Oh, and if you’re thinking “well, I said ‘clips’ so obviously I wasn’t talking about written Japanese,” the same applies to spoken Japanese.
I am an ALT in Japan, and so I get to see teachers teach the same lessons 6 times over the course of a week. I get to see the ways that students respond to those lessons.
I’m always impressed at how many times they will word things slightly differently but still be correct. You’d think in that 6th class I wouldn’t hear any new phrases, but I regularly do.
I don’t think you expanded on what “clips” you were referring to. I’m sure you could share them.
Just to add on: Japanese and European languages are so grammatically, semantically and culturally different that even without any sort of vagueness, much one-to-one translation would be impossible. It’s often necessary to transform Japanese sentences into ideas before turning them into words, since some things aren’t clearly translatable.
The way you mention the lack of pronouns kind of gives me a clue about the source of your problems. Japanese doesn’t seem to be particularly restrictive, but it is VERY different from English, and that doesn’t just mean the writing and vocabulary and grammar. Japanese people just express themselves in a very different way from English speakers, and from most speakers of the major European languages.
Is this perhaps the first language you’ve learned other than English? Even if you’ve studies one of the romance languages, I think Japanese is a lot more different.
I’ve experienced this trap myself. I think of something I’d normally say in English, and I just can’t figure out a way to say the same thing in Japanese, and the reason is because Japanese people just wouldn’t say that. They’d say something else to get the same ideas across, but do it in a totally different way. Until you learn some of that thought process, you’ll probably find it very difficult to express a lot of ideas, or they’ll come out in a very clunky way.
Technically, I started learning spanish (/I did learn spanish for four years, had great grades, too), but the private school I was attending more so [moreso?] fostered my laziness, as compared to a learning environment.
If in doubt, blame it on me, but I finished, and closed, the chapter of the spanish language, for now.
Perhaps it is what you mentioned, yes. Some sleep should help me.
This always irks me in class, when I’m trying to think about how I’d respond to a teacher’s question with something straightforward, but a student says something completely different and they’re just as right. It makes it a lot harder to infer new meanings just from listening. The amount of nuance that can exist in such a simple question/answer is interesting though.
If you learned the guitar in a school band, on a school instrument, got good at it, but then did not buy a guitar and play it for the rest of your life, wouldn’t that be a wasted effort.
(You can argue „He educated himself“, or in this case ~He had fun, lived out his youth, but as you can see, not a fan of that lol)
No, I don’t think so personally. You learnt more than just the skill of playing the guitar. Maybe you learnt how to read sheet music… maybe you learnt how to work as a group in a band. You would most definitely have learnt the skill of perseverance and dedication. Etc etc
I don’t think life is about choosing what is most “valuable” to spend your time on and doing nothing else. And one thing is never so simple that that is the only thing that you learnt while doing it.
Well and good, and in all honesty, I know less than half of these. I’m not denying that other languages are nuanced as well: I’m just pointing out that Japanese is nuanced. As for what exactly I might about listing, it’s a little different from what you mentioned here: most of these are synonyms for ‘and’ at the beginning of a sentence or when starting a new clause, similar to ‘furthermore’ or ‘on top of that’ in English. I meant ‘listing’ in the sense of ‘providing a list of things for a particular purpose’. For example, in English, I can say ‘dogs, cats and pigs’ or ‘dogs, cats and pigs and so on’. In Japanese, the first would be translated using と (犬と猫と豚), while the second would be translated using や (犬や猫や豚), possibly with a など at the end. When making an order at a restaurant, I might want to say「牛丼に味噌汁、お願いします」, which would express that I want my beef don and miso soup to come together as a set. If I were just giving vague examples that I’m not too sure about, I would say stuff like 「さあ、りんごとか、桃とか好きじゃないの？」(‘Well… you don’t like stuff like apples and peaches?’) When you change the particle, you change the nature of the list and the items you’re listing. I don’t think many other languages can do that.
Learning Japanese is like learning the shamisen. You’re already fluent in the guitar, maybe even the ukulele. Is it a waste of time because you can’t really express Wonderwall on the shamisen as well as you can in your fluent instruments? And is playing the shamisen limiting just because it sounds too different? A fluent shamisen player going to guitar would argue the same thing.
I would HIGHLY recommend to at least read the introduction to “Making Sense of Japanese” by Jay Rubin (here). He was a translator for Haruki Murakami and was an inspiration for Cure Dolly’s style of teaching. He delves well into the concept of westerners thinking Japanese is vague and imprecise.
The nonsense that surrounds Japanese would be little
more than a source of mild amusement to me as a teacher
of the language, except that, year after year, I find my job
made more difficult by the myth of Japanese vagueness,
standing as it does as a positive obstruction to the learning
of the language. If students are convinced from the start
that a language is vague, there is little hope they will ever
learn to handle it with precision. If you believe a language
to be vague, it will be, with all the certainty of a self-ful-
filling prophesy.
This article by Cure Dolly about the so-called “lack of pronouns” is also a good read that might clarify some points.
Not originally my point, but honestly, in this case (and in most others), unless you have ideas on how to improve the Japanese language as well as a drive to act on these ideas to get them implemented, you don’t really have the right to criticize the language. Though I can’t find a more precise source, it is generally agreed that most of the language (minus katakana loanwords) was pretty firmly established over a thousand years ago, without large amounts of change. Is it perfect? Of course not. But neither is any other language that exists today, and it seems more than sufficient for daily use for the millions of people in Japan as well as speakers across the world.
Have you tried browsing a Japanese thesaurus? I put a relatively common word that most beginners know, 見える, in and this is what came back. They give several different nuances that could apply, and then a set of words that can express that nuance.
It’s not the language that’s vague, it’s the manner of expression…abstract poetry is vague in any language! Personally I rarely find Japanese to be vague, unless I’ve walked midway into a conversation/don’t understand the words being said anyway.
I assume this is a response to my comment on words? I don’t want to get into it too much here, but there’s a few problems with this:
Increasing the number of words is not the only way of increasing expressivity.
Counting the number of words in a language is really hard. Hard to the point that anyone who claims to be able to is wrong. Partly because in many languages, deciding what is or isn’t a word is also really hard.
There’s a limit to how many words you can learn. At some point having more words can’t increase the range of expression (in a practical sense at least) because other people don’t know the extra words…(I think this is basically why we need grammar - you can increase the range of expression of a limited number of words to cover any possible concept).
Let me get a way with that much hyperbole
but yeah, that’s pretty much what I was getting at.
What is your goal?..you claim not to have a “different reason” beyond it being a hobby, in which case the only metric for whether it’s a good use of your time should be whether you enjoy studying it. And if you have some other goal, the expressivity of the language is probably not that relevant…
In all fairness, I honestly doubt that the original post was meant as a criticism of Japanese. It was an expression of a certain impression, possibly with an undercurrent of frustration.
My impressions of some of Jay Rubin and Cure Dolly’s ideas aside, I’m just as perplexed as he is about the idea that Japanese is ‘vague’. Japanese typically just allows context to weigh heavily on whatever has just been said, and in some cases (especially for the sake of politeness), Japanese people are intentionally vague. It’s got nothing to do with Japanese not being able to be precise: it’s just that context makes the meaning of unfinished sentences and things left unsaid abundantly clear. E.g. ‘Hey, want to go out on Saturday?’ ‘Oh, my family’s having a picnic so…’ For that matter, I hadn’t heard of the idea that Japanese might be vague before today.
