Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material.
I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan.
But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.
I feel that this is a common misconception by many language learners, and it is not their fault. Usually when we learn about a language in a non-organic setting, such as a classroom, we learn mostly about the "rules". But the rules are usually just generalizations that cover a large portion of usage, while the irregularities are often learned later or are segregated as "special" cases even though they are often the most common constructions. As a result I often hear people say things like, "this language has pure vowels," or, "this language has very consistent word order," but in fact it is mostly because some teacher emphasized the most regular forms, or the places where it contrasted from their native language.
I am not suggesting that all languages are equally irregular, or illogical. But I do think that many times the differences are exaggerated.
That is what turned my off grammar for me from a very young age. As a child I decided to ignore all rules and just read books. The end result is that I can write whole essays flawlessly in my native tongue with no mistakes – but I can't tell you why. I'll just "know" that a comma needs to be added, for example.
As far as I can tell, commas are inserted either to reduce ambiguity, or to indicate where a pause would be in spoken English (which are also frequently related to reducing ambiguity).
So the colloquial patterns of use are pretty deeply dependent on understanding the rest of English, so you can notice where it becomes ambiguous or starts to feel like they could almost be different sentences but the person who is communicating with you is ignoring that because their personal dialect doesn't have those pauses and you kinda just have to deal with that when it happens.
Every other rule-set I've heard has to be accompanied by so many exceptions, and has so many competing schools that disagree, that they're just dogma, not description. And they're extremely hard to remember. So they're more about socially signaling that you're part of the well-educated upper-crust than they are about communication.
And yes, I'm an Oxford Comma user. It reduces ambiguity.
Commas do follow rules, they are just hard to explicitly lay out. Usually they are used to separate clauses. For example, in some cases you need to use a semicolon instead of a comma to avoid the “comma splice” (though outside of formal writing this comes off as pretentious).
If you use commas only to denote when you’d pause when speaking, your writing can come off as juvenile or uneducated. It’s not just a signaling thing. It is jarring to read a sentence with them misplaced.
Some teachers can do that to any subject, no matter how interesting.
> The rule is that multiple adjectives are always ranked accordingly: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Unlike many laws of grammar or syntax, this one is virtually inviolable, even in informal speech. [0]
There is a proper order for adjectives in English that native speakers follow, but cannot explain.
> "It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist." [1]
Agreed with the assessment of the article, but I find Japanese to be significantly more logical than English/other languages I’ve learned. Just, the way it’s typically taught makes little sense usually. Recommend Cure Dolly on YouTube for some high quality explanation of the inner logic behind the Japanese language in a way accessible to western language speakers.
I think it's not significantly more logical than other languages. For example, there's no rational-designed reason to have different ways of describing the number of an object based on the object's qualities. "I have 4 books" and "I have 4 apples" shouldn't have different ways of describing the number 4. It's purely based off of organic growth and provenance of the language itself.
Blame it on the Chinese - Japanese didn't have that many "counter words" until Chinese influence increased that by an order of magnitude or more.
As for why you need them, Wikipedia points out that because there's no concept of singular or plural (in general, excepting words like "私たち" for "we"), you may consider all Japanese nouns mass nouns. And with mass nouns in English you usually have to use something similar: ".. loaf of bread" ".. grain of salt". The "solution" is not the same in English as in Japanese (you still use "one, two, three.." in English), but still, you can't just remove it. For Japanese there are other ambiguities which are resolved by the counter system as well.
But yes, the counters.. that's one of the bigger stumbling blocks I ran into early on. Learned the numbers, yay! Then learned that I can't use the numbers when I want to say how many there are of something.. I limited myself to the few where I can, as in the counter for flat thin items like e.g. tickets. "にまいください"
Exactly my thoughts. While not fluent for professional settings, I live in Japan and speak enough for everyday life and I can tell that the Japanese I studied at school from first principles and more "literature-like" has nothing to do with the one used day to day, and e.g. that one has nothing to do with the one used in manga.
