6 ms·

Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

36 points by fogus 15y ago

Symmetry 15y ago
maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.
- rollypolly 15y ago
  Inferring from context.. like many programming languages. Is there a programming language you would say most resembles Japanese in spirit?
  - Danieru 15y ago
    No, its more like a unified diff.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    Where did you get this idea? Programming languages infer almost nothing from context. Moreover, when they do that's often seen as bad because it usually creates ambiguous semantic or syntactic constructs. Good programming languages are often based off of a formal language[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language
    - corysama 15y ago
      Basic Japanese always struck me as having special purpose registers and a postfix notation. The basic sentence structure is "noun wa noun da verb." where wa is the "set the subject" operator and da is "set the direct object" operator then stating a verb sets the verb register to complete the statement. Once a register is set, you are able to omit it from later sentences until you want to change its value. "noun wa noun da verb. noun da verb." would indicate that the same subject is doing two different things to two different objects. More operators: http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-wadakano-explained/ http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-...
      - evincarofautumn 15y ago
        It’s not nearly that simple, formal, or programmatic. First, は wa is a topic marker, not a subject marker; the topic need not be the grammatical subject of a sentence, and indeed is often included for emphasis alone. There is a subject marker が ga, but it’s primarily used to introduce new information (“ペンがある。” pen ga aru “There is a pen.”) without changing the topic. だ da or the formal です desu is known as a copula, standing for an assumed verb. This is often is, but not always (“飲み物は？ソーダです。” nomimono wa? sooda desu “What would you like to drink? I’ll have a soda.”). だ is not a direct object marker—you might be thinking of を wo. Of course, it’s a perfectly reasonable idea to borrow topic-structured statements for a programming language. Just assume the topic wherever a required term is missing: = new Window .width = 640 .height = 480 w = = new Button .label = "Hello" .align = CENTER w.add() It comes with a host of problems, but it’s reasonable. And you might want to have a look at Forth-family languages if you’re into postfix notation and pointfree/tacit programming.
- gommm 15y ago
  Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to be guessed by the context... Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good). I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the field confirm me that it was the case (not to sure of the details but that was during a discussion on voice compression).
  - Tipzntrix 15y ago
    Maybe this explains why Hatsune Miku can perform live shows for millions around the world while people still have trouble taking Microsoft Sam and Anna seriously.
    - lmm 15y ago
      I suspect that's more about Japanese celebrity dynamics; consider Naomi Campbell's famous statement on her album sales.
  - YmMot 15y ago
    > the lower number of different syllables I have a theory that this is why the Japanese are so (seemingly) fond of portmanteaus. It makes it easier to smoosh words together.
- mc32 15y ago
  Sounds a bit like mafiosi conversations where it's mostly context with a few details in order to avoid being overt about what they're discussing. Albeit without the use of codeword substitutes.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  Yeah, since it isn't very reliant on word order for denoting function of words in a sentence and instead using markers, practically anything unnecessary can be omitted.
rubashov 15y ago
I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most languages. Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly hard.
- iron_ball 15y ago
  Those three words are composed of Greco-Roman bases. Is English unique in having so many words like that? (And does anyone know the linguistic term for words made by "mixing and matching" existing roots and affixes?)
  - silentbicycle 15y ago
    Agglutination.
    - andreasvc 15y ago
      Agglutination is a specific kind of word formation where roots are concatenated unmodified; it happens in Turkish, some Inuit languages, and Esperanto. More generally the process of word formation is called morphology.
KoulMomo 15y ago
This explains every Final Fantasy game ever made.
coob 15y ago
It's also subject to poor interpretation: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_shortfilms http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_...
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  I cringed, poor director...
  - mc32 15y ago
    I cringed for the actor. It's like he's lost among this sea of conversation and only gets a few crumbs. Like grasping at straws of understanding.
muyuu 15y ago
Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred. Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across. Now, drawing any comparisons is extremely hard because context doesn't translate, so by definition you cannot create a benchmark. For instance, they convey far more information about social nuance and politeness, to levels that would need whole paragraphs per sentence to explain. Also, syllables are a horrible benchmark for Japanese since all their syllables are extremely short and quick to pronounce. Their encoding, so to speak, consists of a smaller unit size and a bigger number of units. They have a compression system for text, which is the mixture of kanji and kana. This basically goes to show how unique Japanese is in many respects and how differently they communicate.
- mc32 15y ago
  Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and Romaji are about writing. I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1] were borrowings made to fit the spoken language. [1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain, they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they became phonographs.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
    IIRC they are still ideographs, usually representing the japanised chinese pronunciation of a word and the japanese pronunciation of a word.
  - muyuu 15y ago
AznHisoka 15y ago
When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne... "
- patio11 15y ago
  Really? Is that so? Umm, erm, well, how do I put it, English... ya know what I mean. We had an exercise once in Japanese class for who could go longest on hesitation noises without including substantial content. I remember losing at only 46 seconds. This is not a Japanese exercise, this is a fluency exercise. All languages have a right way to say nothing because nothing is often the right thing to say. P.S. There are very fluent and fluid ways to say absolutely nothing of substance in both English and Japanese. Try playing the improv game "Talk like a politician": given an accusation of a true statement ("You had a banana for lunch"), dispute the charge without actually saying that you did not have a banana for lunch. You can use arbitrarily sophisticated English (or Japanese) for this.
  - WildUtah 15y ago
    "Nothing is often the right thing to do an always a clever thing to say." -Will Durant
shadowmint 15y ago
It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable: "The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione & Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)." Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers. The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends to be spoker more slowly). This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies. To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there. That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  >comparable semantic content Hmm. Would this mean specifying similar amounts of context? Japanese from the little I know, at least when spoken, omits a lot of details that can be inferred from the context. I would imagine casual speech to be far more efficient than polite formal writing, which includes many details that would otherwise be left out and uses the longer "polite" verb forms.
ineedtosleep 15y ago
I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language. In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there." There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables]. I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this. [1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...
- batista 15y ago
  >In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...
  - ineedtosleep 15y ago
    Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.
chao- 15y ago
Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus: Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice. Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness. Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken. Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.
  - vorg 15y ago
    > It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".
    - evincarofautumn 15y ago
AgathaTheWitch 15y ago
It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom). Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese. A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite. In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.

