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When reading any of Pico Iyer's drivel about Japan, remember that he can't read or speak the language: "And the virtues of when I got to Japan, finding that I

When reading any of Pico Iyer's drivel about Japan, remember that he can't read or speak the language: "And the virtues of when I got to Japan, finding that I was essentially an illiterate. I can't read — I can't — to this day, I can't read or write Japanese." http://www.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pico-iyer/ http://www.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pic... "He’s a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn’t choose to learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and “a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/books/review/pico-iyer-autumn-light-memoir-japan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/books/review/pico-iyer-au... Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to spout bullshit like this: A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things. No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%82%E3%81%86#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E3%82%82%E3%81%86#J...

antiterra 7y ago
The breathless retelling struck me as unreliable as well, but I can concede that 思う has slightly different meanings based on context— just like any English word with a thesaurus entry or used in idiom. 思う/Omou is interesting because my brain shuffled it into the same spot as the Spanish creer (to believe) and both have a counterpart that is (roughly) more about thought process: kangaeru(JP)/pensar(ES) The similarity meant 思う actually grounded me instead of sending me into linguistic mysticism like it apparently did to Iyer.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  "Believe", in a faith without proof sense, is shinjiru 信じる in Japanese. As in English, this is a lot stronger than mere thinking. Omou is used a lot in Japanese as a politeness marker of sorts: instead of stating flat out that the moon is green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu desu), you soften the statement a bit saying that you think it's green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu da to omoimasu). When translating to English, you'd often drop it entirely or at least find other ways to express it, because in English it's not natural to tack "I think" to everything you say.
  - antiterra 7y ago
    Sure. Creer is very often used in a similar way to tacking on to omou to express best guess/subjectivity/lack of definition. Kirei [da] to omou can be pretty close to Creo que es bonito for thinking something is pretty. I'm not saying it's one-to-one, just the same kind of issue and you'll see very similar conversations about both. Therefore, it feels familiar and not astounding per Iyer.
xelxebar 7y ago
> No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart 君のことを思っている You're on my mind. 思うどおりにはいかなかった It didn't go how she had hoped. 面倒だと思ったことがないよ I've not really ever felt it to be a hassle. Context matters. > Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to... He's waxing poetically about his personal experience. Not sure who else would be more qualified to do that. Excuse me a bit of a meta-comment. Why such a vicious response? A priori, the article stands on its own. It sounds to me like you're bringing in a lot of personal expectations and imposing them on someone that never asked. Bad day, perhaps? If you need a beer or a listening ear, feel free to PM me.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  Not a bad day, just a pet peeve: I find the "Japanese is so exotic and mysterious and different" trope in general and Pico Iyer's writing about the topic in particular insufferable. I mean, if you're going to pontificate about Japanese literature on the world stage, is it really too much to ask that you read some of it? Languages are complicated, translation between two languages is even more complicated. Does Japanese have "weird" features compared to English? Sure, adjectives having past and conditional tenses still does my head in. But claiming that omou has 29 radically different meanings is wrong, and using this to draw the conclusion that "Speech is dangerous in Japan" is just silly.
  - around_here 7y ago
    I’m with you. This is just another JCE who needs to disappear. The writing was god awful.
  - sdrothrock 7y ago
    I'd like to chime in on 9nGQluzmnq3M's side here -- I had exactly the same reaction for exactly the same reason. It does Japan's complex culture a complete disservice to wrap it up in a neat package of "exotic" and "ineffable." You wouldn't accept an analysis of fine wine, a new medication, or graphics cards from someone who didn't bother to learn about them, so why is an analysis of an entire culture from an equally ignorant standpoint acceptable? Is it acceptable because "being an outsider" gives him a more "objective" viewpoint? So, his ignorance gives birth to wisdom? Or is it acceptable because Japan has a history of being labeled "ineffable" and "exotic," meaning that nobody not Japanese can ever understand Japanese culture, so anyone can say whatever they want? Anyone who starts claiming that there's a connection between "numbers of meanings [e.g. ways to translate a word into ANOTHER language]" and culture immediately starts setting off alarms in my head, but the Language Log sums that up much better than I ever could: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1088 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1088
lgessler 7y ago
> A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things. Ugh. That might be correct in the sense that a translator could defend their choice in using a certain English word or another, but that's also correct for most words in literally every language spoken on Earth.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even culturally looked down upon as incompetence. Hence the confusion by native English speakers.
  - lgessler 7y ago
    I'm not sure what the particulars are in this article, but if the suggestion is that Japanese is unusually expressive and English is unusually impoverished, that probably isn't true. In general, Language A and Language B, unless they're very closely related, will always lack some grammatical categories in common that will make translation from one to the other difficult. Eastern Pomo, for instance, requires any well-formed verb to inflect based on how the speaker learned the information being reported, with four possible values: direct, reported, inferred, or non-visually sensed (smelled, felt, etc.) knowledge. Retaining this information would be awkward in English, and encoding it in an Eastern Pomo translation would often be impossible (in the context of translating a book). Hindi lacks articles, while English has at least a and the, which encode (roughly) how identifiable the noun it is attached to is in the present situation. The rules governing when to use the, a, or neither are incredibly subtle and complex (I'm sure you've heard second language speakers getting it wrong but not in a way you could readily explain). Going from English to Hindi, the articles can mostly be safely disregarded, but going from Hindi to English, you need to think hard about how identifiable each noun is in discourse. I'm probably taking all this a bit too seriously, but it's frustrating to see well-intentioned but wide-eyed writers like Iyer trying to evoke a sense of wonder propped up by pseudolinguistic claims.
- 7y ago
Camillo 7y ago
> No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart: A nitpick, but you could tell them apart even if they weren't written differently (such as when speaking).
- asutekku 7y ago
  Context. Japan has a lot of homonyms and the people speaking it tend to not use the words pronounced the same in a sentence thus the meaning can be infered from the context.
musicale 7y ago
In English, think can mean lots of things, probably 27 at least. I think about my exes a lot even though I don't think much of them. I think I'll go now. I'm thinking of a number. I'm thinking of changing careers. I'm thinking dinner at 8. I think a lot, I think. I think not. You think? Thinking of you. Think again. Etc.. Though my favorite productive English verb is still 'to get.'
agota 7y ago
It's pretty crazy to write an essay like that when you don't know the language. I know I wouldn't be impressed if someone who doesn't speak Lithuanian wrote an essay like that on Lithuanian culture/language/literature.

