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I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written comple

I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.

capableweb 4y ago
Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it. English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
  - makaren 4y ago
    My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough. French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.
      - mytailorisrich 4y ago
        'ai' in Northern French is pronounced like è (and so tends to be considered the standard pronunciation). Southerners tend to pronounce everything like é. Aix is also the name of several towns, in which case the 'x' is not silent.
  - ezequiel-garzon 4y ago
    what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other? Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.
    - Adverblessly 4y ago
      > “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Except that if you are burning up, you have a fever, but if you are burning down, you might be planning on illegally collecting some insurance money :)
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        Houses that are burning up are also burning down, but people who are burning up are not also burning down.
        MrOwnPut 4y ago
        A structure burns down (to the ground). Anything else (including people) burns up. "The house burnt up", is not proper, but people say it and everyone knows what you mean. Then there's the saying of what you're referencing, "burning up" as in you feel like you are "on fire", when you are sick. Phrasal verbs are probably the hardest part of being fluent in English. People will understand what you mean, but it won't sound right.
  - atsuzaki 4y ago
    I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure. I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      > I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right. This is the correct approach.
      - knodi123 4y ago
        That's how native-speaker kids learn grammar. First learn to speak the language. Then many years later, learn how to say _why_ what you're doing is the right way.
    - arp242 4y ago
      > I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right. I think that's what most people do, including native speakers. Besides, there ain't no One True Correct™ English grammar in the first place. This is both what makes it a fun language but also vexing.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        The best feature of English is that you can be pretty trash at it and make yourself understood. I've had great friends with terrible English.
  - philsnow 4y ago
    I've never heard the term "phrasal verb" but one similar case that doesn't use verbs pops up in my head all the time, "down {for,on,with}": - "I'm down for that", I am prepared and willing to do that - "I'm down on that", I don't like that practice - "I'm down with that", I do like that practice
    - discreteevent 4y ago
      That's American. English would be: I'm up for that. I'm not ok with that. I'm ok with that.
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        As an American, the "down" slang sound weird. The most I've heard in the wild is a short "I'm down.", you wouldn't say "I'm up." (unless you're saying you woke up, or you're high, or your gambling is going well) Other than that, your versions are more common in the US as well, from my experience. edit: Thinking more on it... "I'm up for that" would be used if you were slightly hesitant. "I'm down for that" implies a lot more confidence.
        losvedir 4y ago
        I dunno, American here and to me being up for something and being down for something are pretty equivalent. I don't hear any hesitancy in "I'm up for whatever".
  - agalunar 4y ago
    The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch: She must have had been being watched. = It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).
    - stoppingin 4y ago
      That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched", alternatively "She had been watched".
      - agalunar 4y ago
        Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like: Two detectives are watching security film. DETECTIVE 1 And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but – Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen. DETECTIVE 1 – from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why? DETECTIVE 2 She must've been being watched. I do agree that form "must have had been being —ed" (with "had" in there as well) is an especially rare form, but in context, native English speakers understand what it means! I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.
        ickoonite 4y ago
        I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?
        agalunar 4y ago
  - g9yuayon 4y ago
    My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.
    - iopq 4y ago
      The Spanish sentence is exactly like the English sentence "Programming is pleasing to me", it's the same grammar and it exists
      - g9yuayon 4y ago
        The structure is different, right? "Me gusta algo" does mean something is pleasing to me, but it's not the way how one would think in Chinese or English.
        iopq 4y ago
        But the grammar is the same as "something pleases me", no difference at all But there's other verbs, just like in English that you can use like this: Disfruto de pasar tiempo con mi familia. I enjoy spending time with my family
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    English writing can have unpredictable spelling mostly due to imported foreign words (looking at you French!) or inclusion of Old English. imo that's better than having a whole other system like Katakana to import foreign words.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I feel like you just said that English has complicated spelling both because of its borrowed words and its native words. I think this could be shortened to "English has complicated spelling because of the spelling of its words." Or even "English has complicated spelling."
