A cap o' kindness

Japanese Language
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The title of this post is a deliberately misspelled excerpt from the song “Auld Lang Syne”, which itself has a Scottish title referring to something like “once upon a time”.

Indeed, once upon a time, over a millennium ago, katakana (片仮名, level 39) was included in Japanese language. As everyone here knows, katakana is not a set of alphabets but, rather, a guideline for the Japanese on how to pronounce foreign words.

The attached image below is a screenshot taken a couple of days ago from Fuji TV:

screenshot 2024-11-08 17.10.37
screenshot 2024-11-08 17.10.371904×967 292 KB

The name of the horse race mentioned in the screenshot is famous, unlike the way its name is written. But then again, カップ would indeed be perfect Japanese, as “kappu” refers to “cup” when written in katakana.

The problems arise when linguistic reverse engineering takes place. When Japanese people need to either speak or write English words, their point of reference is often the katakana versions of the same words. But, as mentioned, katakana is not alphabetical but phonetically constructed system. This results in examples such as the screenshot, where the translated phonetic katakana is actually taken as the correct way of writing English.

In addition, because all English-speaking movies and even interviews of foreign people in the news are always dubbed, Japanese people never get the “tv education” or a chance of listening to English while reading the Japanese transcription in subtitles. Funnily enough, many Japanese tv shows do have subtitles, but only when Japanese guests speak their mother tongue.

In my opinion, katakana is like a linguistic barb wire fence set on a peaceful border between English and Japanese. Its mere existence makes it way more frustrating for English speakers to learn Japanese, and conversely, katakana makes Japanese people write a three-letter common English word wrong on a national television network.

As mentioned, it’s a peaceful border with cups of kindness on both sides. Maybe it would finally be time to remove the barb wire.

ベスト、
Jari
—

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仮名は悲しい。
漢字を感じたい！

On a meowre serious note, however, Japanese without katakana would not be Japanese :sweat_smile:

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What do you mean by “remove the barb wire”? Do you think that Japanese should spell English loanwords using the latin alphabet?

There’s nothing particularly strange or unusual with this situation IMO, you have exactly the same thing with Russian that respells almost everything in Cyrillic for instance, and I think that holds true for most languages that use non-latin scripts like Arabic, Greek etc…

カップ is not an English word in Japanese, it’s a Japanese word borrowed from English. Amusingly I can demonstrate that there’s nothing particularly odd or unique going on here by using the exact same word: “cup” in English is a borrowing from latin, and the same word exists in modern French as “coupe”. Except that, as you can see, the word is spelled differently, has a different pronunciation and has a slightly different meaning. That’s not barbed wire to insulate the languages, it’s just how languages evolve.

You wouldn’t expect English to respell “cup” to match a foreign language based on etymology, so similarly I don’t see why Japanese would change the way they spell カップ.

I agree with you regarding subtitles/dubbing and how it cheats Japanese people from a lot of exposure to foreign languages (we have the same issue in France), but that’s an entirely different topic.

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What’s wrong with dubs existing?

Usually both dubs and subs exist and can be readily viewed if desired. I always choose subtitled foreign movies when I go to the theater (usually as the only foreigner) and I regularly set my TV’s audio feed to English when watching foreign shows or movies.

It would be unreasonable to think that Japanese people should only ever watch subs.

I never got a response to my question in your previous thread either.

Edit: looking back on the OP’s previous posts, it seems like they use the forum like a blog and don’t interact after making an initial post, so I guess I shouldn’t expect a reply.

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I grew up watching mostly subbed movies and my English was significantly ahead that of my peers mainly as a result of that (most mainstream movies are completely dubbed in France, and the option of watching with subs instead was rather uncommon until fairly recently).

A few years ago I moved to Portugal and here all movies and shows not targeted at kids are subbed and not dubbed, probably mainly because the market is too small to justify a Portuguese dub, and Portuguese people tend to speak pretty good English. Now naturally there are many factors at play here and it’s certainly not the only reason, but I’m sure that large exposure to English through media plays a role.

So I don’t know about “unreasonable” but at the same time I don’t expect that Japanese (or French) people will suddenly massively shift to subs. People used to dubbing often find subbing annoying, and vice-versa.

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My point was just both exist, and the subtitled film industry clearly isn’t being supported by foreigners alone.