You can do the same exercise as the author with almost all languages, the only small advantage of Japanese and more programming-like is the combination of kanjis to make up new words but even then the pronunciation might totally change. For example in Spanish:
"I eat beef" = "Yo como ternera" = subject + verb + object. Both in Japanese and Spanish, but not in English, you can omit the subject "yo"/"watashi". But this is so syntetic that people wouldn't use normally, I might instead want to say how good cow meat is and say "¡me encanta la ternera!" "Gyuniku ga suge ski!" (transliterated), in Japanese effectively eating up some random letters there.
I was thinking something similar while reading the article. Studying Japanese it's easy at first, and even kanji is easier than it appears, but eventually there is a huge increase in difficulty when you get to advanced grammar and conjugation, which changes based on tense, voice, imperative/not, gender, ranking, politeness level, etc. Every language is like this, although every language has its own unique quirks and difficult points.
Learning it is also kind of like learning physics in high school. After a few years you realise the first things you learn are a bootstrap to get started and not actually used in daily speech. Simple example: You hear the words "anata" ("you") and "sayonara" ("goodbye") one time in a month, but you will use them all the time in beginner Japanese class.
I don't speak Japanese, so this is kind of half baked, but I find the OP description of "transform polite present tense" explanation a little confusing. Or at least, maybe it assumes we don't do that in English? Or this is using a bad example? Let me explain.
"I eat beef" is not something many native English speakers would say, or only in unusual contexts. We may say, "I am a beef eater" or simply "I like beef". Something about "I eat beef" as a statement conjures chest pounding imagery (it sounds primitive), so I'd propose we often pass through a sort of politeness filter too?
Anyways as a English only programmer, I don't know if I learned anything from the article - maybe you have to speak Japanese to get it?
A bit that you can get away with learning: in English, the things foreigners start learning (and probably you in elementary school about the language and its structure are closer to the actual English usage compared to other languages like Spanish and Japanese. In my example, the textbook beginner "I eat beef" is very out of place usually in the 3 languages, but in English "I like/love beef" are perfectly valid examples that still follow the same basic/beginner structure of "I eat beef" and are valid. In Japanese and Spanish, you have to change the whole sentence structure to not sound like a robot.
(English grammar being simpler in this trifecta, but then in exchange you have the crazy pronunciation learning of English that I found out I would never "fully learn" and nobody really does in English, since you even have literal competitions (spelling bees) where people show off how good they are at it, and with jokes still happening between professionals like "is it 'data' or 'data'?").
In Japanese, the formalizations of polite speech vs impolite speech are significantly more rigorous than in English. So much so that different words and grammatical changes to words occur. You can insult someone by saying "I watched my boss be given an anniversary present by their boss" by using the word 'give' word which implies the recipient or the giver are a lower social status than you the observer.
> [everyday Japanese] has nothing to do with the one used in manga
Depends on the manga you read. There are plenty of manga revolving around everyday life, so called "slices of life" by the Western fans. I'd say they tend to use your regular everyday Japanese.
I said/meant that the Japanese learned at school, the one used by people everyday and the one at mangas are 3 different versions of the same language. I still do agree with what you say though.
Combination of kanji to create new words is a feature of Chinese, which Japanese inherits. It’s the same way we (used to) coin words in European languages by reaching for Latin and Greek.
At a simple level, the use of particles feels somewhat programming-ish. As one's knowledge expands, the exceptions and idiosyncrasies end up destroying that picture, but I get where it comes from.
I would assume it is similar to introducing a programmer to sentence diagramming in English. You start to see patterns and those patterns start feeling like a more formal system. Yet it always ends up crashing down and being too illogical to keep building upon.
One aspect that is likely at play is that learning a new language tends to be more formalized than one's understanding of their native language (outside of a sentence diagramming class or similar). When you learn a specific piece of grammar in a new language, you want to understand it formally. That means finding equivalent examples in a native language if they exist, or otherwise formally explaining the distinction between what grammar exists in a native language and the new grammar structure. I think this sort of pattern goes away when one approached fluency (unless they specialize in studying grammar itself in both their native and new language). The eventual goal is for grammar in the new language to feel as natural and yet illogical as grammar in the native language.