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        GP said "unpredictable" spelling, not complex. And I said "Old English". I was saying it's unpredictable if you include Old English spelling and words (which you don't in Simplified English). The remaining unpredictable words are imported foreign words, usually French.
        ickoonite 4y ago
        There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally defined, as the majority of the most commonly used words - italicised here - have such heritage. The spelling of such words is probably not the most troubling part of English orthography anyway.
        deleted 4y ago
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  - kawera 4y ago
    English phonological rules are generally pretty complex for non-natives.
- Adverblessly 4y ago
  > I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary. Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...
  - celu 4y ago
    As a speaker of English, and Spanish, which has the adjectives after, I feel like putting the adjectives first is more expressive. "A hot, juicy chicken leg" would sound less exciting if it was said "A chicken leg, hot, juicy" because the listener would first imagine the wrong chicken leg.
- Maken 4y ago
  Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point. (The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)
visarga 4y ago
> copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees. or language models
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Sure, but it’s a messy model that tells you that 生 is pronounced nama or sometimes ki, 生きる ikiru, 生じる shōjiru, 学生 gakusei, 生む umu…
  - wst_ 4y ago
    All the examples you gave are pretty obvious to read because of suffixes, called okurigana, or the other kanji next to it. Problem arises only when the kanji stands alone and that doesn't happen so often as people think. Even when it does, most often than not, you can infer the reading from the context.
    - gray_-_wolf 4y ago
      わたし (私） and わたくし (私） is probably my favorite example. Good bless furigana. きょう (今日） and こんにち (今日） is sometimes fun as well.
      - glandium 4y ago
        だいにんき(大人気) and おとなげ(大人気) can be fun too. The latter usually is followed by ない, which wouldn't usually happen with the former, but the usual way I'm hit with these is in sentences where the word is at the end of the line (or better, when the line ends at 大人).
    - visarga 4y ago
      In some cases you need to read the whole phrase to know what a word meant and how to read it.
detrites 4y ago
It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers. Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hiragana alongside Kanji (which are common).
- ickoonite 4y ago
  > Reading is similar until Kanji comes along I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin. Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not warm) but it is nowhere near as complex as European languages. But. You can’t just dismiss kanji. They are the essence of the language and, counterintutively, are what make it easy to read in long form. A stream of hiragana is almost illegible; you need the kanji to be able to pick nouns and verbs out. And outside of very limited contexts, furigana (phonetic transcriptions of kanji) are rare, so you need to a reasonable command of kanji to get by.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - detrites 4y ago
    > outside of very limited contexts, furigana Sarcasm aside, I only take issue with this. The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga. It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves learn Kanji. And I would guess probably why it even exists, though I'm sure you could correct me on that. Your view of Japanese seems to be from a very high level, encompassing its totality or close to it. At that level your assertions may be correct and relevant, but that's not where my comments, nor the OP with their post, are aiming.
Laaas 4y ago
It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English. The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages. Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man? The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words. Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English. I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away. Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.
qwezxcrty 4y ago
Interesting, 生 have only one pronunciation in Chinese (native speaker, ref: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F ). Didn't know it's so different in Japanese.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  There is a long list of exceptions for Chinese: https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/chinese-characters-with-various-pronunciations https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-t... Kanji will have at least two pronunciations (one called a Chinese pronunciation that often sounds little like modern mandarin, like 电 being Dian in Chinese and Den in Japanese).
  - FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
    Thats 25 characters. Hardly a long list, especially compared to about every kanji having two or more pronunciations.
    - qwezxcrty 4y ago
      Ah, actually I just meant that specific character. There are indeed many 多音字 in Chinese and they are frequently used, but 生 is a simple one.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- ickoonite 4y ago
  Some of it comes from importing words from different parts of China or at different times in history. From my (very) limited experience, Japanese pronunciations of kanji are much closer to Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.
  - iopq 4y ago
    It's worse than you think. The oldest readings came from KOREA where they used rhyme dictionaries to create a full system of Sino-Korean pronunciations without regards to the actual sounds.
presentation 4y ago
Phonetically it’s a pain, but grammatically it is very regular and logical if explained well.
- rjh29 4y ago
