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Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re

Im learning Japanese too and both agree and disagree. There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. But some things are pretty elusive or just require a great deal of memorization to sound natural, like which counter words are the correct counter for the given noun, or the proper pitch accent patterns and intonation to apply to words and phrases, and speaking with the different levels of formality. Plus the huge hurdle of learning a ton of Kanji.

andi999 6y ago
Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
  - andi999 6y ago
    Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
    - mkl 6y ago
      Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
        bckr 6y ago
        This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. Well, I meant to; this is what I had in mind when I said "native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row".
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      > What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother Yes. Usually size comes first: big red metal ball. red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball. But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Pinker's written about this I know. The order looks something like this https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adjectives/ https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adj... (although there are exceptions, of course!)
        kwhitefoot 6y ago
        Thank you!
  - inkyoto 6y ago
    Pandemoniums of cockatoos are still rather common in Australia, especially considering the ruckus they bring along, and the occasional damage they cause.
- wccrawford 6y ago
  There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc. https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...
  - ghaff 6y ago
    English uses those also to some degree: a case of beer, a carton of eggs. But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
    - mkl 6y ago
      Carton and case aren't collective nouns though. They describe the packaging. You can buy a tray of eggs or a keg or six-pack of beer.
  - laurieg 6y ago
    English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
    - cowboysauce 6y ago
      I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.
    - pja 6y ago
      Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”. Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.
- mkl 6y ago
  Most of those collective nouns are just made up and are not used in the real world: "In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, the tendency had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild." And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/ https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- laurieg 6y ago
  A much closer analogue would be the words used in English together uncountable nouns: A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese. These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.
cehrlich 6y ago
Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood. However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist. As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that. [1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X
- tasogare 6y ago
  Japanese is hard for different reasons but some of them are self-inflicted. Bothering with pitch accent is one: no second of effort towards it will be ever relevant in comparison to learning new vocabulary or collocation. An other big issue is indeed in manuals, which teach sentences construction with the English logic instead of the Japanese one (eg starting with 私は学生です already poses 3-4 pedagogical problems). I’m working on a conversation guide (in French for now) to avoid those issue but that’s a lot of work...
  - presentation 6y ago
    Disagree re pitch accent being unimportant - it depends what your goals are and what your experience level is. If you’re competent enough with grammar but screw accent up constantly Japanese people get tired of listening to you, when you nail it people are more at ease talking to you in my experience. Like someone messing up stress in English all the time. If your goal is to get over that then it’s absolutely worth studying, and arguably it’s worth studying early before you pick up bad habits in the first place. As the parent mentioned, it’s all dependent on your goals.
EE84M3i 6y ago
>Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.
jhanschoo 6y ago
> There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.

andi999 6y ago

Well the English 'counter words' for animals are also tough aren't they? Ok, a flock of birds everybody knows as well as a murder of crows. But what about an exaltation of larks? And is it a school of dolphins or rather a pod?

