I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English.
The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.
It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English".
The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters.
Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets
> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher
[citation needed]
It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.
Hmm I'm not sure you're completely clear on how syllabaries (including katakana, hiragana, kanji, etc) work. You can use them to encode anything as well
Orthographic English is probably the best example to show the inefficiencies alphabets sometimes bring. The English language has ~24 constants which are often well-represented, but then you have things like "ng" or "sh" which is actually a single phoneme that we lack a symbol for. On the flip side, English has an unusually large number of vowel phonemes, around 13 monophthongs and 7 dipthongs. Yet we have only 5 symbols for vowels and often use them in very ambiguous and end up having strange combinations of them leading to ghoti:
The point is you only have 26 letters, but now you end up having to memorize a vast array of combinations and how they work in different contexts. You're really not saving yourself any more memory space than if you'd learned a syllabary
I suppose it depends what you consider efficient: I would counter that using a mere 26 letters to encode all the varying sounds of English is wonderfully parsimonious, an incredibly efficient use of those characters. Such an efficient encoding does however, as you point out, make decoding more cumbersome, as it requires memorisation of the specific pronunciations of strings of letters up to and including whole words. In that sense, however, it is very similar to the Japanese (ab)use of kanji, which - as I pointed out at the very top of this thread - has the same problem. For a given kanji, you need to see it in context to be able to have a reasonable chance of pronouncing it correctly (and sometimes even that isn’t enough).
What I’m slightly puzzled by is your apparent confusion as to what a syllabary is: as I gently tried to hint in my reply (and someone else has now more explicitly pointed out), hiragana and katakana are syllabaries; kanji is not, even if it is occasionally used that way (当て字). I’m not sure to what extent that undermines what you were trying to say.
But, to engage with the substance of your point on the efficiency of Japanese syllabaries, we first have to put aside the fact that they retain two distinct systems to encode the same sounds (a baroque inefficiency surely without peer in any other language). It is true that modern kana allow for efficient decoding - there is almost no ambiguity in the sounds, は for ha/wa excepted. That reliable decoding does, however, impose a fairly hard limit on the number of sounds they can express, so I am not sure what you mean when you say “[y]ou can use them to encode anything as well”.
If we're bringing accenting into this (as with ghoti, that uses the "o" from "women"), then syllabaries are far from optimal as well, since Japanese has different ways of accenting each word that are not encoded into the syllabaries themselves. You then end up with having to memorize a vast array of combinations and how they work in different context. So it's not really a syllabary but an alphabet with more letters. Which is totally fine, but then calling it a syllabary creates confusion since people expect to be able to pronounce words easily, which they can't with only the word written (just like with "women" or "ghoti").
Kanjis are not a syllabary, they're originally ideograms but they're not really, some of them "make sense", some don't really. So they become mostly another layer of mapping symbols to meaning, except this time you have tens of thousands that can't be decomposed properly into smaller parts (like words with letters), which is terrible for many reasons.
On the other hand kanjis offer you the opportunity to play around with different meanings, in a way that you just can't in English. That makes Japanese richer and more interesting, at the cost of being a harder language. I'm glad both exist.
Practically, the difference is not that big. There are many sounds English letters can't encode, and for others it cheats by saying "let's pretend th sounds like this, despite it having little to do with t or h, and then zh sounds like that, and ae like this, and so on". You could do the same with a syllabary - and to some measure Japanese does, aided with special marks and other tricks, but as English inevitably misses some sounds, so does Japanese. It's inevitable - look at IPA symbol set to see how many there are needed, and I'm sure even that doesn't cover all the possibilities.
What you lose with syllabary is to be able to encode some patterns - like Czech "strč prst skrz krk" - pretty much no way to encode it in Japanese I think, unless you resort to a lot of cheating like inserting "u" everywhere and then declaring "u is silent" (which is pretty normal for Japanese in general but in this case kinda looks like cheating). But tbh English encoding wouldn't adequately describe how it's pronounced either.
