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It should be Japanese, of course! Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the w
by retrac 4y ago
It should be Japanese, of course!
Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the world. It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system. There's even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings. It is truly media agnostic.
Japanese has a regular grammar. From a linguist's perspective, aside from the politeness system, it's really quite normal for a language. Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker. (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.)
Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day. Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese. The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it! For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.
- stardenburden 4y agoNow I need to know if this is also satire or if I need to start learning Japanese
- amyjess 4y agoJapanese grammar is starkly minimalist. It's not hard to learn at all, the basic structure is almost purely agglutinative, and the word order is consistently head-final in all cases (e.g. SOV for sentence and modifier-modified for not only adjectives but also relative and appositive clauses), and it helps that Japanese doesn't grammatically track several things that other languages do, such as person, number, or gender. There are only two real problems: 1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext. 2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.
- xhevahir 4y agoYou're forgetting the difficulty of learning the elaborate system of honorifics, without which you'll be unable to talk to a native speaker without insulting them. The title of this book gives some idea: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim/librarythin06-20 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim...
- cyphar 4y agoWhile that is technically true standard 敬語/honorifics (です/ます and a few word choices) aren't really that complicated. There are additional levels of honorifics which can be far more complicated but (outside of workplace honorifics -- which you will need to practice if you will work at a Japanese company) native speakers usually get some kind of training in how to speak in that exceptionally formal way (the kind of keigo used in restaurants is sometimes criticised for being "incorrect" Japanese and is called バイト敬語 -- usually service workers literally get handed a manual which explains how to interact with customers using this form of 敬語). If you or I had an audience with the queen we would probably also get some kind of training in how to politely speak to her. Finally, if it's obvious you're studying Japanese and you drop a です or ます the person is quite unlikely to be insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your superior at work.
- checkyoursudo 4y agoJust to relate back to the original point of adopting a universal language, I would guess that if any language were adopted as a world-wide language, then things like honorifics and formal-informal distinctions and gendered articles/nouns would be dropped pretty quickly.
- presentation 4y agoDon’t worry, all Japanese people know you’re a gaijin and won’t be offended.
- saagarjha 4y agoOh, they’ll probably be ok if you don’t know the language. But they might be offended that you’re a gaijin.
- sbierwagen 4y agoJapanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoI had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on デバドラ (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized English but it took a while to realize it is "device driver".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cyphar 4y agoThey like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously you have 四字熟語, but most onomatopoeia are four kana, and a lot of other emphatic words are four kana). I was watching a let's play YouTuber who started referring to Breath of the Wild as ブレワイ (burewai).
- smcl 4y agoI guess we do the same in English - obviously there’s using an acronym (BotW) but often people will use a single word in a multi-word title - like “Smash” for one of the Smash Brothers games
- amyjess 4y agoFrom my experience, the Japanese love four-katakana abbrevations as much as English-speakers love our two-letter and three-letter acronyms. For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoIt's a language with over 2k common characters of which most have two pronunciations, and the language is immensely context-dependent. If that doesn't scare you, go ahead.
- contravariant 4y agoIt's not that bad, most sequences of kanji have just a single (common) way to pronounce them. Although some sequences are completely new, so you need to figure out which word ends where. And the most commonly used kanji also have the highest number of different pronunciations, sometimes in several ways that are impossible to tell apart grammatically (or even semantically, obviously this is almost never annotated, because adding the pronunciation is for words the author thinks you don't know, even when the pronunciation is entirely unambiguous*) *: No I'm not bitter I had way too much trouble figuring out how to annotate Japanese text with the pronunciation to make it vaguely readable, why do you ask?
- innocentoldguy 4y agoMost Kanji have at least two ways to pronounce them, the On reading and the Kun reading. For example, 水 (meaning water) can be pronounced as both “Mizu” and “Sui.” Some have a lot more. 下 has two On readings (Ka and Ge) and several Kun readings (Shita, Shimo, Moto, Sa, Kuda, and O). While combinations typically do have one reading, some can have multiple readings, especially people’s names. Still, it is hard for learners to know which reading for individual Kanji’s are the right ones a lot of times. EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos and a premature submit.
- contravariant 4y agoWhile those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word. For instance 水 in isolation is (almost?) never pronounced 'sui'. To say it has 2 different pronunciations is a bit like pointing out 'ou' has about 4~5 different pronunciations in English.
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- teddyh 4y agoSo You Want To Learn Japanese http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm
- Asraelite 4y agoIt is literally the hardest language to learn for English speakers. Regardless of what you hear about the elegance of its grammar, this is a real fact backed up with evidence from past learners. Know what you're getting yourself into.
- presentation 4y agoIf you want to get to native level mastery and full literacy, but learning it to conversational proficiency is actually quite easy.
- Aeolun 4y agoSay you. But I’ve been trying to do that for 4 years, with weekly lessons, in Japan, and I’m still having difficulty. It’s certainly not easy for everyone.