36 points by fogus 15y ago

maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.

rollypolly 15y ago
Inferring from context.. like many programming languages. Is there a programming language you would say most resembles Japanese in spirit?
- Danieru 15y ago
  No, its more like a unified diff.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  Where did you get this idea? Programming languages infer almost nothing from context. Moreover, when they do that's often seen as bad because it usually creates ambiguous semantic or syntactic constructs. Good programming languages are often based off of a formal language[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language
  - corysama 15y ago
    Basic Japanese always struck me as having special purpose registers and a postfix notation. The basic sentence structure is "noun wa noun da verb." where wa is the "set the subject" operator and da is "set the direct object" operator then stating a verb sets the verb register to complete the statement. Once a register is set, you are able to omit it from later sentences until you want to change its value. "noun wa noun da verb. noun da verb." would indicate that the same subject is doing two different things to two different objects. More operators: http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-wadakano-explained/ http://fm1397.com/knowledge/chalkboard/chalkboard-session-5-...
    - evincarofautumn 15y ago
      It’s not nearly that simple, formal, or programmatic. First, は wa is a topic marker, not a subject marker; the topic need not be the grammatical subject of a sentence, and indeed is often included for emphasis alone. There is a subject marker が ga, but it’s primarily used to introduce new information (“ペンがある。” pen ga aru “There is a pen.”) without changing the topic. だ da or the formal です desu is known as a copula, standing for an assumed verb. This is often is, but not always (“飲み物は？ソーダです。” nomimono wa? sooda desu “What would you like to drink? I’ll have a soda.”). だ is not a direct object marker—you might be thinking of を wo. Of course, it’s a perfectly reasonable idea to borrow topic-structured statements for a programming language. Just assume the topic wherever a required term is missing: = new Window .width = 640 .height = 480 w = = new Button .label = "Hello" .align = CENTER w.add() It comes with a host of problems, but it’s reasonable. And you might want to have a look at Forth-family languages if you’re into postfix notation and pointfree/tacit programming.
gommm 15y ago
Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to be guessed by the context... Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good). I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the field confirm me that it was the case (not to sure of the details but that was during a discussion on voice compression).
- Tipzntrix 15y ago
  Maybe this explains why Hatsune Miku can perform live shows for millions around the world while people still have trouble taking Microsoft Sam and Anna seriously.
  - lmm 15y ago
    I suspect that's more about Japanese celebrity dynamics; consider Naomi Campbell's famous statement on her album sales.
- YmMot 15y ago
  > the lower number of different syllables I have a theory that this is why the Japanese are so (seemingly) fond of portmanteaus. It makes it easier to smoosh words together.
mc32 15y ago
Sounds a bit like mafiosi conversations where it's mostly context with a few details in order to avoid being overt about what they're discussing. Albeit without the use of codeword substitutes.
TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
Yeah, since it isn't very reliant on word order for denoting function of words in a sentence and instead using markers, practically anything unnecessary can be omitted.

rubashov 15y ago

I remember seeing some mention that English has by far more words than most languages. Saying "Ontology recapitulates phylogeny" in other languages is allegedly hard.

iron_ball 15y ago
Those three words are composed of Greco-Roman bases. Is English unique in having so many words like that? (And does anyone know the linguistic term for words made by "mixing and matching" existing roots and affixes?)
- silentbicycle 15y ago
  Agglutination.
  - andreasvc 15y ago
    Agglutination is a specific kind of word formation where roots are concatenated unmodified; it happens in Turkish, some Inuit languages, and Esperanto. More generally the process of word formation is called morphology.