If you think of Japanese writing as a whole (kanji, hiragana, katakana where needed) then indeed you can encode more information in less space. Which is easy to see if you compare the Japanese sections with the English sections of dual-language user manuals (those who actually include exactly the same amount of information of course). The Japanese sections are about 30% shorter than their English (or any other language written with Latin letters). One manual I looked at was 60 pages in Japanese, 90 in English, including illustrations (same on both).
But since you need more bits to encode a single character, at least in most common encodings without inventing a custom one, it's not really much more efficient.
>The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters.
It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general.
For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word").
In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).
It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English.
The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation.
There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.
Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man?
The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words.
Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English.
I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.
I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away.
Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.
> I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.
I live in Japan and I have seen it happen many times, suddenly the person needs to stop and check the character in their phone or a dictionary. I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language. Sure, you might not be 100% sure about the spelling, but you can always approximate it and write something.
Every single Japanese person who I know has told me how much a pain in the ass their language is to read and write, and how they wish it was simpler, but shoganai.
> I have never seen it happens with an alphabet-based language.
I got it once for a couple of days when I was about 7 years old. Learned how to write an uppercase N, and became unable to write it lowercase (n) for a few days. (it's a super weird feeling, trying to write something and producing a different shape)
They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.
Character amnesia isn't a problem because we have IMEs, but they're also a problem _because_ of IMEs. In the pre-digital world, character amnesia was likely a rarer thing.
>The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages.
What the heck...? It's most definitely a problem in practice! That problem becomes pretty obvious once you get a vocabulary of around 10k ~ 15k words and you read both fiction and non-fiction books. What you find is that every time you encounter an unfamiliar word you only really have a best guess at how to read it and you actually can't be 100% sure. This has repeatedly been my experience. I spent some time thinking about if I could shortcut this process by instead simply learning all the "exceptions to the rule" but what I discovered is that the volume of them is too large for that to be a tractable approach.
The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyone who looks at English and Japanese and finds them to be of equivalent complexity probably isn’t qualified to comment on either.
Isn't it common in English, too? Just to mention "vague", "awe", "sigh". There are many others. I see those words and pronunciation is far from obvious to me.
It is, but in Japanese it's on a whole other level. One key thing a lot of people don't really account for is the fact that native speakers of a language are already fluent in their language before they learn to read, and in many cases (certainly not all) have the added benefit of having heard the word before and the task is just to create a mapping between the sound and it's visual representation (for words already in their vocabulary). When you're a non-native speaker, you don't have this advantage and the difference it makes can be quite large. So, it's natural for anyone non-native speaker to struggle with this. The difference is in frequency, severity and duration. You can get a pretty good hint at how much insanely harder it is for non-native Japanese speakers learning to read Japanese by comparing how much native speakers both kids and adults struggle to read unfamiliar words. I can't really ever recall struggling to read unfamiliar words much in English, and I compare that with my wife who is Japanese and how many times we have played a guessing game at how to read an unfamiliar Japanese word in a book she was reading. It took me a long time to realise that even for Japanese people there's just this level of insurmountableness to it that is part and parcel of how the orthographic system is structured. Going back to how kids learn to read unfamiliar words, books in Japanese have furigana in them which are a phonetic guide on how to read words that the author assumes the intended audience has a high chance f not being able to read. Even general purpose books aimed at adults have quite a lot of this. The younger the intended audience, the more furigana tends to be present as it's simply not possible to read without it when you're much younger. What you often see, though not always, is for a difficult word to have furigana the first time it appears and then subsequent appearances of the word don't have it. This is one way you learn to read more over time. For certain words, no matter how many times it appears, if it's obscure enough it may always appear with furigana.
The existence of furigana alone is a huge admission that Japanese a somewhat unreadable language that has somehow or other been made to work through bolting it on. So, you can imagine that if an orthographic system comes with permanent training wheels for native speakers, then non-native speakers are going to have a pretty brutal time with it.