Well programmers tend to be into video games, and at least for a while all the best video games came out of Japan, so that helped. Between that and anime I really wanted to learn Japanese, and took two semesters of it in college.
I even worked for a Japanese game publisher for a while (in their small US office, they originally invited me in to discuss maybe publishing a game I was developing that they spotted at Microsoft's XNAFest).
Spoke some Japanese phrases that everyone in the office did while there "Ohayoo gozaimasu!(good morning, as you arrive) Tadaima!(i've returned, said when you come back to the office, like after getting food or coffee) Shitsurei shimasu.(sorry for interrupting, say before enter someone else's office) Itadakimasu!(common saying before eating lunch, which we always did together) Hai, wakarimashita.(yes, i understand) Mmm, umai.(mmm, that food is tasty) Aa, so so so.(yes, i agree) Doozo.(please, go ahead)" are some of the most common examples I can remember from over a decade ago.
I also sat in some teleconference meetings conducted in Japanese with the parent company in Japan (I was pretty quiet, mostly just tried to follow general concepts and wrote down words I heard I was curious about to look up later). Even got to the point where I started saying 'Hai' instead of yes around others for a while, out of habit.
I'm guilty of this as well haha. Not saying it in a negative vibe.
I lived in Japan for two years, and even tried to build an over-engineered learning tool (built a short roguelike version of Shortstraw algo to learn Kanji in Unity).
Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there. Normal spoken Japanese is much more casual than textbooks. There is an introverted component to learning to read (drilling kanji, etc). that probably lends to a lot of tech solutions.
> Fastest learning was in going to bars and talking to people when I lived there.
Live in Japan close to 10 years. Went there speaking basically nothing, left speaking fluently.
In my experience, bars are 100% the best way to learn. If bars aren't your thing, social situations are good, but a little bit of booze has a great way of making you not care about making mistakes.
I don't think it's necessarily limited to video games.
Japan simply has so many strong otaku (original meaning) subcultures to nerd on, anime/manga/game being the obvious ones (to be more accurate, manga in Japan isn't really a "sub"-culture, but the otaku portion of it is big enough on its own).
The only things I can think of that are comparable in the Western world are Star Wars or Sci-Fi in general, and Superhero comics. But I'm not super familiar with Western cultures.
I would agree if i had just read the article, but i do remember being awed the first time i heard a Japanese person talking to the digital assistant in their phone (~10 years ago at that) really fast and the digital assistant understanding everything flawlessly and thinking - Japanese is very well suited to this! Not only how sentences are composed, but the diction as well. Of course you can be really ambiguous and vague in Japanese if you want, but that's not how you talk when you want to transmit information clearly
I would say that's (like in Spanish) thanks to the fact that Japanese is a very phonetic language. You can easily transliterate it by listening, since most sounds correspond to a single written character, and the reverse, when in English a single letter like "a" might have 5 different pronunciations.
Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing.
But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.
In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.
And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.
Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.
> In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written.
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
I learned English for school material (math, physics, etc). I then learned further while taking Computer Science at University.
I can watch full length videos on any topic from physics to philosophy to politics and understand nearly everything. But I have a hard time following casual conversations about small daily life things.
Further more, I can only think about programming and technology in English. If I have to talk about technology in Arabic (my native language) I basically have to think about it in English in my head then translate it to Arabic.
Something similar happens to me, but it doesn't seem to be related with how logical/math-related English is, but rather the context in which you've learned it.
If you had learned Chinese (or Portuguese, or whatever) for your school material and computer science courses at university, you'd probably think it's Chinese that's "purpose built" for logic/math.
English seems to me a very illogical language, see for example the pronunciation rules compared to a more "logical" (pronunciation-wise) language like Spanish. Or Japanese, I hear, though I wouldn't know about that. Written English can feel similarly illogical very often.
I think that’s more of a reflection of the fact that English is the dominant Lingua Franca for those subjects.