  It's like all the complexity went into kanji. Pronounciation of -kana- is mostly regular. Grammar - 2-3 main verb types with a VERY small conjugation table to learn, no plurals, no genders. You can take a mostly complete sentence and whack it on top of a noun to make it describe the noun, or add stuff to the end to qualify its meaning, in a much more simple way than English. I hate grammar and I found that part of the language to be extremely simple.
  - Anon1096 4y ago
    You start having problems when you learn about registers and how there's basically a second (or third!) set of words depending on who you're talking to.
    - rjh29 4y ago
      It's great fun looking up the keigo versions of words though. Even native speakers have a hard time with it.
bamboozled 4y ago
I think the language is so difficult that it actually holds the society back. Things are just way harder than they need to be in a lot of instances.
- ezconnect 4y ago
  It didn't hold back their society, what was held back was the competition because Japanese is hard and the locals have all the business and flourished. That's my view on why they were successful compared to other Asian nations who adapted English early on their history.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Not sure if this argument holds water in 2023, "tech" for example is well behind in Japan. I guess the world is a more connected place now. I love the language though so I'm personally happy if it sticks around.
    - ezconnect 4y ago
      Huh? I don't think they are behind technology. There are lots of technology only Japan can provide.
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        The stereotype of Japan as technologically advanced persists in the West despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Japan still uses floppy disks and fax machines. They prefer to pay in cash and will go to the bank to get crisp, fresh notes - to give old notes would be disrespectful. Banking in Japan - indeed, experience with any kind of bureaucracy at all there - makes the US DMV, or indeed any Western bureaucracy, look like the vanguard of efficiency.
        4y ago
Tor3 4y ago
You are now talking about the written Japanese language, with all the (real) problems with Kanji, an imported writing system. True enough, but that has little to do with the Japanese language. If you look at verbs, and ignore the rubbish written in most textbooks about "conjugations" (which for the most part aren't conjugations), you'll find one of the most logical and consistent systems on the planet. There are only two exceptions. How many exceptions are there in English? EditAdd: What English does have is a lot of redundancy, which can cover up tons of grammatical mistakes and still deliver the meaning. This makes it an excellent language, in many ways, for international communication. If you try to speak someone else's language, and that person knows just a little bit of English, that person can make a lot of mistakes and the meaning is still clear enough, particularly if you're a little practiced in listening to non-native English. Whereas you may make a small little mistake when trying to speak that person's language, and suddenly the sentence totally changes. Heck, even Italian.. use the wrong verb form and instead of saying what you meant "Ah, I'm stupid" you're saying "Ah, you're stupid". But it's hard to mess up English that way so easily.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  But what is a language without its written form? I mean, fine, if we are going to contrive a comparison where we are only comparing spoken forms, well…English is still going to come out on top, because - exactly as you explained in your edit - its grammar is simple enough that almost anyone can have a go at it. Stick some words together and you’re probably 80% of the way there. That’s not going to be true of any inflected language, even if - as inflected languages go - Japanese is one of the simplest. Anyway, if we are going purely on grammar and ignoring written forms, Chinese - having almost no grammar at all [citation needed] - is surely the apex of simplicity.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble). As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the same, most of the time.. which is arguably very useful for trying to communicate with someone.
raincole 4y ago
"The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult" It's actually many-to-many. I know it sounds crazy, but it's even true for English, just to a much less extent. Sometimes a single Japanese word can be written as different kanjis.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  Yes, you are quite right. I got my table relationships mixed up in the heat of the moment.
tragomaskhalos 4y ago
It's important to distinguish a language from its writing system. The Japanese writing system is a basket case to be sure, but that doesn't say anything about the language itself. My decidedly rudimentary knowledge of the language reveals a rather elegant and logical system, although even here little spikes are already poking through (e.g distinction between wa and ga) that hint of more turbulent waters for the more advanced learner!
culi 4y ago
It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English". The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets
- glomgril 4y ago
  linguistics FTW!
- de_nied 4y ago
  >The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. This is pretty cool
  - djhn 4y ago
    It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general. For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word"). In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).
fomine3 4y ago
I don't think written complexity of Chinese linked to "least logical". Since kanji is composed by parts, isn't it logical? (though it's complex)
- ickoonite 4y ago
  If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “justice” or “meaning”, then you have found the Sinitic Holy Grail that people have spent at least a couple of millennia searching for. Some characters are moderately logical. A tree, 木, begets a wood, 林, and a forest, 森。日, sun, in triplicate, 晶, is a crystal or glittering. But these are very much the exceptions. By what logic would you create a character for a whale (鯨) as distinct from a salmon (鮭), or for abstract concepts like government (政) or crime (罪)?

