Redundancy in the following sentence?

Japanese Language
1

ざっくり日本人の半分ぐらいはニンジャです。

The words ざっくり and ぐらい seem redundant here, don’t they? They mean the same…

2

Are you expecting zero redundancy? Really, truly?

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3

Fair point!

4

If I were you, I’d tread very cautiously when it comes to criticizing ninjas.

Just sayin’…

5

In all seriousness, redundancy plays a role in language.

Japanese “if” sentences often start with もし, even though the actual critical conditional “if” part comes somewhere in the middle. You could remove the もし and the meaning wouldn’t change. But then you’ve removed something that helps the listener grasp the purpose of the sentence quicker.

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6

Interesting observation - especially since so many Japanese sentences seem to be structured so that you can’t figure out what it’s trying to say until you get all the way to the end… and with my poor short-term memory, often by the time I get there I’ve forgotten much of what came earlier…

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7

There’s a bit in Rubin’s Making Sense of Japanese where he discusses this, with some other examples:

  • まるで signalling a “looks like/as if” comparison with みたい, よう, etc
  • ただ signalling a phrase ending with だけ
  • たとえ signalling an upcoming ~ても “even if”

and others. He reckons they’re more common in written language (where the clause between the leading adverb and the grammar structure it is foreshadowing is likely to be longer).

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8

I know that it’s possible to use ただ without だけ (and I think I hear it without it more). Does that happen for まるで too? Can’t seem to think I’ve heard it without みたい or よう, but could just be because I haven’t heard it a ton.

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