When you’re at the cutting edge of research, it’s inevitable that you are going to have to come up with new words/language to describe new concepts, and so that process has been happening in English for decades.
It’s a fairly common phenomenon that languages assimilate words from other languages as new concepts are introduced by people who use that other language.
So I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that English has some sort of superior utility for expressing scientific/programming concepts, at least not innately. It’s just that it’s more fleshed out after being used so heavily for such over a long time.
I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty.
I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis.
On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.
As a Spaniard, I find it funny how in English some times they use both the latin/french and germanic/anglosaxon roots of the same word, but at some point in time they arbitrarily adopted the translation to mean something different and more specific, like: "poison" vs "venom", "tea" vs "ocha/chai", "comic" vs "manga", "teacher" vs "professor", "connoisseur" vs "expert", "memento" vs "souvenir/keepsake", etc.
Then I started to see we are doing the same in Spanish with business/internet to make things sound cooler.
Not a problem with diacritics. But I wish languages used them consistently, so that e.g. o/ö or e/ę relate in the same or at least in a similar way in all languages that use them.
For phonemic spelling systems, it wouldn't even be hard. Start with the baseline of aeiou for the basic vowel triangle. Then let's say that umlaut changes the vowel's "default" backness without changing roundness, ogonek lowers the vowel, tilde makes it nasal, and breve makes it a glide. This gives us aąäãăeęëẽĕiįïĩĭoǫöõŏuųüũŭ, plus all combinations of these diacritics when needed (which should be very rare). Add doubling to indicate vowel length, and I can't think of any European language that cannot be consistently expressed this way; American English should only need aąäeëiįouų.
Yet Spanish is a very expressive language, and it has no trouble expressing whatever you want using fewer vowels (note there are more than just five vowel sounds even in Spanish, it's just that variations don't have different meaning).
There's a lot of sound variation in regional dialects of Spanish, from country to country and even regions within a country. People pronounce vowels and consonants differently, and even the "accent" varies a lot (some people can seem as if they were "singing" instead of speaking, to speakers of other countries/regions).
what's cool is that regional dialects have different vowel/consonant pronunciation but the differences are almost completely consistent internally and between the dialects. Like, Peruvians pronounce anything with "y" or "ll" like an English "j" and Argentines like "sh", always. Everything maps 1 to 1.
Spanish isn't particularly rich in sounds but other languages use combination of vowels or accents. French or Portuguese have much more than 5 sounds and the same vowels.
Portuguese has the same basic characters except for ç, in the case of vowels it's resolved with combinations of letters or by adding accents. For instance e and é have different sounds and ou isn't the same sound as o followed by u.
> I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.
Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.
Well I'm far from a native speaker, but my English is certainly much much better than my French (I cannot speak French fluently) and I find French so much better for this purpose.
I have lived in Ireland for more than a year and I haven't heard anyone arguing in a really expressive way although I've seen a couple actual fights starting a couple times. I don't know, anger in English always feels like diet coke to me.
I know this is a paradox, but the fact that verb tenses in English are so simple and give so little context compared to Spanish makes them very easy and global. Pick this sentence:
Joe flew yesterday to Paris, he had never flown before, so he was nervous.
Pretty much every speaker no matter where from will use the same tenses here, past simple for recent past and perfect for older past. We have similar rules in Spanish and I'm pretty sure that another person from my region would use the same tenses as I would. But I'm not quite sure if someone from, say Costa Rica or El Salvador would pick the same tenses. In fact, I don't know if someone 500km south or west would use the same tenses. This is usually not a problem because usually you don't need that much correctness, but in engineering it can be a problem.
Because English verb tenses are so simple they are used in a way more consistent way and from Australia will use the verbs in a very similar way as a Brit, and even non native speakers can use them in a pretty correct way.
Another problem is that in Spanish verbs give you a lot more context and people rely on them, but again they are used differently across regions. In Englosh because they give so little context means that you're forced to add a lot more context in the rest of the sentence in a much more explicit way.
Yet another problem is that verbs in Spanish are super complex for non natives, and because we rely on the verb so much they may end up saying something that they don't mean. Also this is usually not a problem in casual conversations but in technical conversations it may be an issue.