This was the point I made at the top of this thread: that Japanese manages to combine the complexity of written Chinese with the inconsistency of English spelling. Does any other language expect quite so much of its users?
I struggle to see how this "doesn't matter" while also agreeing with you that it's a super cool property. Especially for someone coming from an alphabetic language background.
Logograms allow you to understand (some) meaning without understanding pronunciation.
Syllabaries and alphabets allow you to understand pronunciation (to varying degrees of success depending on spelling consistency) without necessarily understanding meaning.
It's all tradeoffs.
These days I read Chinese much better than Japanese, and it's definitely fun that I can look at a page full of Japanese and understand the meaning of many words just from knowing the (largely parallel) meaning of the kanji / Hanzi from Chinese.
Conversely, I can read (the sounds of) Hangul, but I rightly know about 20 Korean words, so it's all just sounds to me.
But I can read the name off of a Korean hotel sign and communicate it to a Korean taxi driver. I can't do the same in Japan if I don't know the pronunciation, even if I know exactly what the sign means. If it affects your ability to use the language effectively to achieve what you want then I think it matters.
Names and particularly place names are on a whole other level. Especially stuff that's written in a font other than the standard, nicely formatted text you're used to reading.
While I can sometimes guess the meaning of a novel word based on context of the sentence and the meaning of Kanji alone, the vast majority of the time I can't. So... I disagree.
Aren't you just pointing out that fluent speakers don't often have a problem communicating? Surely that's true for any language, almost tautologically (they would have changed the language, even unintentionally, if there were major problems).
I think parent’s use of ”logical” instead of “complex” better fits the bill.
For instance, on the 1 onyomi with 1 kunyomi average, there’s no specific logic making it that way (I actually doubt it’s only one of each in average), and there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them.
It’s not a problem in practice because not knowing most words’ reading has little impact in day to day life, and mixing up kanjis is pretty common and people won’t make a fuss about it.
All in all I think Japanese has a very steady learning curve where other languages will have sudden walls to climb, but it’s not more or less complex, difficulty is just more evenly distributed.
> Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write some verb or other.
This is intensely interesting -- do I understand this correctly, that what happens is a songwriter uses a verb (or I guess any word) and writes it down as a different set of kanji(+kana) than how it's usually written, and the new form is confusing at first to a reader of the lyrics, and the new form evokes some different emotion or context because of the choice of kanji?
Can you think of an example? I want to see for myself.
Wordplay is delicious and I've never heard of this kind of it. . o O ( this had better not awaken anything in me. )
I'm not familiar with many Japanese song lyrics, so not familiar with the phenomenon mentioned. I'd also be interested in examples.
There are always several ways to write a word in Japanese. As far as I know, any word can be written in hiragana. Additionally, there are the kanji writing and then katakana. While katakana is primarily used for words that were appropriated from other languages, it has several other common uses. For example, if a robot, alien, child, or non-Japanese is speaking, the words may be written in katakana to indicate the non-fluency of the speaker. Also, many animal names are often written in katakana.
Additionally, there are quite a few pseudo-English words that are written in katakana because they originally arose from English words. Some of my favorites (written in romaji for those who don't read katakana):
- "baabeekaa" : pronounced similar to "baby car", this word means a stroller
- "akogi" : short for acoustic guitar
- "brappi", "jimihen", etc: Brad Pitt, Jimi Hendrix, etc.
- "handoru": pronounced similar to "handle". This is what a steering wheel is called in Japanese, so..
- "handorukeepaa": or handle keeper, refers to a designated driver.
Another interesting thing that occurs in Japanese is referred to as ateji. This is where kanji are used only for the sound they give. In other words, any word can be written by just using a kanji with that sound for each syllable. The meanings of the kanji chosen (there are many with each particular sound) can give additional flavor/wordplay/signifigance to the usage.