antiterra 7y ago

The breathless retelling struck me as unreliable as well, but I can concede that 思う has slightly different meanings based on context— just like any English word with a thesaurus entry or used in idiom. 思う/Omou is interesting because my brain shuffled it into the same spot as the Spanish creer (to believe) and both have a counterpart that is (roughly) more about thought process: kangaeru(JP)/pensar(ES) The similarity meant 思う actually grounded me instead of sending me into linguistic mysticism like it apparently did to Iyer.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
"Believe", in a faith without proof sense, is shinjiru 信じる in Japanese. As in English, this is a lot stronger than mere thinking. Omou is used a lot in Japanese as a politeness marker of sorts: instead of stating flat out that the moon is green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu desu), you soften the statement a bit saying that you think it's green cheese (tsuki ha guriin chiizu da to omoimasu). When translating to English, you'd often drop it entirely or at least find other ways to express it, because in English it's not natural to tack "I think" to everything you say.
- antiterra 7y ago
  Sure. Creer is very often used in a similar way to tacking on to omou to express best guess/subjectivity/lack of definition. Kirei [da] to omou can be pretty close to Creo que es bonito for thinking something is pretty. I'm not saying it's one-to-one, just the same kind of issue and you'll see very similar conversations about both. Therefore, it feels familiar and not astounding per Iyer.