KoulMomo 15y ago

This explains every Final Fantasy game ever made.

coob 15y ago

It's also subject to poor interpretation: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_shortfilms http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3gj7y_lost-in-translation_...

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
I cringed, poor director...
- mc32 15y ago
  I cringed for the actor. It's like he's lost among this sea of conversation and only gets a few crumbs. Like grasping at straws of understanding.

muyuu 15y ago

Japanese don't think in terms of syllables. Ideograms are very often multi-syllabic (as opposed to Chinese) and the amount of "context" is by far the highest I've ever seen. Being such a high-context culture very little needs saying and most can be inferred. Actually I'd say it's one of the most efficient languages I know in terms of what needs saying and how quickly they get their point across. Now, drawing any comparisons is extremely hard because context doesn't translate, so by definition you cannot create a benchmark. For instance, they convey far more information about social nuance and politeness, to levels that would need whole paragraphs per sentence to explain. Also, syllables are a horrible benchmark for Japanese since all their syllables are extremely short and quick to pronounce. Their encoding, so to speak, consists of a smaller unit size and a bigger number of units. They have a compression system for text, which is the mixture of kanji and kana. This basically goes to show how unique Japanese is in many respects and how differently they communicate.

mc32 15y ago
Syllables are about spoken language (speech). Kanji Hiragana and Katakana and Romaji are about writing. I think it's more natural to measure the spoken expression rather than the written expression, specially for Japanese as all the major writing forms[1] were borrowings made to fit the spoken language. [1] I guess that's pretty generic as all writing forms are made to fit. What I mean is that Kanji characters were fitted upon Japanese language --which had not written form. Basically, the way I understand it, they took a word like Mountain (Yama) and then would ask, how do you write mountain in Chinese（山）/shan/ and then would say (山) = /yama/. Now let's say there was another word that had the sound /yama/ but had nothing to do with mountain, they would still use (山) to write it. so rather than being an ideograph, they became phonographs.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
  IIRC they are still ideographs, usually representing the japanised chinese pronunciation of a word and the japanese pronunciation of a word.
- muyuu 15y ago

AznHisoka 15y ago

When I learned Japanese I found I could spit out a lot of words without actually saying anything of substance. "sou sou! sou desu ka... eeto des ne... "

patio11 15y ago
Really? Is that so? Umm, erm, well, how do I put it, English... ya know what I mean. We had an exercise once in Japanese class for who could go longest on hesitation noises without including substantial content. I remember losing at only 46 seconds. This is not a Japanese exercise, this is a fluency exercise. All languages have a right way to say nothing because nothing is often the right thing to say. P.S. There are very fluent and fluid ways to say absolutely nothing of substance in both English and Japanese. Try playing the improv game "Talk like a politician": given an accusation of a true statement ("You had a banana for lunch"), dispute the charge without actually saying that you did not have a banana for lunch. You can use arbitrarily sophisticated English (or Japanese) for this.
- WildUtah 15y ago
  "Nothing is often the right thing to do an always a clever thing to say." -Will Durant

shadowmint 15y ago

It's worth noting that dataset this comes from is actually pretty reasonable: "The speech data used are a subset of the MULTEXT multilingual corpus (Campione & Véronis 1998, Komatsu et al. 2004). This subset consists of K = 20 texts composed in British English, freely translated into the following languages to convey a comparable semantic content: French (FR), German (GE), Italian (IT), Japanese (JA), Mandarin Chinese (MA), and Spanish (SP). Each text consists of five semantically connected sentences that compose either a narration or a query (to order food by phone, for example)." Which is to say that the study took a set data (constant information content), translated into various languages, and then analysed the information density based on how many syllabels where in it and how long it took to deliver the information (read) by various native speakers. The result being, basically, languages tend toward a common rate of information through-put using a trade off between speed of delivery and data complexity (ie. fewer syllables to communicate an idea -> the language tends to be spoker more slowly). This is pretty interesting stuff; love to see some larger follow up studies. To be honest, I'm not surprised at all to hear japanese has a lower information density, especially in formal stuff; I bet that if you tracked segments in the languages that had _no information content_ you'd find japanese right up there. That said, the blog post doesn't really do much for the article, and just ends up sounding unsubstanciated.