Finally, one of the most interesting things I saw in Japanese was a baby soap, called "Arau baby". The first word "arau" is the Japanese infinitive for "to wash" written in romaji, or roman script. Since this is the product name and it is written in roman script, the product label also includes a katakana translation (アラウベビー). So instead of using the kanji for arau, it was treated as a foreign word and then appropriated back into Japanese using katakana. Or something.
I can't think of any examples of the top of my head, but I have definitely seen this many times. One form it comes in is writing the meaning in kanji but then using an English word in Katakana as the Furigana for it. One example I can remember in that form, though it's not song lyrics, is "とある科学の超電磁砲" where 超電磁砲 has the Furigana レールガン (rail gun). Another form it takes is doing the same thing but using a different Japanese word instead of an English one.
There is just absolutely all sorts of fuckery in Japanese on a count of people playing with the language. It's a fun language to play around with.
It's a pretty broad mechanism, also widely used in drama/anime/manga where you can basically stick any reading to any word as long as people accept it.
Traditional examples would be 本気 (honki) -> マジ (maji), 頭文字(kasiramoji) -> イニシアる(initial), 因果(inga) -> カルマ(karma)
I remember a live stream where a comment with "超電磁砲"(choudenjihou) was straight read into "railgun", as at this point the novel/manga/anime just established it as a popular reading.
One good example is from GReeeeN's 愛唄(Aiuta/ Love Song). It's a song about a guy apologising for all the times he's fought with and been a nuisance to his partner, and reaffirming his love for them.
「君の選んだ人生「みち」は僕「ここ」よかったのか？」
Taken as you'd hear it from listening to the song, it means "Are you happy with the road you have chosen?", but reading the lyrics uses different kanji to give it a slightly broader meaning.
人生 is read as jinsei, meaning life, but the furigana is 道（みち）which is a road or a path, note that this can be a literal road or a more figurative pathway through life.
僕(boku) is a male pronoun for "me/myself" but ここ means "this" as in "this road, not that one"
It's not that deep, but it extends the meaning of the lyric to be something like "are you happy to spend the rest of your life with me?" I thought it was kinda clever. There's probably better examples, but this pops into my head often as it's still quite a popular song.
let's take something very basic, the kanji 人 has two on'yomi pronunciations, jin and nin and there's no way to tell which one to use without knowing ALL of the words it will be used in
日本人 - nihonjin, so far so good
三人 - sannin, okay, I guess there's two pronunciations
二人 - futari, huh?
一人 - hitori, wat
so please tell me how I am supposed to know 人生 (jinsei) from 人気 (ninki) from 恋人 (koibito) from 大人 (otona)
even ignoring the irregular reading for "adult" there's still no way to tell those three readings apart in a kanji as basic as person
You basically have to memorise them, like with any other language (e.g. the rules and exceptions of English spelling and pronunciation). Usually it's the most common words that have weird exceptions, because we use them enough to remember them. All the words you mention are beginner words. (There's also 人気=ひとけ, just for fun).
As far as jin and nin goes... (source: 漢語からみえる世界と世間)
jin is more about adjectives/nouns - describing yourself, and part of your identity. 日本人、アメリカ人、原始人、現代人 are all じん. 読書人（どくしょじん） is used to describe people who really love reading. Similarly 暇人（ひまじん）.
nin is more of a plain descriptor. 管理人、運搬人、苦労人、被告人 are all にん, as well as 三人.
I think taking sides in this debate is pointless. Languages are always as difficult as far they are from your mother tongue or other languages you know.
Your question about the reading, though, has quite a simple answer. It's pretty obvious how to read all the examples given when you look at them as words, not a single character. Kanji does not exist in a vacuum. 人気 is "ninki" and 大人 is "otona" - no other way around it. Combination of those characters, usually, have one and only reading. To tell the truth, in English, people are unconsciously reading words as a whole, too.
Not sure I agree with that. It's not difficult to notice one has "nai", other don't. Also when you read it in actual sentence you can immediately notice that something is wrong when you choose the wrong reading. Subsequent words don't add up. I am not saying confusion doesn't occur. I'm just saying it's not as big as people are painting it.
Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto).
Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡
One can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.
I was working on an import/data conversion task for a Japanese accounting software. I always assumed importing was じゅにゅう, but it is actually うけいれ (受入). Much to my amusement I found out I have been saying breastfeeding (授乳) instead of importing. Theoretically both are readings for the same Kanji, but by convention, a lot of compound verbs are read using kun-yomi instead. Anyway, I hope my tax lawyer still was able to understand what I was trying to communicate? Prepare for people being too polite to point out mistakes.
Also sometimes 受入 is written 受け入れ instead! And 支払い can be 支払. It is really confusing.
Knowing all these nuances is difficult if you are looking to just use simple rules here and there.
読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.
Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;)
Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s
Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services.
One should keep in mind here that IT Japanese uses Japanese in places you won’t expect, and when you expect it even less, it will switch back to English.
支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”.
That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?
When you consider that alternatives like freee are still quite clunky in the browser, you don't have a lot of choice. I haven't tried Yayoi yet, but I don't expect much.
Kaikeio doesn't support HiDPI / 150 % fractional scaling either, so it looks really weird on my machine.
Recently the maker (Sorimachi) has announced that you can download their newest edition. Too late! They have already sent me the CD.
I just resort to editing everything in GnuCash and then importing into Kaikeio using a custom sql -> csv script. I hate the idea of my accounting journal being trapped in proprietary software.
Too bad that Japanese lawmakers have further decided to decrease software freedom by prescribing the use of digital time stamping by next year.
> Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :)
Oh dear. I just skimmed that. The bit where it tells you to turn off the beta UTF-8 support made me particularly sad.
(A good part of the blame lies with Microsoft of course - why are these legacy locale and encoding settings still system-wide?)
> It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English
Anecdotal, but considering how often I see Japanese people have small struggles with their own language compared to British or American people, I think it is more complex than English.
I’m not sure how to measure complexity but after a long time with both languages I have found Japanese has a lot of gaps where there is no word matching an English word and fewer in the other direction. I thought I was bad at Japanese but then I heard things like “get suru” or “stay shita”.
English people very much have trouble with spelling, pronunciation and grammar as well. The spelling and pronunciation rules are at least as complex as kanji. (At least we don't have to write kanji, though...)
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.
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")
>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.
"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.
Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it.
English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.
The structure is different, right? "Me gusta algo" does mean something is pleasing to me, but it's not the way how one would think in Chinese or English.
I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure.
I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.
That's how native-speaker kids learn grammar. First learn to speak the language. Then many years later, learn how to say _why_ what you're doing is the right way.
what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?
Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.
Except that if you are burning up, you have a fever, but if you are burning down, you might be planning on illegally collecting some insurance money :)
French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough.
French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.
'ai' in Northern French is pronounced like è (and so tends to be considered the standard pronunciation). Southerners tend to pronounce everything like é.
Aix is also the name of several towns, in which case the 'x' is not silent.
The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch:
She must have had been being watched.
= It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).
That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched", alternatively "She had been watched".
Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like:
Two detectives are watching security film.
DETECTIVE 1
And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but –
Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen.
DETECTIVE 1
– from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why?
DETECTIVE 2
She must've been being watched.
I do agree that form "must have had been being —ed" (with "had" in there as well) is an especially rare form, but in context, native English speakers understand what it means!
I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.
I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?
Sure! Using "had been" rather than "(has) been" indicates that something may no longer be the case, e.g. "she's been well (and still is)" versus "she had been well (but is not necessarily still well)". So in my example
She must've been being watched.
suggests that, at that point in the security footage, she might still be being watched. If the detective had said
She must have had been being watched.
it would additionally imply that, at that point in the security footage, she was no longer being watched (but had been). So let me rework the story a bit:
Two detectives are watching security film.
DETECTIVE 1
She's acting ordinarily, but I see fatigue written on her face. I wonder why.
