How do you explain Japanese to people?

A quick Google search says that Cursive is, in fact, required to be taught in 21 US states.

When I was at school in Germany (late 90es), the expectation was that cursive would be the script we did all our handwriting in. Which makes it quite different from Japanese calligraphy. (The equivalent of Japanese calligraphy is English calligraphy.)

2 Likes

Yeah, I never learned cursive, and, as a result, I have work to read it. And I can write only about half of the alphabet in cursive, so I don’t really count it as a script I know.

My argument is that cursive is not a necessary thing to know to communicate in the language, whereas all the things I mentioned for Japanese speakers are.

1 Like

Fair point.

We only learn cursive in brazil. I don’t know how to write in the “formal” font, or whatever the name is haha

Well, if you want to read things that are written in cursive, you need to be able to read it. Sure, you can just ignore anything that is written in cursive but if you can only read an arbitrary subset of things that are written in English, I’d say that you are not, in fact, able to “read English”.

I mean, you can communicate in English without knowing any Latin script so that is a wonky criterium either way.

To someone who only knows lowercase letters, that first sentence would be completely incomprehensible as well.

If you wish to read older documents, sure. If you wish to read older Japanese documents you also need to learn many more characters. I can tell you that in the daily life of a native English speaker, you have absolutely no reason to read or write cursive outside of signatures.

Obviously you can communicate in any language without knowledge of the written language, so I don’t know why you would assume that’s what I meant. To clarify, I mean across all mediums of communication, you would need to know how to read and write English characters.

Not that ANY of this matters because even if you were to include cursive script you’d be looking at ~100 characters vs. ~2500.

If you wish to read documents written in cursive today, you also need to be able to read it! And I will not argue with you on whether those exist because they do. That’s just a fact. They may not come up regularly in your life but there are other native speakers of English than you. And statistics say that many of them write in cursive to this day.

This is true. The assertion that learning hiragana and katakana is somehow a giant obstacle is not. The fact remains that kana exist on a very similar level of complexity to Latin script, and if you consider digraphs, trigraphs etc which exist in basically every language that uses the Latin script, kana might very well be the less complex script.

1 Like

Feels like people complaining about kana never learned a language with accents

Whoever decided that à and a should sound the same but have two completly different grammar in PT uses deserves to get kicked in the ass

2 Likes

Ugh, and don’t get me started on the French with their silly accent that has no function other than to serve as a memorial for a letter that died and has long been forgotten.

5 Likes

This is a great way to explain to someone who only wants a general idea of how kanji works in Japanese. Thanks!

1 Like

I’ve tried explaining to some people but the majority of people (particularly native English speakers) aren’t interested in learning foreign languages - or had bad experiences at school - and you can see their eyes start to glaze over!

1 Like

Kids these days. Next you’re going to tell me you didn’t have to learn how to use a typewriter. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

8 Likes

Typewriter… :thinking:…I think I know what that is…:grin:

2 Likes

Can’t say much about the first part of your questions since English is not my mother-tongue. As for the second part my point of view always was from a different angle trying to convince people that getting started with Japanese might be way more easy than they think it will be :slight_smile:

Some anecdote why tls had to "sell" Japanese language learning

I wanted to take Japanese in middle school but since it wasn’t very popular language to learn initially not enough students signed up for the classes. So I literally advertised it to my classmates and others.

  • The “so many difficult kanji” argument: yes, but they also have two syllabic writing systems which allows you to express everything you wish to express. (Yes, it might be horrible to read or arbitrary but still…) You then can learn kanji step by step.
  • Japanese basic grammar is logical. You have a rule and you apply it.

The main idea was to get people started. And I totally agree that Japanese, as other languages as well, gets way more complicated once in a more intermediate or advanced level. But with my sneaky argumentation I convinced five more people to sign up :innocent:

As for the handwriting stuff...

I remember at university one of our senpais offered a class in hentaigana. Took the first lecture and found out that this might not be my style :sweat_smile:

Quick research shows that Tofugu has an article on some Japanese cursive writings in case someone is interested:

Hentaigana: How Japanese Went from Illegible to Legible in 100 Years

I do know @Jonapedia senpai does calligraphy. Not sure if you are into cursive writings as well but maybe you want to elaborate on the subject a little bit more? :slight_smile:

… I can’t read it and I made the choice to find ways around it :innocent:

Yeah, I think the same. But how to use it (properly) is on another page :sweat_smile:

I usually say something like “the grammar is completely different from Western languages”. English speakers are usually willing to go along with the idea that something “from the East” is foreign.

2 Likes

That’s basically what I’d say, too, but it isn’t really much of an explanation.

(But it could possibly steer the conversation to a more focused question than “How do you Japanese” so that is good.)

1 Like

A conversation with my wife yesterday:

Her: So how long have you been learning Japanese?

Me: Almost two years now.

H: Wow; you must be pretty good at it!

M: Not in the slightest. But I can kinda read stuff.

:wink:

14 Likes

So, if you have people who don’t think that Japanese is difficult for native English speakers then you can point them towards language research from the foreign institute that rates the difficulty and time it takes to become proficient in a foreign language. They don’t have to trust you, but hopefully they’re not the type of folks who disregard data and what experts say.

From a linguistic point of view, it’s not the sounds or grammar of the language that make it difficult. Although Japanese has fewer sounds than many other languages which lead to more homophones, the grammatical rules have relatively few exceptions. It’s the writing systems that take more time to learn. A key point here is that this list is specific to native English speakers. When you have a different starting point, such as if your native language is Korean or Mandarin, Japanese could potentially be a much easier language to learn.

12 Likes