The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language

Coming from French I don't consider there is any conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you, they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about gender and plural.

Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)

So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.

(background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish; Chinese not at all)

Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.

I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.

In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.

Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.

There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.

But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.

The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".

The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.

I’m extremely skeptical of your claims that you learned Chinese grammar in a week as a Chinese learner myself and I’m willing to bet you don’t realize how much you don’t know. The Chinese grammar wiki has 505 articles on grammar split across A1-C1 levels of the European Common Framework for language proficiency. This wiki is also non-exhaustive. This isn’t even including the fact that Classical Chinese, which is a basis for many 成语 used today, has a completely different grammar than modern Chinese.

There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...

This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:

1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.

2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).

3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".

I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

Right.

You feel Chinese grammar simple only because you're a native speaker, or at least have learned Chinese at a very young age.

Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.

Why not "unable to express at all"?

Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.

So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)

The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one word for.

Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?

My favorite simple example of this is exclusive "we". It's not a thing in most languages, but it allows a level of passive aggressiveness that you can't achieve without it.

Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we.

As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity and resignment at the same time (besides other things.)

The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.

Exactly. Japanese _mostly_ doesn't have plurals in the English sense (it actually does have a few plural words), but you do use counters to specify quantities, which is just another way to express plurality.

I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."

I've studied translation and what was fascinating to me was all the terminology that a language uses that's totally linked to the culture in which it's used. For example, in Brazilian Portuguese, someone may say something like "show de bola" (literal translation: "ball show" using the borrow English word "show" for something like "great performance") even in seemingly completely unrelated context, like when you do well on your math homework :D. Because football parlance is ingrained so deep into the collective mind of the population that you can "transfer" what would normally describe a fantastic play by a football team to pretty much any other context you like.

I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?

That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.

Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".

In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.

Isn't that like 見る and 見える?

What I mean is that, to use an English example "in comparison to X, Y" and "in contrast to X, Y" are not grammatically different -- the words are all doing the same jobs in the same structure, it's just a different verb. But they're both useful idiomatic patterns to learn. It happens that the standard in Japanese as a second language teaching is to call (the Japanese equivalents to) these different idiomatic patterns different grammar points. Personally I don't care too much about the terminology as long as everybody is on the same page, and because this is the standard in the J2L communities it's generally fine; but it does mean that looking at the size of the volumes of a "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" is a bit misleading about how grammatically complex the language is.

I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).

From their username, I'm guessing Polish...

Tones.

The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.

The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.

What you're proposing is not an objective measure, it's a popularity contest.

And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list. Sometimes with Arabic.

Maybe Japanese is a really hard language objectively, but these surveys aren't actually showing that. What they are showing is that the majority of organizations that are doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively" much harder than Spanish.

Anecdotally speaking, my spouse is from China and she thinks it was easier for her to learn Japanese than English despite learning English from a young age and not having any formal Japanese education until college by which point she was already fairly conversational in Japanese from having watched variety shows and anime. We met while I was studying Japanese at college so I have a pretty good idea of where her Japanese ability stands.

Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn.

Point being? I think it’s subjective.

Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.

I press “doubt” on the entire comment just due to this statement. There is no “objectively more difficult” for most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first language.

Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first language. They will likely find Japanese language to be extremely easy compared to almost any other language. Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and pieces all the time.

Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it; cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at all), grammar overall doesn’t feel overly complicated, etc. However, from what I’ve observed, native English speakers seem to struggle with quite a few of those things, including pronunciation.

Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand at least half of what the other person is saying (despite speaking to each other in different languages, without having any prior knowledge of each other’s language).

All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing as “objectively easier”, unless we know the person’s first/primary language.

What you're describing is written Chinese though. It's entirely possible, that prepositions / postpositions were used in spoken language.

Started with friends introducing me to anime in highschool (with english subtitles), which I got hooked on, then got into the music as well, and later into vtubers (so no subtitles when watching live). I haven't ever really been into other entertainment, so for a little over a decade I've been listening to japanese on a near daily basis.

I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.

I think GP's assessment that Chinese is semantically clean and regular might not be completely correct, rather it's quite close to his primary that friction is much reduced compared to Japanese, or many others for that matter. It's very well known that Chinese grammar is super close to English for whatever reasons.

The characters are mostly 1-1. There are a few exceptions, but usually one is a lot more typical than the other, so reading it with the typical reading won't usually get you in trouble

I think they meant there is only one syllable per character.

How is that common in Chinese writing? I haven't seen anything similar to gikun in Chinese. Outside of graded readers, I've not seen the pronunciation written above a character and in the case of graded readers, it would always be the expected pronunciation not a different pronunciation that carries a different sense. That's something I agree with the writer as being unique.

I think they are completely different.

I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.

The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is speaking has said one word but pronounced it like another. That doesn't really make sense in English but with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a normal way to think.

So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.

But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.

I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.

Every language has various out-of-band features (gestures, etc). I was asking if any of them are similar to the (written) furigana usage described in TFA.

As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.

Careful... it's a little too easy to ascribe things like that to a superficial cultural trait.

English has a huge variety of terms for extreme tiredness: whacked, bushed, wiped out, worn out, drained, burned out, beat, knackered, fried, shattered, frazzled, zonked... must be the puritan work ethic or something.

We've even got a few onomatopoeia of our own: feeling kinda.. ugh.. meh... bleugh... I mean, whew, yeesh. Just... phew.

Maybe being tired is just the global human condition.

I think there are different onomatopoeia for different kinds of pain. English equivalent is probably when a doctor may ask if a pain is sharp, dull, pulsating, burning, etc.

it's best explained to anglophones as a voiced 'd', not anything to do with 'r' or 'l'

It’s amusing that the characters even look like a conveyor belt.

Thanks for the explanation. I'd heard about the r / l issues with romanizing Japanese but hadn't made the link.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_Kuru_Kururin

Whoa! Thanks for the recommendation! This looks like it'll be right up my alley.

Every language is built on a mountain of cultural context and assumptions. That's the part which is impossible to translate. You can translate the words but you're missing layers upon layers of subtle meaning.

I don't speak Spanish so can't judge your translation, but I know that "you're great" and "you're the shit" feel different. The simplification drops a lot of implicit information and social signaling.

It's that emotional and cultural baggage layered on top of words that's hard to translate.

So for example in USA you can call someone "a benedict arnold". As an immigrant this means nothing to me. People tell me it means "bad". I understand the words, but there's no impact behind them because I lack the cultural background.

actual concrete examples

Here's an easy one: nearly any pun is literally impossible to translate while still being a pun. You can explain the pun by talking about the original language, but it can't be adequately translated.

Phrases have properties other than their literal meaning. These can be both important to an author's intent, and hard to get across;

Personally I prefer footnotes in those situations. I'd rather have a few sentences that explain the nuance an author was trying to convey with their word choice that a native speaker would have picked up on rather than have a phrase thrown out entirely and replaced with some alternative localization that might be familiar in an effort to try to capture the same "feel" but barely comes close to what was actually said (if you're lucky).

I think we actually agree here: it's not "untranslatable", it just does not translate easily or well.

But regarding translating it as "we're finally here", that's not what it means: it's not an expression of satisfaction, it's acknowledging that to others that it's been a long trip for them.

I think when people say "untranslatable", there's an implied "without breaking the flow or losing nuance" there. Of course you can in principle translate anything into any language, it's sometimes impossible to translate something without either a lengthy digression, or giving up on translating the full nuance. Poetry is notoriously hard to translate because of stuff like that.

I don't know that I would say this is a bastardization of the word, but I see where you're coming from.