Detective 1 leans back in their chair and muses.
DETECTIVE 2
She must've had been being watched. The state security service monitors high-profile civilians occasionally, and a few days before this she was acting very cautiously, almost as if she was suspicious of something.
(Also, I think I falsely portrayed the universality of such a construction. Although I think some native English speakers would accept it as grammatical, many might not!)
I am watched. (present passive)
I was watched. (past passive)
I have been watched. (present perfect passive)
I had been watched. (past perfect passive)
I am being watched. (present progressive passive)
I was being watched. (past progressive passive)
I've been being watched. (present perfect progressive passive)
I'd been being watched. (past perfect progressive passive)
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have had been watched.
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've had been being watched.
I think is roughly it? Although now I'm beginning to doubt myself, and maybe it is just:
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must have been watched.
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
I must've been being watched.
or really, maybe it's better to say those forms don't exist:
I must be watched.
I must have been watched.
—
—
I must be being watched.
I must've been being watched.
—
—
What's neat is that I can assign meaning to "must've 'd been", but it really teeters on the edge, sometimes sounding strange but acceptable and sometimes sounding simply wrong.
I can't find many examples of it, but there are a few I've found online:
"To qualify for a special enrollment due to a permanent move, you must have had been enrolled in other minimum essential coverage, such as under a job-based health plan, another Marketplace plan, or Medicaid."
"Sales must have had been in the same year as the tax return."
So perhaps it's best to say it's nonstandard but attested.
> "Must have had been" is simply wrong; in your examples, it should always be "must have been".
As a matter of prescription, maybe, but as a matter of description? I think it's interesting. It is meaningful and it's something that English speakers produce. Here are other examples in the wild:
"To complete the request, the owner of the permit must have had been present at the time the citation was written, present a valid permit to the Tax Collector in person, have a copy of their citation, and pay a $7.50 processing fee to the Tax Collector if approved."
"Lankeshwar must have had been easy to defeat compared to new-age Ravanas."
It can even have a distinct meaning (rather than just being a variation), which is how I would interpret it. Which I think is cool.
It's perfectly fine to say "don't use this construction if you want to be taken seriously by so-and-so", but if its usage happens to be dialectal, for example, I don't think you can say those speakers are using their dialect of English incorrectly.
I feel like you just said that English has complicated spelling both because of its borrowed words and its native words. I think this could be shortened to "English has complicated spelling because of the spelling of its words." Or even "English has complicated spelling."
There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally defined, as the majority ofthemost commonly used words - italicised here - havesuch heritage. The spelling of such words is probably not the most troubling part of English orthography anyway.
I've never heard the term "phrasal verb" but one similar case that doesn't use verbs pops up in my head all the time, "down {for,on,with}":
- "I'm down for that", I am prepared and willing to do that
- "I'm down on that", I don't like that practice
- "I'm down with that", I do like that practice
The most I've heard in the wild is a short "I'm down.", you wouldn't say "I'm up." (unless you're saying you woke up, or you're high, or your gambling is going well)
Other than that, your versions are more common in the US as well, from my experience.
edit: Thinking more on it... "I'm up for that" would be used if you were slightly hesitant. "I'm down for that" implies a lot more confidence.
I dunno, American here and to me being up for something and being down for something are pretty equivalent. I don't hear any hesitancy in "I'm up for whatever".
> I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones
As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary.
Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...
As a speaker of English, and Spanish, which has the adjectives after, I feel like putting the adjectives first is more expressive.
"A hot, juicy chicken leg" would sound less exciting if it was said "A chicken leg, hot, juicy" because the listener would first imagine the wrong chicken leg.
Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.
I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point.
(The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)
It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers.
Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hiragana alongside Kanji (which are common).
I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin.
Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not warm) but it is nowhere near as complex as European languages.