capableweb 4y ago

Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.

ickoonite 4y ago
My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it. English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).
- makaren 4y ago
  My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough. French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.
    - mytailorisrich 4y ago
      'ai' in Northern French is pronounced like è (and so tends to be considered the standard pronunciation). Southerners tend to pronounce everything like é. Aix is also the name of several towns, in which case the 'x' is not silent.
- ezequiel-garzon 4y ago
  what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other? Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.
  - Adverblessly 4y ago
    > “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Except that if you are burning up, you have a fever, but if you are burning down, you might be planning on illegally collecting some insurance money :)
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Houses that are burning up are also burning down, but people who are burning up are not also burning down.
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        A structure burns down (to the ground). Anything else (including people) burns up. "The house burnt up", is not proper, but people say it and everyone knows what you mean. Then there's the saying of what you're referencing, "burning up" as in you feel like you are "on fire", when you are sick. Phrasal verbs are probably the hardest part of being fluent in English. People will understand what you mean, but it won't sound right.
- atsuzaki 4y ago
  I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure. I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.
  - ickoonite 4y ago
    > I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right. This is the correct approach.
    - knodi123 4y ago
      That's how native-speaker kids learn grammar. First learn to speak the language. Then many years later, learn how to say _why_ what you're doing is the right way.
  - arp242 4y ago
    > I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right. I think that's what most people do, including native speakers. Besides, there ain't no One True Correct™ English grammar in the first place. This is both what makes it a fun language but also vexing.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      The best feature of English is that you can be pretty trash at it and make yourself understood. I've had great friends with terrible English.
- philsnow 4y ago
  I've never heard the term "phrasal verb" but one similar case that doesn't use verbs pops up in my head all the time, "down {for,on,with}": - "I'm down for that", I am prepared and willing to do that - "I'm down on that", I don't like that practice - "I'm down with that", I do like that practice
  - discreteevent 4y ago
    That's American. English would be: I'm up for that. I'm not ok with that. I'm ok with that.
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      As an American, the "down" slang sound weird. The most I've heard in the wild is a short "I'm down.", you wouldn't say "I'm up." (unless you're saying you woke up, or you're high, or your gambling is going well) Other than that, your versions are more common in the US as well, from my experience. edit: Thinking more on it... "I'm up for that" would be used if you were slightly hesitant. "I'm down for that" implies a lot more confidence.
      - losvedir 4y ago
        I dunno, American here and to me being up for something and being down for something are pretty equivalent. I don't hear any hesitancy in "I'm up for whatever".
- agalunar 4y ago
  The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch: She must have had been being watched. = It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).
  - stoppingin 4y ago
    That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched", alternatively "She had been watched".
    - agalunar 4y ago
      Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like: Two detectives are watching security film. DETECTIVE 1 And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but – Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen. DETECTIVE 1 – from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why? DETECTIVE 2 She must've been being watched. I do agree that form "must have had been being —ed" (with "had" in there as well) is an especially rare form, but in context, native English speakers understand what it means! I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?
        agalunar 4y ago
- g9yuayon 4y ago
  My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.
  - iopq 4y ago
    The Spanish sentence is exactly like the English sentence "Programming is pleasing to me", it's the same grammar and it exists
    - g9yuayon 4y ago
      The structure is different, right? "Me gusta algo" does mean something is pleasing to me, but it's not the way how one would think in Chinese or English.
      - iopq 4y ago
        But the grammar is the same as "something pleases me", no difference at all But there's other verbs, just like in English that you can use like this: Disfruto de pasar tiempo con mi familia. I enjoy spending time with my family
- MrOwnPut 4y ago
  English writing can have unpredictable spelling mostly due to imported foreign words (looking at you French!) or inclusion of Old English. imo that's better than having a whole other system like Katakana to import foreign words.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I feel like you just said that English has complicated spelling both because of its borrowed words and its native words. I think this could be shortened to "English has complicated spelling because of the spelling of its words." Or even "English has complicated spelling."
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      GP said "unpredictable" spelling, not complex. And I said "Old English". I was saying it's unpredictable if you include Old English spelling and words (which you don't in Simplified English). The remaining unpredictable words are imported foreign words, usually French.
      - ickoonite 4y ago
        There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally defined, as the majority of the most commonly used words - italicised here - have such heritage. The spelling of such words is probably not the most troubling part of English orthography anyway.
        deleted 4y ago
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- kawera 4y ago
  English phonological rules are generally pretty complex for non-natives.
Adverblessly 4y ago
> I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary. Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...
- celu 4y ago
  As a speaker of English, and Spanish, which has the adjectives after, I feel like putting the adjectives first is more expressive. "A hot, juicy chicken leg" would sound less exciting if it was said "A chicken leg, hot, juicy" because the listener would first imagine the wrong chicken leg.
Maken 4y ago
Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.
- ickoonite 4y ago
  I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point. (The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)