- presentation 4y agoCheck out Cure Dolly on YouTube and weep at the poor quality of instruction that you’re probably receiving. Also I don’t know how much actual conversational practice you get from day to day life - but at least for me, I talk with my wife and my (mostly Japanese) friends in Japanese for hours every day, and that makes a huge difference. Once a week would simply not be enough.
- glandium 4y agoAs someone who speaks Japanese, I think Chinese is harder.
- m1117 4y agoKorean is like japanese, minus the kanji.
- hota_mazi 4y agoHangul is a marvel of an alphabet, especially when you realize it was created from scratch six centuries ago.
- skrebbel 4y agoBy the king!
- bitwize 4y agoReminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'. Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.
- sofixa 4y ago> Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya' Do you have a source on that? As a Bulgarian (where Cyrillic comes from) i had never heard anything of the like, and a short Google, in Bulgarian or Russian, found nothing.
- nine_k 4y agoIDK about Я, but Peter I definitely reshaped, along the European typesetting guidelines, some letters like lowercase a (which traditionally looked more like the Greek alpha, α), and most drastically the t (т) which for the best part of 17th century looked like Latin m. (This shape still remains in Cyrillic cursive.)
- ternaryoperator 4y agoJapanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.
- wl 4y agoEnglish lacking a future tense hasn't stopped it from becoming the international language.
- thfuran 4y agoWhat? English has several future tenses: I will go I will be going I will have gone I will have been going
- dorchadas 4y agoThere's an argument to be made that that isn't a true future tense, as it's not an inflected verb form. Thus English doesn't have a future tense in the same way it has a past tense (-ed for regular verbs) or a present tense (-s for third person singular verbs), .i. marked by inflection of a verb. Instead, it uses an auxiliary verb to express the future. Now, whether that counts as 'tense' or not is a matter for linguistic debate.
- vgel 4y agoThis is my syntax bias for sure, and you're not wrong it is a debate for some reason, but I find it very silly. An inflectional rule or an auxiliary word can assign a `TENSE fut` feature, just like an inflectional ending or an adposition can assign a case feature. They're just different mechanisms.
- msbarnett 4y agoYeah, but we're just trying to be consistent: when people say "Japanese has no future tense", they mean a morphological tense, and it's equally true that English has no morphological future tense either. Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
- java-man 4y ago幽霊文字
- nine_k 4y agoA beautifully simple language with the world's hardest writing system.
- United857 4y ago> speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it Only for a very loose definition of "speaking" A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa. You'd recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign. Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones. Most English speakers wouldn't recognize "terebi" (television) or "konbini" (convenience store) for example.
- cyphar 4y agoNot to mention some words like パターン (pataan/pattern) have either very specific meanings that an English speaker would not understand naturally or other words like テンション (tenshon/tension) have completely different meanings that an English speaker would not recognise as English.
- ur-whale 4y agoJapanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet dedicated to segregating gaijin words - lest they somehow taint the original language.
- mathgorges 4y agoMy understanding is that katakana I used for tons of other uses like providing emphasis. The reason borrowed words are written in katakana is too provide a clue that the word may have a non-standard pronunciation. It functions similarly to how italicization does in English
- nine_k 4y agoLatin fonts also have italic forms, sometimes materially different in shape from the straight forms. This is largely similar.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoIt's not similar, people mostly just use foreign words in English without italics.
- cyphar 4y agoKatakana are used for far more than loan words, loan words is just the first example you learn when you first start learning Japanese. Among many other stylistic uses, katakana are often used for native onomatopoeia and are used to write native words all the time (usually in cases where the kanji is either not well-known or to give a different feeling to the sentence -- ズルい is a good example of this).
- glandium 4y agoAlso if you go back in time a hundred years, you'll find things using katakana where hiragana is used today (to the point of having full sentences in katakana)
- jhanschoo 4y agoJapanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet of broken Chinese letterforms dedicated to segregating native Japanese particles and inflections - lest they somehow taint the original kanbun.
- deltasevennine 4y agoI find it inelegant. Two alphabets and a borrowed character system from chinese which is entirely different. An elegant language that is easy to learn should be based off of consistent primitives. Similar to math where an entire mathematical language can be derived from a few axioms. For a language you should have a single alphabet and consistent grammar rules. Such a language is not only more elegant, but much more practical to learn as well. And Practicality is by far more important then elegance.
- presentation 4y agoThe grammar is very elegant but yes the writing system is very complex.
- vesinisa 4y ago> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.
- canjobear 4y agoYou're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender. Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.
- johannes1234321 4y ago> You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language. While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)
- notahacker 4y agoTolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible. At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
- 4y ago
- kriro 4y agoI think Koran is quite interesting. The symbols were designed from scratch iirc. and they are extremly logical. I'd argue that most people will be able to read and correctly pronounce Korean in a couple of days (even if they don't understand a single word the are saying) which is quite astonishing. I was pleasently surprised at the logical structure. When I first saw the symbols my western brain said "oh my, this is complex and hard". I was shocked how wrong I was.
