Hi everyone! I’m still a total beginner (waiting for my JLPT N5 results and moving onto Genki 2 in January), but I’ve been reflecting on the long-term benefits of learning this language to keep me motivated— even if I might have failed that tricky grammar section! Aside from the obvious goals, I’ve become obsessed with how Japanese might actually upgrade my way of thinking.
English is not my native language, and looking back, becoming fluent in English felt like a RAM upgrade—it made my thinking faster and more effective. But Japanese feels like a Graphics Card upgrade.
I recently took a quiz on “Visual-Spatial Learning” I found here in the community, and realized I’m a textbook visual learner. I’ve been doing some “visualization exercises” comparing English and Japanese, and I’m curious if other visual thinkers notice this:
Example 1:
English: “I eat an apple.”
Japanese: りんごを食べます (Ringo o tabemasu) In Japanese, the object (Ringo) comes first. My brain “sets the stage” by rendering the apple in high detail before the action even begins. To me, it feels like 2D Disney animation in English but high-resolution 3D Pixar in Japanese.
Example 2:
English: “There is a little blue bird sitting on a branch of a tree.”
Japanese: 木の枝に小さな青い鳥がいます。 (Ki no eda ni chiisana aoi tori ga imasu) In English, I see the bird first, almost floating in space, until the rest of the sentence “catches up” to provide the location. In Japanese, the language forces my brain to build the environment spatially: first the Tree placed in the landscape, then the Branch, and finally the Bird with the detailed texture of its feathers. It builds the 3D scene from the ground up.
My Theory: I wonder if this is why Japan excels so much in design, architecture, and engineering. Is it possible that the very structure of the Japanese language allows for visualizing in much greater detail? To me, the Japanese word order feels more “painterly” and cinematic.
Questions for the community:
If you are a visual/spatial thinker, do you notice a difference in the “resolution” or “depth” of your mental images when using Japanese?
Does the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order change the way you “build” a scene in your head?
Even if you are a mixed thinker or an exclusive verbal thinker, do you feel like Japanese has changed your “spatial” logic?
I’d love to hear if anyone else feels like they are “seeing” more detail now that they are learning Japanese!
I definitely love Japanese’s sounds and imagery, and I can relate to the “graphics update” feeling of learning it. That being said, I don’t think a country’s language has enough explanatory power to provide reasons for cultural or business successes or failures. I’m sure there are lots of non-linguistic reasons at play as well.
I think I might be a visual-kinestetic learner, somehow? It definitely feels like the language is interactive for it to stick. Mainly by using it in messaging friends even if its just sending them single kanji much to their annoyance. Things definitely stick when recalling what particular kanji references the situation at hand.
The feeling of it being a RAM upgrade, I can definitely see it. I come from a Romance language(Spanish) where things are said in longer ways than in English. Its not necessarily a downside as theres a lot of room for nuance where English can often miss out on it, not that it can’t have it, but rather that its a direct language. And its actually a very beautiful and expressive language. The direct linage to the roman empire will always be a notable aspect.
Maybe its this way because I am so green, but Japanese seems to build up in details. Then some verb happens where its doing something or something happened. I like that context is clearly given when using the は marker where in English and Spanish the context is kind of just there. Yet at the same time a lot of text takes on a particular meaning in contexts that aren’t described by the language.
For me, its not that it renders in higher resolution but that it has a build up process where other languages do not and even though ive studied for a year it still feels somewhat strange to build up the subject and sometimes the build process results in some very unexpected outcomes due to cultural reasons.
It is indeed a bit painterly and cinematic, but my perspective come from vidya games particular Nakamura from Cyberpunk, and to a bigger extent Japanese movies and other cultural output. And their high tech aesthetic. My exposure to Japanese comes mainly from mass media, so I can’t say for sure what the on the ground feeling is, but I can definitely sympathize it with feeling cinematic. I need to find more cool Japanese movies.
Japanese has changed my ways of thinking probably more than I can actually properly determine. Because learning it permanently alters who you are. There is a state change that only others can see. For example, in western cultures we often assume the internal state of others, but Japanese is very respectful towards this and so it has changed my Eng/Spa way of thinking in that assumptions of internal states of others feel incorrect yet its still hard to break such a habit.
It has probably also changed the way I order things in English by increasing the likelihood that the context is all the way at the front of words. And most hilariously it has changed my English at work where the order of words will change to be more JP-like somehow. Much to the confusion of my project manager lol.
I have wondered about some perhaps similar questions, but from a different direction, namely, is there such a thing as the “information density” of a written language?
If fewer glyphs are required to convey a specific message in one language vs. another, is one more efficient than the other?
But it gets complicated quickly - I posed the question in terms of ‘language’, but that’s a bit inapt, since the same information might be rendered within the same language in either mostly graphical kanji (plus a few kana) or completely in kana.
Also, what is the ‘overhead’ in going from graphical representation to meaning, vs. going from a phonetic representation to meaning? Is there possibly an intermediate internal ‘voicing’ step when going from graphical to meaning, or does the graphical representation somehow short-circuit that step and go directly to meaning?
And, if so, is the meaning that is the end result actually identical for both methods, or are there nuances and possible ambiguities with one method vs. the other?
Maybe such questions could be investigated by probing the mind via suitable instrumentation (and maybe some researchers have already gone down that path). It may be similar to sensory interpretation - is the color ‘green’ that I see the same as the color ‘green’ that you see, for example.
Perhaps a useful analogy might be to music, where a composition can build up some ‘tension’, and then to wrap it up and resolve the tension at the end with a musical phrase.