visarga 4y ago

> copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees. or language models

ickoonite 4y ago
Sure, but it’s a messy model that tells you that 生 is pronounced nama or sometimes ki, 生きる ikiru, 生じる shōjiru, 学生 gakusei, 生む umu…
- wst_ 4y ago
  All the examples you gave are pretty obvious to read because of suffixes, called okurigana, or the other kanji next to it. Problem arises only when the kanji stands alone and that doesn't happen so often as people think. Even when it does, most often than not, you can infer the reading from the context.
  - gray_-_wolf 4y ago
    わたし (私） and わたくし (私） is probably my favorite example. Good bless furigana. きょう (今日） and こんにち (今日） is sometimes fun as well.
    - glandium 4y ago
      だいにんき(大人気) and おとなげ(大人気) can be fun too. The latter usually is followed by ない, which wouldn't usually happen with the former, but the usual way I'm hit with these is in sentences where the word is at the end of the line (or better, when the line ends at 大人).
  - visarga 4y ago
    In some cases you need to read the whole phrase to know what a word meant and how to read it.

detrites 4y ago

It depends on your goals. If the goal is speaking and understanding it being spoken, it's one of the most orderly and consistent languages there is, with (non-typically for languages) clear and simple rules, grammar and modifiers. Reading is similar until Kanji comes along and messes things up, but by that stage you could probably get by pretty well, both in the country, and by ingesting materials with simplified Hiragana alongside Kanji (which are common).

ickoonite 4y ago
> Reading is similar until Kanji comes along I mean, sure, if you exclude the most complicated writing system currently in use in any natural language, Japanese is simple. I hear Chinese is really easy too if you just do everything in pinyin. Right, sarcasm off. Yes, the grammar is pretty simple. It has a mere three irregular verbs. The inflection can be somewhat unwieldy (温かくなかったら atatakakunakattara, if it were not warm) but it is nowhere near as complex as European languages. But. You can’t just dismiss kanji. They are the essence of the language and, counterintutively, are what make it easy to read in long form. A stream of hiragana is almost illegible; you need the kanji to be able to pick nouns and verbs out. And outside of very limited contexts, furigana (phonetic transcriptions of kanji) are rare, so you need to a reasonable command of kanji to get by.
- deleted 4y ago
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- detrites 4y ago
  > outside of very limited contexts, furigana Sarcasm aside, I only take issue with this. The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga. It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves learn Kanji. And I would guess probably why it even exists, though I'm sure you could correct me on that. Your view of Japanese seems to be from a very high level, encompassing its totality or close to it. At that level your assertions may be correct and relevant, but that's not where my comments, nor the OP with their post, are aiming.