There are things that don’t get dubs at all, but they tend to be films aimed at smaller adult audiences, like Oscar bait films. I have doubts that their existence helps Japanese people be better at English. I watched a lot of subbed anime before I ever studied Japanese and I can’t say it helped me at all, except that maybe I knew some phrases here and there and had gotten accustomed to the rhythm of Japanese a bit. I still needed to actually study before I gained any significant language ability.

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I was going to say the same thing as @Leebo:

Personally, I don’t feel like I’m learning anything from watching Japanese films with English subs, and I’ve watched a few since I started learning the language. It can be good for solidifying vocab I pick up elsewhere (well, here on WK mainly) and it did help with getting rid of a few “meaning” leeches I had, but that’s about the extent of it.
English subs can even be a bit of a nuisance, if I read a line and try to match it to what I’ve just heard (this seems to happen more often now as my vocab grows)… by the time I’m done reverse-engineering I’ve already missed the next two-three-four lines :rofl:

But methinks this is mainly because the sentence structure is so different, rather than the subs naturally following the spoken language.
Because otherwise I was just like @simias: English audio with Romanian subs did wonders (at a scale) for my English as I was growing up, to the point that I was mostly bored through the English classes in school - there wasn’t anything new beyond the “theory” behind everything I knew already.
(we only started taking English in 5th grade, first was French in 2nd)

Luckily here nowadays only cartoons and some live-action shows for kids are dubbed (in my youth, cartoons on national TV channels were subbed, on Cartoon Network there were no subs or dubs just the original English audio - that was fun!); everything else is subbed.

As to the thread’s “problem” with katakana/loanwords: how would a “solution” look like, in the OP’s view?
Any imported words would still have to be adapted to match Japanese phonetics - ‘cup’ would always end up as ‘kappu’, no matter what script you write it in.
And aside from the purpose of maybe learning some words in a foreign language, I don’t see how having original English/French/Spanish/whatever audio + JP subs instead of a Japanese dub would help in this matter: you hear ‘cup’ and the JP sub shows ‘カップ’ - okay cool, and… ?
:man_shrugging:

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Yeah that’s the same situation in France, all the mainstream stuff is dubbed by default and you have to go out of your way to watch foreign media with subtitles, which only a minority of people do regularly.

Regarding the fact that you and @cezarL don’t feel like you got much from watching Japanese media with subtitles, I wonder if maybe age isn’t a factor. I think it’s pretty well established that your ability to soak up languages peaks very young and then degrades as you got toward adulthood. My dad fed me subtitled English media basically as soon as I was able to read and it continued throughout my teenage years, and anecdotally I really felt like it made a huge difference on the size of my vocabulary and my ability to understand spoken English (whereas I didn’t feel particularly skilled in German for instance).

I also think that a critical factor was that I was also taking the usual English classes at school, so there was a feedback loop between the more structured content I got in textbooks and the reinforcement from listening passively.

I can definitely imagine that purely listening to Japanese without having studied the very basics of the language wouldn’t be quite as beneficial because of the wildly different vocabulary and grammar, as @cezarL points out. But I assume that most Japanese kids are being taught English these days, so I do think that getting non-dubbed media would be beneficial for them to some extent.

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Age probably is a factor, yeah.
I wonder what it might have been like if when I was a kid we’d have had anime in Japanese?
Alas, we got the likes of Sandy Bell and Saber Rider (those are the oldest I can recall, they aired in the early 90s here) with French audio… no idea how that deal came about :laughing:

English being taught in Japan:
Is it a serious thing, I wonder?
Like… mandatory in public primary/middle school like it was here, or only elective?

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I actually don’t know but given how important English is in our world, I would be very surprised if most kids didn’t get some amount of English classes.

Also isn’t “English language tutor” the stereotypical gaijin job for Americans/Brits looking to work in Japan? Surely there must be some demand.

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English has been a mandatory class from young ages for a long time, though it’s gotten ramped up more recently.

In my 6 years of working as an ALT, the hours of English education for elementary schoolers went way up, with it now basically being a full subject for 5th and 6th grade, whereas it was kind of just an extra ungraded thing before that. And now even 1st graders have some amount of mandatory hours.

That’s how it was in Kobe anyway, not sure if other places are different.