That’s how a lot of Japanese sentences seem to be structured - overload the information at the front end, leading to a tension between many possible actual meanings that may be conveyed to the listener or reader, and it’s only when the speaker or writer reaches the end that the actual intended meaning is revealed and the tension that was built up at the beginning is released in a flood of understanding.
It is also perhaps modulated by the concept of “vagueness”, which seems to be an evolutionary trait within the Japanese language that had the side benefit of allowing the speaker to keep their head attached to their body, by not being too precise in conveying the intended meaning to a listener who may be equipped with a sharp katana.
And if you want to dive deeper into the way the language could shape cognition, I suggest reading on Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (and watch Arrival! I love that movie)
i know this whole “sensory learning type” thing is “debunked” but the theory had been made for a reason. engaging different senses while learning anchors and connects the new input to the already existing network, just like mnemonics do. and some people do have preferences for one learning style or the other. the biggest problem with that theory was just, that it was hugely exaggerated and made it into pop science where it was twisted beyond recognition.
some DO thrive on visual learning methods. it just doesnt make sense for everybody to focus on those 4 (or however much it was) categories only, when there are like a hundred more learning styles out there.
so this is a small reminder: visual-spatial learners are a thing, it’s just not very common. and it always pays off to take the time to evaluate your own learning style.
I respectfully disagree. What most people (and experimental participants) self-report as learning styles are actually benefits of multimodal context for procedural knowledge in my experience. If you add more modalities, the memory trace would be even stronger - for example, if someone would hit you every time you make a mistake, it would be an additional emotional modality, that could strengthen the memory trace (but the amount of hitting and resulting pain should be obviously optimal, so it wouldn’t disrupt the memory encoding).
The original thread starter doesn’t seem to be about “learning styles” anyway and more about where you are on the aphantasia through to “full vivid internal mental visualisation” spectrum.
(Personally I don’t have any imagery building up in my mind when I read in either English or Japanese – I just read, voicing it inside my head, and understand the meaning…)
You many find the study referenced in this short article of interest. Although this is specific to spoken language in terms of density and rate of information transmission.
Some interesting points in that article - but it also included some inapt statements, such as:
Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.
That claim falls apart when you consider that Morse code can be sent and received at a wide range of speeds - so it makes absolutely no sense to use it as a benchmark (at least absent some further constraint).
Not sure whether the error originated within the underlying study or in the writing of the article…
There’s also a huge difference between 19th century and 20th century (or newer) morse, even just within human audio comprehension. 19th century sounders (the audio output devices) make big clacking noises when a dot/dash starts and again while it ends, rather than digital systems playing a tone, so I’d imagine (even if I don’t have stats myself) that listening comprehension got much easier with the introduction of sound synthesis.
Additionally, at some point telegraph key design switched from binary keyswitches (they’re open or closed, and you press it down for a longer period of time to create a dash) to three-pole switches (push it one way for a dot, the other for a dash) that made it much easier to make sounds much more quickly (and also massively reduced carpal tunnel by shifting the movement from vertical to horizontal). So I’d also imagine “average professional human morse code speed” is also something that was somewhat variable over time.
None of which is particularly relevant to the discussion at hand, but I’m enjoying this thread as “let’s keep the chain going of interesting facts about how humans communicate”
I’ve long had a theory that the language drives the attention to detail so (generally speaking) prevalent in Japanese culture. When you spend every day from a very young age differentiating between kanji like 星 and 皇, 猫 and 描く, 林 and 材, to name only a handful of some of the easier examples, and not to mention stroke order, stroke type, etc., I think people naturally become more attentive to little details in all areas of life that native speakers of alphabet based languages may be more prone to brushing off, or even missing entirely.
Obviously, there’s so much that changes person to person. I’m speaking in a very broad sense.
Well for English at least, there are a ton of people who natively speak English. While the anglosphere has similar cultures, there are some key differences. Even within Japan, there are regional cultural differences as well. Obviously these within language differences are much smaller than the between languages ones, but it’s not nothing.
My point is mostly people aren’t monoliths, language use is not a monolith, and culture is not a monolith.
I’m curious as to how you reached this perspective. From my experience in Japan, there is more assumption about other people’s intentions and states of mind. I feel that English is a very explicit in comparison, since it is a low-context language and therefore requires more explicit communication. Meanwhile, Japanese is high-context, so there are a lot of assumptions that are necessary in order to understand a sentence in many cases. A lot of times this just has to do with determining subjects, but I feel that I also see this in effect in the way people talk about each other and label people that they don’t know. I feel like there are much more unspoken understandings and conclusions in Japan. Not to say this is Japanese-exclusive in any way. But one of my greatest struggles in Japan is learning how to read the unspoken implications/assumptions in people’s words. America also has them, and I’m born into that culture, but I do genuinely feel that I have more freedom to not understand things and ask questions than in Japan. I feel less need to make assumptions about what people mean. But I’ll try to be more deliberate about noticing it.
I think he’s probably referring to grammatically how they tend to use そう and what not where we wouldn’t in English. E.g 嬉しそうな顔してる
Grammatically I remember it being explained to me this way as well. However, after studying for 10000+ hours and living in Japan for half a decade now I can say I 100% agree with you that in reality they assume the internal state of others far more than Americans on average. But, this is a byproduct of the fact that they just tend to think more about other humans feelings in the first place. I’m making generalizations, of course, but they also are probably better at it so long as the 相手 in question is another Japanese person.
From a language perspective yes they do tend to be less direct about other people’s internal state, but Japanese is also less direct in general. Lack of directness in the language doesnt necessarily mean lack of directness in what’s communicated so long as both speakers are proficient in the language. That’s just an issue of you calibrating yourself to the language/cultural norms though
Learning styles are now 