AndrewDucker 6y ago
It's "some dolphins" and "some larks" Because nobody in the UK bothers with group nouns except for a very few (herd of cows, for instance).
- andi999 6y ago
  Ok, so that was a bad example. What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother about that? Like a red metal big ball, or a big red metal ball?
  - mkl 6y ago
    Yes, the adjective order is definitely important (and native English speakers are not explicitly taught it, but we absolutely know it).
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      "Important" is dramatically overstating it. I've only ever seen anyone remark on adjective order in an ESL class. English is full of ordering constraints that matter. This isn't one of them; if you put your adjectives in a strange order, the worst thing that can happen is that people realize you're foreign. [1] And the odds are they knew that anyway, unless you managed to learn perfect pronunciation without absorbing common speech patterns. [1] They may not even notice. ESL classes treat adjective order as a big deal, but native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row. You're most likely to be noticed if you put exactly two adjectives in the unconventional order.
      - bckr 6y ago
        This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. So there's a difference between planned speech and rushed speech, and there's piecing together what someone means through their mistakes. For another example, last night I was watching some Zoom comedy [0] and one of the comedians twice fumbled their joke, saying a word that was important to the punchline too early. So they abandoned the joke and moved on. Inferring what had happened was fairly natural, but you really had to have a robust (as in, fail-safe) grasp of English and, I suppose, culture, to roll with it. [0] https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-comedy-6560595937 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/best-of-san-francisco-stand-up-...
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > This isn't even to take into account that we flub our speech (not to mention writing) all the time. It's easy to imagine someone saying "red... Metal... Big ball!" because that was the order that the features of the ball arrived in their mind. Well, I meant to; this is what I had in mind when I said "native speakers will often violate the normal constraints if they have to string together several adjectives in a row".
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > What about order of adjectives, do people in the UK bother Yes. Usually size comes first: big red metal ball. red big metal ball sounds wrong to me and so do metal red ball and red metal big ball. But I'm not sure if it can be succinctly expressed as a general rule. It's just something that native speakers do without thinking, seeing it written in the wrong order or hearing it said in the wrong order just feels wrong to me. Perhaps a linguist could provide a rule, or at least a rule of thumb.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Pinker's written about this I know. The order looks something like this https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adjectives/ https://www.hip-books.com/teachers/writing-about-reading/adj... (although there are exceptions, of course!)
      - kwhitefoot 6y ago
        Thank you!
- inkyoto 6y ago
  Pandemoniums of cockatoos are still rather common in Australia, especially considering the ruckus they bring along, and the occasional damage they cause.
wccrawford 6y ago
There's a few well known ones that everyone uses. And then there's ridiculous ones, like "a murder of crows", that many people know because they're ridiculous, but people still don't use them. And then there's a ton that almost nobody knows, and nobody uses. In the end, it's not a big deal. Unlikely Japanese, where they really do use counters for those kinds of object. Flat things like paper, cylindrical things like beer bottles, etc etc. https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...
- ghaff 6y ago
  English uses those also to some degree: a case of beer, a carton of eggs. But, yeah, if you told me to pick up some eggs and a a carton/box of beer, I'd know what you probably wanted. (In the latter case, I might ask if you wanted a 6-pack, 12-pack, or 24.)
  - mkl 6y ago
    Carton and case aren't collective nouns though. They describe the packaging. You can buy a tray of eggs or a keg or six-pack of beer.
- laurieg 6y ago
  English "counters" are in some way worse because they aren't consistent. Slice of bread, slice of cheese but not slice paper. To be fair, Japanese has "everday use" counters and "trivia TV show" counters.
  - cowboysauce 6y ago
    I don't see how that's inconsistent. Slice is used to describe things that are cut from a larger whole, particularly for food, while paper is manufactured as sheets.
  - pja 6y ago
    Not going to defend the consistency of English for a second but for that particular example: paper isn’t sliced, so it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “a slice of paper”. Obviously the standard usage of a “piece of paper” is pretty arbitrary, but slice is clearly wrong.
mkl 6y ago
Most of those collective nouns are just made up and are not used in the real world: "In the course of the 14th century, it became a courtly fashion to extend the vocabulary, and by the 15th century, the tendency had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun I read an interesting article about it a few weeks ago, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶. (Edit: wccrawford linked it: https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crows https://www.audubon.org/news/no-its-not-actually-murder-crow...) There's a quote from a biologist who studies wombats about the supposedly-correct collective noun for a group of wombats: "Wombats do not form groups in the wild." And it is a pod of dolphins: https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/ https://www.dolphins-world.com/what-is-a-dolphin-pod/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
laurieg 6y ago
A much closer analogue would be the words used in English together uncountable nouns: A loaf of bread, a grain of rice, a slice of cheese. These tend to be common everyday words but if you get them wrong things sound quite off.

cehrlich 6y ago

Kanji (at least the first 3-4000), counters, word-level pitch accent, etc are all totally learnable and I wouldn't consider them "advanced" topics. That's not to say it doesn't take a couple thousand hours to get there, just that with enough time spent studying and consuming native content learning these things is inevitable. Likewise understanding something like は vs が to the level of a fairly advanced non-native speaker is not that difficult. Especially now that there are actual good grammar resources that don't explain things in the bizarre way that the traditional textbooks do. At that point you can _understand_ everything, and explain yourself in a way that you will always be understood. However once you know all those things there's a whole different category of issues that separate you from native speakers. Case in point: this 331-page book [1], written in Japanese, only about は vs が. Clearly if knowing that が is always the topic etc was enough to pass for a native, this book would not exist. As I said, this is in no way unique to Japanese. There's a difference between speaking correctly and speaking at a native level. Most are happy with the first, and that's ok - it's mostly an academic exercise once you go beyond that. [1] https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/product/487424128X

tasogare 6y ago
Japanese is hard for different reasons but some of them are self-inflicted. Bothering with pitch accent is one: no second of effort towards it will be ever relevant in comparison to learning new vocabulary or collocation. An other big issue is indeed in manuals, which teach sentences construction with the English logic instead of the Japanese one (eg starting with 私は学生です already poses 3-4 pedagogical problems). I’m working on a conversation guide (in French for now) to avoid those issue but that’s a lot of work...
- presentation 6y ago
  Disagree re pitch accent being unimportant - it depends what your goals are and what your experience level is. If you’re competent enough with grammar but screw accent up constantly Japanese people get tired of listening to you, when you nail it people are more at ease talking to you in my experience. Like someone messing up stress in English all the time. If your goal is to get over that then it’s absolutely worth studying, and arguably it’s worth studying early before you pick up bad habits in the first place. As the parent mentioned, it’s all dependent on your goals.

EE84M3i 6y ago

>Sounding things out is super straightforward due to the direct mapping from sounds to kana. Sounding out, e.g. place/people names, in Japanese is difficult and sometimes impossible if they use a one-off reading of the kanji.

jhanschoo 6y ago

> There are way fewer idiosyncrasies in the language IMO, the rules tend to hold and depending on how you’re explained concepts they make more sense (は described as the “topic” particle, が described as the “identifier” particle, which most resources don’t explain properly but makes the choice much easier to understand). In my opinion this perspective more likely reflects your comparative lack of exposure to Japanese than to English. For example, you mentioned wa and ga as an example of an actually clear concept (albeit foreign), but in speech these particles may be dropped, and choosing what to drop also adds subtle meaning to what is communicated.