Laaas 4y ago

It's not clear to me whether it's one of the _least_ complex languages (there are various warts I'd get rid of if I were in control), but it's certainly not more complex than English. The "many pronunciations for one kanji" thing isn't a problem in practice, because 1) most kanji have _1_ on'yomi (Chinese) and _1_ kun'yomi (native) pronunciation, with it being obvious which one to choose from context, especially because when it's kun'yomi, the kanji are suffixed with hiragana to denote its correct pronunciation. There are however problematic kanji, such as the one you note, because there are several things it could mean, but this isn't really any different from _all_ languages. Given any sentence, there are multiple possible meanings, and we have to disambiguate depending on context. This is true even for sentences like "The man is here", which man? The part about complexity is less "ambiguity", and more "how much headspace do you need for the language". I'm not sure if Japanese is more complex than English in that regard, but I do want to note that 1) pronunciation is very straightforward 2) it's *very* hard to make spelling mistakes 3) there are very few irregular words. Especially point 2 is quite important IMO. If you look at rates of dyslexia, you'll see that they're much less in countries that use Chinese characters. Interestingly, many Japanese people whom I know, who have no issue spelling in Japanese, show the very common signs of dyslexia when spelling in English. I think it's related to there being fewer ways to "fuck up". In English, it's easy to mix up the letters, transpose them, etc.. With Chinese characters/kanjix, _you can't transpose strokes_ digitally. There are people who make mistakes when writing by hand, but even that is much less when writing kana, the reason being that while in English, "relatiounally" and "relationally" might be similarly, transposing whole kana changes the pronunciation such that it's entirely distinct. Transposing strokes within a kana is of course still possible.

ickoonite 4y ago
I think it’s quite hard to argue that Japanese orthography is harder to fuck up than English. Mastery involves distinguishing between 人 and 入, 鐘 and 鍾, 撤 and 徹, amongst countless other very similar characters. It is not easy at all - significant mistakes are just a slip of the pen away. Phonetic syllabaries like hiragana may eliminate spelling mistakes, insofar as such a thing could be conceived of in Japanese, but the same is largely true of Spanish, which manages to achieve orthographic consistency while using the same letters as we do.

qwezxcrty 4y ago

Interesting, 生 have only one pronunciation in Chinese (native speaker, ref: https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F https://zh.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%94%9F ). Didn't know it's so different in Japanese.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
There is a long list of exceptions for Chinese: https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-tips/chinese-characters-with-various-pronunciations https://blog.tutorabcchinese.com/mandarin-chinese-learning-t... Kanji will have at least two pronunciations (one called a Chinese pronunciation that often sounds little like modern mandarin, like 电 being Dian in Chinese and Den in Japanese).
- FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
  Thats 25 characters. Hardly a long list, especially compared to about every kanji having two or more pronunciations.
  - qwezxcrty 4y ago
    Ah, actually I just meant that specific character. There are indeed many 多音字 in Chinese and they are frequently used, but 生 is a simple one.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ickoonite 4y ago
Some of it comes from importing words from different parts of China or at different times in history. From my (very) limited experience, Japanese pronunciations of kanji are much closer to Cantonese or Hokkien than Mandarin.
- iopq 4y ago
  It's worse than you think. The oldest readings came from KOREA where they used rhyme dictionaries to create a full system of Sino-Korean pronunciations without regards to the actual sounds.

presentation 4y ago

Phonetically it’s a pain, but grammatically it is very regular and logical if explained well.

rjh29 4y ago
It's like all the complexity went into kanji. Pronounciation of -kana- is mostly regular. Grammar - 2-3 main verb types with a VERY small conjugation table to learn, no plurals, no genders. You can take a mostly complete sentence and whack it on top of a noun to make it describe the noun, or add stuff to the end to qualify its meaning, in a much more simple way than English. I hate grammar and I found that part of the language to be extremely simple.
- Anon1096 4y ago
  You start having problems when you learn about registers and how there's basically a second (or third!) set of words depending on who you're talking to.
  - rjh29 4y ago
    It's great fun looking up the keigo versions of words though. Even native speakers have a hard time with it.