TazeTSchnitzel 15y ago
>comparable semantic content Hmm. Would this mean specifying similar amounts of context? Japanese from the little I know, at least when spoken, omits a lot of details that can be inferred from the context. I would imagine casual speech to be far more efficient than polite formal writing, which includes many details that would otherwise be left out and uses the longer "polite" verb forms.

ineedtosleep 15y ago

I'm not sure what the article is trying to prove (haven't read the study source[1] yet). It's hard to understand these differences without knowing more about the pragmatics and syntax of the Japanese language. In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University + a few trips to Japan), at lot is indeed left unsaid. The more common case for this from my experience is the null-subject/topic [2] (i.e. "Iku yo." literally means "go", however, depending on the context the topic and/or subject gets assumed and can mean something simple like "Let's (or let us) go." or something slightly more complicated like, "Let's go and eat over there." There is also multitude of verbose set phrases that occur in Japanese. Example: [V]-nakerebanaranai/-nakerebananarimasen, which roughly translates to "I must do [V]" where [V] is a verb. There are two instances of it because of the honorific/politeness deal with the language which makes sentence structures even more verbose. A quick comparison with the word "to eat" would yield: Tabenakerebanaranai/tabenakerebanarimasen with 9 and 10 syllables, respectively, compared to English's "I have to eat" which is less than half [4 syllables]. I can go on, but I doubt I'm qualified enough to give a small lesson on Japanese syntax. Hopefully, though, that sheds a little more light on this. [1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_2011_Language.pdf http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language#Japanese...

batista 15y ago
>In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...
- ineedtosleep 15y ago
  Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again depending on context -- it'll be visually/audibly less. Conversely, a sentence or two in Japanese can potentially be translated into a longer block of English due to English requiring a certain syntax: I believe English is SVO/OSV (Subject-Verb-Object: I'll go there) whereas Japanese is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb). The reason I bring up the SVO/SOV/etc. types is that it's a pretty significant difference when comparing languages. Spanish, I believe, is similar to English in that they're both SVO: My name is ____, Mi nombre es ____ -- Similar syntax. On the other side of the spectrum, the Chinese language structure (again, not completely sure) allows for almost any arrangement of words and will yield different meanings depending on where words are positioned. So translating sentences like that into another language can be a good deal of work and produce more extraneous words.

chao- 15y ago

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus: Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far. It sounds like it would be ambiguous, but rarely feels that way in practice. Japanese, on the other hand, to get beyond sounding like a 5-year old you need to brush up on a lot more grammar. And even then, any given sentence, for all of its grammar and four- or five-syllable conjugations, can stretch on and on, but still be ambiguous as all hell. Part of that is cultural, though: a dash of ambiguity can provide some added politeness. Here though, I must reference Symmetry's comment for fairness. Casual/conversational Japanese can be very abbreviated and through a combination of implicit topics, dropped/ignored/shortened conjugations and such doesn't feel so slow when spoken. Here I'm going beyond the information density per syllable addressed by the study, but it was nice to see that aspect studied formally, even if it isn't the whole picture.

evincarofautumn 15y ago
Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.
- vorg 15y ago
  > It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+<pause>+A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".
  - evincarofautumn 15y ago

AgathaTheWitch 15y ago

It is true that spoken Japanese often leaves much up to context. If you were to translate English sentences into literally equivalent Japanese phrases, you would invariably create phrases with far more syllables. However the language is not used the same way as English. A child will say in English "Mom was angry with me." In Japanese he says "okocchatta." Same information conveyed but requiring context for the Japanese (doesn't explicitly say "mom). Furthermore, I would argue that when you compare equivalent sentences in English and Japanese, the Japanese sentence often conveys MORE information. Take the English sentence "You did not eat." 4 syllables. There are many ways to say this in Japanese. A formal translation would be "Anata wa tabemasen deshita." Somewhere between 9 and 12 syllables depending on pronunciation. This sentence conveys a lot of information that the English does not. For example, the use of "anata" instead of a more rough word for "you" suggests that the speaker has a certain type of relationship with the subject. The same is true of "tabemasen deshita", which could have been "kutta" meaning "did not eat", but much less polite. In myriad ways the Japanese language allows for speakers to be explicit about their relationships with others and their sense of place. English by contrast requires listeners to be more attentive to tone of voice, body language, and word connotations.