But. You can’t just dismiss kanji. They are the essence of the language and, counterintutively, are what make it easy to read in long form. A stream of hiragana is almost illegible; you need the kanji to be able to pick nouns and verbs out. And outside of very limited contexts, furigana (phonetic transcriptions of kanji) are rare, so you need to a reasonable command of kanji to get by.
The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga.
It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves learn Kanji. And I would guess probably why it even exists, though I'm sure you could correct me on that.
Your view of Japanese seems to be from a very high level, encompassing its totality or close to it. At that level your assertions may be correct and relevant, but that's not where my comments, nor the OP with their post, are aiming.
OK, but you’re moving the goalposts. A written form of the language curated specifically for the purpose of learning is not really relevant to a discussion of the language, just as would be the case for any other language. That is not the language used in daily life. There are no furigana in a newspaper or on the Internet (technological assistance notwithstanding). Magazines, business communication…anything useful is off limits if you can’t read, say, 500 kanji at an absolute minimum. Anything more advanced, academia, etc. requires far more.
You think the goalposts have been "moved" because you've misinterpreted the context of this discussion.
The original post we are all commenting on is an introduction to some basic concepts of Japanese, aimed at programmers.
After learning several languages to a basic conversational level, Japanese was by far the most logical, simple, and had the least "gotcha's" or exceptions. On the whole it was a breath of fresh air compared to others.
My comments regarding the relative ease Japanese can be learned to a basic, useful level versus same attempted in other languages stand. Attempts to reframe them as regarding a level of complete mastery won't alter that.
Can you explain why a stream of hiragana would be unreadable? It's a phonetic alphabet, right? Shouldn't it be just as readable as the phonetic alphabet for any other language?
It's difficult to skim the stream of symbols and instantly recognize concepts. Think of a word finding box puzzle in English (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=word+finding+puzzle&iax=images&ia=...). It helps if you add spaces and periods, but I still think kanji make it easier to quickly pick out concepts.
In this video, Yuta compares different ways of writing the same sentence and discusses efforts to eliminate Kanji: "Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji?" • https://youtu.be/O27TgLW6pCU?t=220
Another analogy: I find the flat enunciation of "voice to text" on my phone a bit difficult to follow. I can understand if I pay attention, but I can't passively listen and multitask like I can with human read text (@see - The Guardian's "The Long Read" podcast).
I can read only a limited number of kanji (or rather, words written with kanji), but even that makes reading much easier. Books for small children are written in Hiragana, with spaces, and in theory that should be as easy to read as English.. after all, it's easy to learn Hiragana, anyone can do that in a short time, and with practice you can learn to read it fast. But it's still tricky to read all-Hiragana sentences, even with spaces. Not sure I can explain why, more than the usual (and true) argument about the particularly large number of homonyms in Japanese. It's more than that. It's just much faster and easier to read 私 than わたし
It's interesting to consider that Japanese's relatively low number of discrete phonemes might result in a relatively high number of homophones, but if a preponderance of homophones is the problem, wouldn't listening to spoken Japanese be just as hard as reading hiragana?
On the contrary, listening to Japanese feels easier than listening to a lot of other languages, even for speech which you don't actually understand. The sounds are simple, there are a lot of vowel sounds. Straight forward vowels, not diphthongs, and in that respect it's a lot like listening to (slow) Italian.
There are a few run-on consonants in speech, but not many. Of course one runs into homophones in speech too, but there you also sometimes (but not always) have pitch to help you (persimmon and oyster are both written かき(kaki) in Hiragana, but the pitch is different, same for chopsticks/bridge), and there's context - if you understand enough of the language.
As an example, my wife owns a Japanese CD which includes a couple of songs originally from my own country, but translated to Japanese. Listening to that is very easy, I hear every word.. it's much much harder to actually get the words if I listen to the original in my own language! And these are simple songs.
EditAdd: What I said above is correct in the sense that it's easy to listen to Japanese, as in actually hearing the words, but yes there are homophones which sometimes make me, a low-intermediate speaker, not understand what I hear. I hear "another" similar-sounding word, unless there's pitch to clearly identify it, and then what I hear doesn't make sense unless it's a recording and I can re-listen.