bamboozled 4y ago

I think the language is so difficult that it actually holds the society back. Things are just way harder than they need to be in a lot of instances.

ezconnect 4y ago
It didn't hold back their society, what was held back was the competition because Japanese is hard and the locals have all the business and flourished. That's my view on why they were successful compared to other Asian nations who adapted English early on their history.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Not sure if this argument holds water in 2023, "tech" for example is well behind in Japan. I guess the world is a more connected place now. I love the language though so I'm personally happy if it sticks around.
  - ezconnect 4y ago
    Huh? I don't think they are behind technology. There are lots of technology only Japan can provide.
    - ickoonite 4y ago
      The stereotype of Japan as technologically advanced persists in the West despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Japan still uses floppy disks and fax machines. They prefer to pay in cash and will go to the bank to get crisp, fresh notes - to give old notes would be disrespectful. Banking in Japan - indeed, experience with any kind of bureaucracy at all there - makes the US DMV, or indeed any Western bureaucracy, look like the vanguard of efficiency.
      - 4y ago

Tor3 4y ago

You are now talking about the written Japanese language, with all the (real) problems with Kanji, an imported writing system. True enough, but that has little to do with the Japanese language. If you look at verbs, and ignore the rubbish written in most textbooks about "conjugations" (which for the most part aren't conjugations), you'll find one of the most logical and consistent systems on the planet. There are only two exceptions. How many exceptions are there in English? EditAdd: What English does have is a lot of redundancy, which can cover up tons of grammatical mistakes and still deliver the meaning. This makes it an excellent language, in many ways, for international communication. If you try to speak someone else's language, and that person knows just a little bit of English, that person can make a lot of mistakes and the meaning is still clear enough, particularly if you're a little practiced in listening to non-native English. Whereas you may make a small little mistake when trying to speak that person's language, and suddenly the sentence totally changes. Heck, even Italian.. use the wrong verb form and instead of saying what you meant "Ah, I'm stupid" you're saying "Ah, you're stupid". But it's hard to mess up English that way so easily.

ickoonite 4y ago
But what is a language without its written form? I mean, fine, if we are going to contrive a comparison where we are only comparing spoken forms, well…English is still going to come out on top, because - exactly as you explained in your edit - its grammar is simple enough that almost anyone can have a go at it. Stick some words together and you’re probably 80% of the way there. That’s not going to be true of any inflected language, even if - as inflected languages go - Japanese is one of the simplest. Anyway, if we are going purely on grammar and ignoring written forms, Chinese - having almost no grammar at all [citation needed] - is surely the apex of simplicity.
- Tor3 4y ago
  I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble). As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the same, most of the time.. which is arguably very useful for trying to communicate with someone.

raincole 4y ago

"The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult" It's actually many-to-many. I know it sounds crazy, but it's even true for English, just to a much less extent. Sometimes a single Japanese word can be written as different kanjis.

ickoonite 4y ago
Yes, you are quite right. I got my table relationships mixed up in the heat of the moment.

tragomaskhalos 4y ago

It's important to distinguish a language from its writing system. The Japanese writing system is a basket case to be sure, but that doesn't say anything about the language itself. My decidedly rudimentary knowledge of the language reveals a rather elegant and logical system, although even here little spikes are already poking through (e.g distinction between wa and ga) that hint of more turbulent waters for the more advanced learner!

culi 4y ago

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English". The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets

glomgril 4y ago
linguistics FTW!
de_nied 4y ago
>The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. This is pretty cool
- djhn 4y ago
  It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general. For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word"). In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).

fomine3 4y ago

I don't think written complexity of Chinese linked to "least logical". Since kanji is composed by parts, isn't it logical? (though it's complex)

ickoonite 4y ago
If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “justice” or “meaning”, then you have found the Sinitic Holy Grail that people have spent at least a couple of millennia searching for. Some characters are moderately logical. A tree, 木, begets a wood, 林, and a forest, 森。日, sun, in triplicate, 晶, is a crystal or glittering. But these are very much the exceptions. By what logic would you create a character for a whale (鯨) as distinct from a salmon (鮭), or for abstract concepts like government (政) or crime (罪)?