Finally, English handles certainty well. It's very easy to tell how certain you are, if something is mandatory or not, how likely is something, etc. I can't explain why, maybe it's because I've read countless RFCs and not many specifications in Spanish, but this is a general feeling that I have even though I cannot give you an exact reason but I think it would be easier to translate a specification from Spanish to English than the other way around. Even if I find more often things that translate poorly from Spanish to English than the other way around.
I think you have to go to English vernacular, "as she is spoke" to express especially anger. An angry Dubliner or someone from the midlands for example :-)
Yeah. Putting the hat of a product manager, I have to ask: what value does this programming analogy offer? Japanese is a pretty structured language that is quite easy to understand. You use particles to "glue" phrases to sentences, and you use conjugations of verbs, for lack of better words, to modify the meaning of a sentence. Of course, there are exceptions and nuances and advanced concepts in Japanese, but it's damn easy to start learning Japanese and I fail to see the utility of using a programming analogy (not that it's not fun, mind you).
Or are we saying that programmers are so one-dimensional that have to square any concepts into the round hole of programming?
My suspicion is it is a bias to one’s mother tongue. I feel the same way about Arabic. English feels “lawless” and “undeconstructable” in some cases, no equation for “creating” words that works every time. In this sense Arabic is way more “Mathematical “ to me although all the number theory, graph theory, discrete math etc. books I’ve read are written in English.
No, Arabic is not my mother tongue, but it does have a very strong 'logical' feeling to it, primarily due to the derivation rules from three letter roots.
I found that the main difficulties with Arabic were the sheer size of the vocabulary, and the fact that what is spoken is usually not written.
Japanese is in my opinion significantly harder (insane writing system, all words sound the same, lots of homophones, completely different sentence structure, very sophisticated social rules embedded into the language, etc). It feels a bit like reverse polish notation though!
Size of vocabulary is the main problem in learning any language. I have the same feeling about Japanese, and had it about English while I was still learning it.
I agree that in Japanese this is exacerbated by the Kanji system, where many words have the same (or very similar) sounds but completely different meanings, and the fact that most words at the advanced level are just two or three kanjis attached together and read in the supposedly "Chinese" way (aka the sound reading).
Having Arabic as a native language makes this even more difficult because in Arabic most of the time if words sound similar it's because they have the same root and are thus related in some way.
Can you give me some resources on how I can learn? I want to learn how to read and write over the next 5 years, and I have at least 30 min to dedicate each day.
Learn the hiragana and Katakana on your own, then use JapanesePod101.com material.
This is not a paid commercial or sponsorship. I haven't used the site in years.
But, the material at JapanesePod101 really bootstrapped my learning and helped me progress from beginner to advanced beginner.
The other thing that you can't do without is conversation with native speakers. In my case I went to physical language exchange meetups, but if you can find online ways to do it, that should work too.
The great thing about podcasts is you can listen to it while walking/commuting/etc.
To be quite honest it can be quite an overwhelming endavour, and it's very easy to think "f this I give up I don't care about this anymore".
Physiucal language exchange events help give you an "anchor" so that your learning has a purpose: you're meeting people and having positive social experiences with them.
Yes, learn Hiragana and Katakana first. It doesn't take that long. Young people can do it in days or a week, I took about a month or so.
But, unlike what I did, and many others do, I recommend learning Hiragana and Katakana at the same time. Most people learn Hiragana first and Katakana second, and will run into trouble with the latter, which also sometimes confuses the Hiragana they have already learned. Imagine learning the alphabet: Do you think it's better to first learn "ABCDEFGH.." and so on and then, after mastering that, start learning "abcdefgh.." Or wouldn't it be better to learn "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh.. " right from the start. I'm now a firm believer that the last method is better, and as you can think of Katakana as the cursive version of Hiragana (which is why it's used for loan words and also in literature for naming e.g. plant species, "Belladonna"), it makes sense to learn them at the same time. Faster, and avoids later confusion.
I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan.
But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.