3 ms·

I studied only an entire year (2 semesters), and I have a fairly different view of Japanese. A Japanese person exerts no more effort to 'be on track' with their

I studied only an entire year (2 semesters), and I have a fairly different view of Japanese. A Japanese person exerts no more effort to 'be on track' with their native language than anyone else. I'm not sure what you mean about sentences getting too long too fast. As a first semester student, perhaps more experience would better-inform your sense of sentence complexity.

bitwize 10y ago
Japanese expends a lot more syllables to say the same thing that English can say in fewer. Even more if you use the polite form (e.g., speaking in a business context, train announcements, etc.) Grandparent post was not the first person I've observed to notice this. Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.
- vvillena 10y ago
  Yup, Japanese is a machine-gun language. Spanish, too.
  - tellarin 10y ago
    No no no. Finish is a machine gun language. And a broken one at that. Everything sounds like ratatata ta ta. PS: Too long working for Nokia, I guess. ;)
    - bitwize 10y ago
      Finnish and Japanese have enough in common (agglutinative, SOV word order, double consonants and vowels) that some linguists think they might be distantly related. Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.
Larrikin 10y ago
Not so much for reading, but in Japan I actually saw quite a few places that were offering lessons to teach people how to become better at writing kanji, since the vast majority of communication is over phones and through computers where simply knowing the reading and having a decent idea of what the correct kanji looks like will suffice Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.
k__ 10y ago
English: What is this? (3) German: Was ist das? (3) Japanese: Are wa nan desu ka. (5) And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms". Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences. On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bitwize 10y ago

Japanese expends a lot more syllables to say the same thing that English can say in fewer. Even more if you use the polite form (e.g., speaking in a business context, train announcements, etc.) Grandparent post was not the first person I've observed to notice this. Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.

vvillena 10y ago
Yup, Japanese is a machine-gun language. Spanish, too.
- tellarin 10y ago
  No no no. Finish is a machine gun language. And a broken one at that. Everything sounds like ratatata ta ta. PS: Too long working for Nokia, I guess. ;)
  - bitwize 10y ago
    Finnish and Japanese have enough in common (agglutinative, SOV word order, double consonants and vowels) that some linguists think they might be distantly related. Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.

Larrikin 10y ago

Not so much for reading, but in Japan I actually saw quite a few places that were offering lessons to teach people how to become better at writing kanji, since the vast majority of communication is over phones and through computers where simply knowing the reading and having a decent idea of what the correct kanji looks like will suffice Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.

k__ 10y ago

English: What is this? (3) German: Was ist das? (3) Japanese: Are wa nan desu ka. (5) And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms". Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences. On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]