"The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult"
It's actually many-to-many. I know it sounds crazy, but it's even true for English, just to a much less extent. Sometimes a single Japanese word can be written as different kanjis.
Interesting, 生 have only one pronunciation in Chinese (native speaker, ref: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F ). Didn't know it's so different in Japanese.
Some of it comes from importing words from different parts of China or at different times in history. From my (very) limited experience, Japanese pronunciations of kanji are much closer to Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.
It's worse than you think. The oldest readings came from KOREA where they used rhyme dictionaries to create a full system of Sino-Korean pronunciations without regards to the actual sounds.
Kanji will have at least two pronunciations (one called a Chinese pronunciation that often sounds little like modern mandarin, like 电 being Dian in Chinese and Den in Japanese).
A sibling comment shared a short list of common characters with multiple pronunciations. If we include variants where the difference is only tone, then the list of common-use characters with multiple pronunciations gets pretty long.
This list is also changes on a regular basis. The following news article details updates to pronunciation guidance promulgated by the Taiwan Ministry of Education at the end of 2022: https://www.ftvnews.com.tw/news/detail/2022326L08M1
It is my understanding that these new guidelines result in mandated changes to educational curricula as well as standardised testing; they are not wholly advisory. It is also my understanding that these changes can be mildly controversial, because even when the changes are made for the sake of simplification, they lead to discrepancies between the educational standard and common spoken language.
If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “justice” or “meaning”, then you have found the Sinitic Holy Grail that people have spent at least a couple of millennia searching for.
Some characters are moderately logical. A tree, 木, begets a wood, 林, and a forest, 森。日, sun, in triplicate, 晶, is a crystal or glittering. But these are very much the exceptions. By what logic would you create a character for a whale (鯨) as distinct from a salmon (鮭), or for abstract concepts like government (政) or crime (罪)?
It's important to distinguish a language from its writing system. The Japanese writing system is a basket case to be sure, but that doesn't say anything about the language itself. My decidedly rudimentary knowledge of the language reveals a rather elegant and logical system, although even here little spikes are already poking through (e.g distinction between wa and ga) that hint of more turbulent waters for the more advanced learner!
All the examples you gave are pretty obvious to read because of suffixes, called okurigana, or the other kanji next to it. Problem arises only when the kanji stands alone and that doesn't happen so often as people think. Even when it does, most often than not, you can infer the reading from the context.
だいにんき(大人気) and おとなげ(大人気) can be fun too. The latter usually is followed by ない, which wouldn't usually happen with the former, but the usual way I'm hit with these is in sentences where the word is at the end of the line (or better, when the line ends at 大人).
It didn't hold back their society, what was held back was the competition because Japanese is hard and the locals have all the business and flourished. That's my view on why they were successful compared to other Asian nations who adapted English early on their history.
The stereotype of Japan as technologically advanced persists in the West despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Japan still uses floppy disks and fax machines. They prefer to pay in cash and will go to the bank to get crisp, fresh notes - to give old notes would be disrespectful. Banking in Japan - indeed, experience with any kind of bureaucracy at all there - makes the US DMV, or indeed any Western bureaucracy, look like the vanguard of efficiency.
Train tickets are the easiest thing to buy in Japan phone app, vending machine you name it. The train attendant even sells you ticket if you get on board without paying.
It's like all the complexity went into kanji. Pronounciation of -kana- is mostly regular. Grammar - 2-3 main verb types with a VERY small conjugation table to learn, no plurals, no genders. You can take a mostly complete sentence and whack it on top of a noun to make it describe the noun, or add stuff to the end to qualify its meaning, in a much more simple way than English.
I hate grammar and I found that part of the language to be extremely simple.
You start having problems when you learn about registers and how there's basically a second (or third!) set of words depending on who you're talking to.
The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.