xelxebar 7y ago

> No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart 君のことを思っている You're on my mind. 思うどおりにはいかなかった It didn't go how she had hoped. 面倒だと思ったことがないよ I've not really ever felt it to be a hassle. Context matters. > Which makes him exceptionally unqualified to... He's waxing poetically about his personal experience. Not sure who else would be more qualified to do that. Excuse me a bit of a meta-comment. Why such a vicious response? A priori, the article stands on its own. It sounds to me like you're bringing in a lot of personal expectations and imposing them on someone that never asked. Bad day, perhaps? If you need a beer or a listening ear, feel free to PM me.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
Not a bad day, just a pet peeve: I find the "Japanese is so exotic and mysterious and different" trope in general and Pico Iyer's writing about the topic in particular insufferable. I mean, if you're going to pontificate about Japanese literature on the world stage, is it really too much to ask that you read some of it? Languages are complicated, translation between two languages is even more complicated. Does Japanese have "weird" features compared to English? Sure, adjectives having past and conditional tenses still does my head in. But claiming that omou has 29 radically different meanings is wrong, and using this to draw the conclusion that "Speech is dangerous in Japan" is just silly.
- around_here 7y ago
  I’m with you. This is just another JCE who needs to disappear. The writing was god awful.
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  I'd like to chime in on 9nGQluzmnq3M's side here -- I had exactly the same reaction for exactly the same reason. It does Japan's complex culture a complete disservice to wrap it up in a neat package of "exotic" and "ineffable." You wouldn't accept an analysis of fine wine, a new medication, or graphics cards from someone who didn't bother to learn about them, so why is an analysis of an entire culture from an equally ignorant standpoint acceptable? Is it acceptable because "being an outsider" gives him a more "objective" viewpoint? So, his ignorance gives birth to wisdom? Or is it acceptable because Japan has a history of being labeled "ineffable" and "exotic," meaning that nobody not Japanese can ever understand Japanese culture, so anyone can say whatever they want? Anyone who starts claiming that there's a connection between "numbers of meanings [e.g. ways to translate a word into ANOTHER language]" and culture immediately starts setting off alarms in my head, but the Language Log sums that up much better than I ever could: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1088 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1088

lgessler 7y ago

> A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in 29 different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or 27 other things. Ugh. That might be correct in the sense that a translator could defend their choice in using a certain English word or another, but that's also correct for most words in literally every language spoken on Earth.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
The problem is that English doesn’t have a subjunctive tense that maps cleanly to other languages. It is implicit and masked. Expressing doubt is even culturally looked down upon as incompetence. Hence the confusion by native English speakers.
- lgessler 7y ago
  I'm not sure what the particulars are in this article, but if the suggestion is that Japanese is unusually expressive and English is unusually impoverished, that probably isn't true. In general, Language A and Language B, unless they're very closely related, will always lack some grammatical categories in common that will make translation from one to the other difficult. Eastern Pomo, for instance, requires any well-formed verb to inflect based on how the speaker learned the information being reported, with four possible values: direct, reported, inferred, or non-visually sensed (smelled, felt, etc.) knowledge. Retaining this information would be awkward in English, and encoding it in an Eastern Pomo translation would often be impossible (in the context of translating a book). Hindi lacks articles, while English has at least a and the, which encode (roughly) how identifiable the noun it is attached to is in the present situation. The rules governing when to use the, a, or neither are incredibly subtle and complex (I'm sure you've heard second language speakers getting it wrong but not in a way you could readily explain). Going from English to Hindi, the articles can mostly be safely disregarded, but going from Hindi to English, you need to think hard about how identifiable each noun is in discourse. I'm probably taking all this a bit too seriously, but it's frustrating to see well-intentioned but wide-eyed writers like Iyer trying to evoke a sense of wonder propped up by pseudolinguistic claims.
7y ago

Camillo 7y ago

> No, おもう means two things, and they're written differently so you can tell them apart: A nitpick, but you could tell them apart even if they weren't written differently (such as when speaking).

asutekku 7y ago
Context. Japan has a lot of homonyms and the people speaking it tend to not use the words pronounced the same in a sentence thus the meaning can be infered from the context.

musicale 7y ago

In English, think can mean lots of things, probably 27 at least. I think about my exes a lot even though I don't think much of them. I think I'll go now. I'm thinking of a number. I'm thinking of changing careers. I'm thinking dinner at 8. I think a lot, I think. I think not. You think? Thinking of you. Think again. Etc.. Though my favorite productive English verb is still 'to get.'

agota 7y ago

It's pretty crazy to write an essay like that when you don't know the language. I know I wouldn't be impressed if someone who doesn't speak Lithuanian wrote an essay like that on Lithuanian culture/language/literature.