I still doubt it will help much, but we’ll see.

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Your last anti-katakana thread wasn’t going the way you’d hoped, so you thought you’d start a new one with more words? Hoping it sounds more academic? :stuck_out_tongue:

So, you’re suggesting… write loanwords in hiragana instead? Remove loanwords altogether?

Actually, you know what’d make Japanese much easier to learn? Just have them all speak English instead.

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It’s also possible for it to be a mandatory school subject and not achieve much. I see a lot of parallels between what I’ve heard of English lessons in the Japanese education system and with Irish language teaching in the Irish system. It turns out to be pretty hard to teach kids fluency in a classroom setting in a language they’re not using outside the classroom and have little external need for. (In fact if anything, the main outcome of Irish language classes in schools here is resentment towards the language)

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I don’t get, what OP wants. :thinking:
As if the majority of native English-speakers would ever pronounce or write foreign words perfect (same goes for every other native speaker of another language - foreign words are prone to be pronounced, written and sometimes used incorrectly from the perspective of the language’s origin. E.g. in my native language, we didn’t say cell phone or mobile phone. We called it “Handy”. Totally wrong use of this word. But it was an official name and everyone knew, and still knows, what’s talked about. :grin:)

English is (“just”) used as the international language for global communication and doesn’t dictate how other countries should handle English words within their own language. So every country does implement English (or any other foreign word) in their own terms and abilities and evolves the own language (for the better or worse) without any thought of some language learners who may or may not learn their language.

(Fun fact: the English word “skosh” is a Japanese loanword (少し) - totally deformed from its origin, but no one cares because it works just fine for both native and non-native English-speakers. :woman_shrugging: :laughing:)

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So, it’s no use to interact with OP because they will likely never check and answer replies?
And I worked so hard on my 2 cents here… :weary:
Well, then I’ll see it as some more English practice, I guess.

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Yeah, I see what you mean - guy’s got twenty-five topics started, but only four replies total.

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I missed this in replying to the other part of the post originally, but this is just wrong.

Katakana have no inherent connection to foreign words. They were simply developed from kanji as one of the syllabary systems. Their role has actually changed in relatively recent history. Until about a hundred years ago, it was typical to use katakana for okurigana.

And katakana are regularly used for words of native origin as well. You would never see the word ヒト in katakana if katakana were merely a pronunciation guide, but that’s the standard way to write it in a scientific passage on humans as a species.

I know you won’t respond, but I hope you check any future topics more thoroughly before you post your articles or whatever here.

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Currently an ALT and it’s very mandatory. The 5th and 6th grade now have grades and tests and class twice a week, the 3rd and 4th grade have mandatory English once a week, but not graded (basically teach them the basics so when the real stuff shows up that they’ll be graded on, they have a chance). I also teach 1st and 2nd grade kids also kindergarten, once a month.

Japan is trying to improve it’s English but unless it changes it’s ways and made it even more of a mandatory subject (They don’t even really teach writing until 4th grade, and even then it’s not writing practice just recognizing Capital letters and lowercase letters and knowing it’s the same thing) A common complaint I hear is that Japan doesn’t teach the pronunciation of English words quicker, and that writing needs to be taught earlier, but then focus on making their own sentences needs to come faster. I agree with the pronunciation bit (Cuz they don’t even teach phonics until past junior high school) but with the current class outlook of anything below 3rd grade only getting a class a month, and not the months of breaks, (making it only 9-10 months out of the year) there is just not enough time to teach them it too. I distinctly remember when I started taking foreign language classes in the states, the biggest part about it was consistency and amount. In college 1st year Japanese and all foreign language classes were 5 credits because they met every single day minus weekends. Heck, I even remember having Spanish classes in the 4th grade and we would have it 3 times a week, along with homework. I think the only time I have ever given a kid homework in Japan started in 5th grade, but even then it was something for them to write in Japanese, not English. That started in 6th grade and it was like once every two months.

I think this is causing more of a gap in understanding more than the カタカナ

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Thanks for the detailed info! :slight_smile:

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Not sure if its just different where you’re at, but in my school they teach romaji in 国語 from grade 3. I imagine its the same for the entire prefecture. Alphabet practice in english also start from 3rd grade (deliberately lining up with them learning it in kokugo)

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