- jhvkjhk 4y ago
- yurishimo 4y agoIn the 15th century, the Korean king at the time decided to revamp the entire alphabet. It's consistent and phonetic. There are 24 basic "letters" and 27 complex "letters" that are a combination of the basic letters. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language I've been tempted to learn Korean since I discovered this factoid, but haven't found a program or the time that I can stick to. Anecdotally, I'm learning Dutch right now to prepare to move overseas next month, and the basics haven't been that difficult. I feel pretty confident that I can order food and exchange daily phrases after only a few dozen hours of practice. Lucky for me, the Dutch also speak excellent English, but I'm trying to learn anyway!
- Aeolun 4y agoHah, I was going to say, you’d be fine even if you didn’t learn anything. Still, if you can speak Dutch it’s appreciated, especially in less international areas.
- int_19h 4y agoThe interesting part about Hangeul isn't so much so that it's phonetic - that property is not that uncommon; e.g. modern Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian orthographies are about 99% phonetic. It's that it's featural, meaning that the shapes of the letters are mnemonic and represent their sound values and/or relations between them (e.g. vowel harmony). Featural scripts are pretty rare - it seems that they never evolve naturally, so it's something that has to be constructed, and then also to become popular for long enough to stick around. The only example I know of other than Hangeul is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics, and they are noticeably less featural. (Featural scripts for conlangs are more common - e.g. for Lojban, there's Zbalermorna: https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/ https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/) One thing to keep in mind though is that Hangeul was very systematic and consistent back when it was designed. But languages evolve, and they evolve much faster in the absence of widespread literacy and mass media. And Hangeul is almost 600 years old now. So e.g. ㅐ was originally the diphthong "ai", consisting of ㅏ for "a" and ㅣ for "i", but it's now pronounced "e" - not dissimilar to English, actually, but with much more rapid and drastic changes. At this point, it's actually less phonemic than Serbo-Croatian.
- bitwize 4y ago> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. English is a mess because it is a mixture of languages from different ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and Norman. It's been used for cross-cultural communication ever since it was identifiable as English. Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones. Some linguists have observed that trade pidgins develop English-like morphologies, even when English is not one of the contributing languages. (And even Scheme got messy; see R6RS and R7RS...) As for Japanese, I love it, it's beautiful, but as even any weeaboo knows, Japanese language is very bound up with Japanese culture. You can't simply ignore or elide the politeness bits; where you stand in society very strongly influences what you say. The fact that English is largely free of this baggage helps make it an effective language that people around the world pick up and use for trade, especially when different ethnic groups are involved.
- koolala 4y agoA world were everyone could speak scheme is a beautiful idea. Like if we were cyborgs. I'd hope there is still value in learning the thought patterns of Scheme 1.0.
- bitwize 4y agoI once fancied a girl who was doing postgrad work in linguistics, and one time she made a remark like "I love lambda calculus!" And I was like, really? That's a programming/CS thing, how does it apply in your field? Turns out LC is used as a representation to normalize semantics in linguistics. It would be interesting to see a Scheme-like underpinning to the semantics of any language -- maybe not to be used for communication in its own right, but to achieve things like more intelligent translation, or NLP machine-learning applications that extract meaning from a text. I don't see much interest in something like this emerging, however, with the current trend in AI being "throw more statistics at the problem".
- linguistbreaker 4y agoJapanese is a very high context language which instantly disqualifies it in my opinion.
- kyleamazza 4y agoThere's one reason (of many) that Japanese still uses kanji: it has a lot of homophones due to the lack of different sounds in the language (relative to Mandarin, which still has a lot of homophones). Even more, it has pitch intonation which differs the meaning of words. The simplicity of the sounds and grammar belies the difficulty of the language. There have been movements to try and romanize the Japanese language, and for the most part, none have caught on. Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common (Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)
- leke 4y agoA lot of Finnish people learn Japanese for some reason.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoBoth the grammar and pronunciation of Japanese are much closer to Finnish than to English. (Not close, mind you, but closer.)
- bigbillheck 4y ago> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. Right, because what's a West Germanic language very similar to Frisian doing all the way over in New Guinea?
- Aeolun 4y ago> Japanese has a regular grammar. Except for all the exceptions. Also, the millions of different ways you need to manipulate your verbs based on what comes after/what you are talking about. Oh, and that you cannot read/write contemporary Japanese without knowing at least 3 writing systems (with a minimum of 54 characters each).
- glandium 4y agoNot that it makes a huge difference, but hiragana and katakana have 46 characters each.
- Aeolun 4y agoHuh, I’m fairly certain I counted boxes once upon a time and got to 54, but I just did again and you are totally right, there’s 46. Though you could more than double it again by including all the variations I suppose.
- innocentoldguy 4y agoJapanese grammar was pretty easy for me to learn. There are only three verb groups in Japanese (i.e., Godan, Ichidan, and irregular verbs). The irregular verb group only has two verbs する and くる. The others are pretty consistent in following a few simple rules that map quite cleanly into a spreadsheet. There are 14 conjugation forms, which seems like a lot at first, but again, the rules are pretty consistent and easy to learn. At least I think so. The hardest part of learning Japanese for me was Kanji (which I still forget all the time if I’m not using an IME or a dictionary).
- CRConrad 4y ago> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. +1 Funny because it's true.