re probably 80% of the way there. That’s not going to be true of any inflected language, even if - as inflected languages go - Japanese is one of the simplest.

Anyway, if we are going purely on grammar and ignoring written forms, Chinese - having almost no grammar at all [citation needed] - is surely the apex of simplicity.

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble).

As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the same, most of the time.. which is arguably very useful for trying to communicate with someone.

This is not uncommon for the children of Japanese people living in the West, particularly when they have married non-Japanese. They pick up the spoken language via osmosis but the written language…not so much. It is, as I said, very hard and cannot be mastered without extensive study. Many of these hafu, as the Japanese refer to them, nonetheless enjoy successful careers in Japan, presumably usually in environments that don’t require them to read anything.

As to your English example, it…doesn’t really work? There are languages that aren’t dependent on word order for their meaning, but English - shorn of the grammatical signifiers retained by many of its brethren - is not one of them. Latin is famously largely order-independent; another topical example would in fact be Japanese! Its particle-based system for annotating subjects and objects mean their position is unimportant; the only real requirement is that the verb comes at the end.

> Its particle-based system for annotating subjects and objects mean their position is unimportant; the only real requirement is that the verb comes at the end.

Particles are one of the most maddening things about Japanese. Order in sentence may be unimportant but it may not be clear which particle you are supposed to choose. Even native speakers regularly screw up particles and particle use has high regional distinctiveness.

It also doesn't help that Japanese is infuriatingly aggressive about omitting things that are supposed to be "implied shared knowledge". If you thought English was bad about pronouns/antecedents, you ain't seen nuthin' until you've tried to unpack a Japanese conversation. Sure, if the particles are present, you can unpack things. However, Japanese speakers like to remove complete subordinate clauses because they are "shared context".

True enough, in many ways Japanese looks like a spoken-only language where the parties communicating are always visible to each other and share the context. They did get their writing system pretty late, though not that much later than many other languages which aren't as context-based. Then you have languages like Latin, which is so precise that there's little or no implied context needed (from the little I know of Latin, anyway).

You just have to try Google Translate on Japanese and it messes up all the time, it doesn't understand if it's about a male of female subject, one person or several, and lots of other issues. You can't have machine translation of Japanese until you get true AI - an intelligence that can understand context.[0]

Though I don't entirely agree about particles. Sure there are many - I have a little booklet with some 70 of them[1]- but in practice there are vastly fewer in use and the important 6-7 ones are used all the time and aren't (in principle, at least) particularly tricky (though some are often left out in speech). I find them elegant, in many ways. And yes, regional differences.. my wife (Japanese) uses different patterns from "standard" Japanese, but then again my native language has an uncountable number of dialects, often with grammatical differences too, so to me most other languages' variations seem minor..

(I'll add that I'm not fluent in Japanese yet and therefore stumbles on particle use sometimes - in theory I know how, but in practice I'm not good enough. I never imagined it could take so long learning a language, one that I actually like and enjoy listening to. It's very true, as someone said, that "you can know a lot about Japanese but that is not the same as knowing Japanese")

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J4id5jnEo8 [1] https://www.amazon.com/All-About-Particles-Handbook-Japanese...

>Order in sentence may be unimportant but it may not be clear which particle you are supposed to choose. Even native speakers regularly screw up particles and particle use has high regional distinctiveness.

Native English speakers use the wrong prepositions all the time.

What you say about children of Japanese people living outside Japan - yes, I've seen exactly that. Every day, in fact.

As for my English example.. it's grammatically a mess, the word order is wrong etc, but if you hear that sentence, how would you interpret it? There's really only one possible way of understanding it. I hear a lot of that kind of English, though not usually as messed up as that.. but sometimes pretty close. And it's still comprehensible, as in usually not ambiguous in practice. When comparing languages like this, of course it's about a low level understanding of the language. With English you can go a long way with very little knowledge of the language, with, for example, Italian you at least have to learn the verb forms because they substitute for pronouns as well.

As for learning a language, there are 4 "skills" involved: speaking, listening, reading and writing. We group them all into one clump - which I think is a mistake. It is common to have different proficiency levels in each "skill". I've also forgotten a number of languages over the decades and I find that I lose reading/writing skill the fastest with languages that use other than Roman letters (such as Farsi, Arabic & Japanese). I can speak and read French, but if it is spoken, I'm lost.

Written Japanese is hard even for native speakers. Children are usually in high school before they've learned enough Kanji to be able to read a daily newspaper. And some Kanji are so rarely used that newspapers have to put furigana (the little "cheat sheet" or subtitles) alongside the ones that even adults are going to have trouble with.

I find my Korean writing/reading skill did not diminish over time when I didn't practice it, but my vocabulary was largely forgotten

"Chinese" has just as much grammar as any other language! Please, let us not confuse the fact that Standard Mandarin does not use as much morphological change to signal different tense-aspect-mood changes in verbs but instead uses syntactically ordered particles with no grammar. A grammar covers morphosyntax!

A language without its written form is a language. The written form is an artifact of modern society and literacy.

Thank you. This was the counter-citation I could not be bothered to produce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com