(background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish; Chinese not at all)

Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.

I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.

In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.

Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.

I think you have it right and OP doesn't. For example: "Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure"

There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.

Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".

I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.

Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.

Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.

I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.

> Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.

This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.

So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.

This led me to read https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... which was rather interesting

Not sure why I put Latin in as SVO, given that the second Latin lesson I received (aged 10), went into some detail about word order. The first was amo amas amat ... moneo monas monat.

However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".

> only two irregular verbs

This is what textbooks often say, but it's kind of a soft lie. Besides the typical する and 来る (which are strongly irregular), there's:

ある → ない (negative form)

行く → 行って instead of expected 行いて

くれる → くれ (imperative form) instead of expected くれろ

And a number of others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_irregular_verbs

I'll go pedantic, but ない is technically not an irregular negative form of ある. The negative form of ある is the regular あらぬ/あらない, but it has been substituted with ない, which is an entirely different word. You'll often hear あらへん in Kansai dialect, which is derived from ある.

Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.

O this!

English is like a runtime typed language, and Japanese sounds like a statically typed language.

> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.

But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.

The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".

The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.

A better comparison for numerical classifiers would be uncountable nouns.

In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:

三杯水 three glasses of water

十头牛 ten heads of cattle

两支铅笔 two rods of pencil

一条路 a strip of road

六只猫 six animal-units of cat

五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people

> I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows"

Collective nouns.

Actually, from the Wikipedia article, it's specifically the "terms of venery"

Speaking of erudite wankfests! :)

Tangentially, I once saw a list that gave "wunch" as a collective noun for bankers.

Coming from French I don't consider there is any conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you, they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about gender and plural.

Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)

So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.

There's conjugation but it's on different axes.

One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on politeness/formality.

There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form, causative, etc, etc.

The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.

Portuguese has something like 50 different verb endings, Wikipedia tells me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_conjugation

In reality few people use half of these, I would think

My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese

I don't know about Italian but the ser/estar distinction works in pretty much exactly the same way in both Spanish and Portuguese. I can't think of any difference between how Spanish and Portuguese treat those two verbs.

You're right, I stand corrected. I guess I've been hearing too much Italian lately

Actually most if not all of those verb endings are used colloquially (the most important exception would be the second person plural, which is only used in some regions of Portugal).

2nd person singular is also never really used correctly, and even 1st person plural is sometimes replaced by 3rd person singular e.g. "a gente vai" instead of "nós vamos"

I’m extremely skeptical of your claims that you learned Chinese grammar in a week as a Chinese learner myself and I’m willing to bet you don’t realize how much you don’t know. The Chinese grammar wiki has 505 articles on grammar split across A1-C1 levels of the European Common Framework for language proficiency. This wiki is also non-exhaustive. This isn’t even including the fact that Classical Chinese, which is a basis for many 成语 used today, has a completely different grammar than modern Chinese.

It might not be technically correct that they learned the full set of Chinese grammar in a week, but I can imagine one week is sufficient for a beginner to get the basics and start reading/speaking/writing the language and absorb the other nuances or nitty-gritty details through everyday usage.

I mean, I'm pretty much a Chinese/Cantonese native user, so I can't be sure about that since I never "learned" the language in a classroom setting, but my impression is that this short period of learning grammar for Chinese language leaners is quite typical.

You feel Chinese grammar simple only because you're a native speaker, or at least have learned Chinese at a very young age.

Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.

> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...

This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:

1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.

2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).

3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".

> I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

Right.