I once saw a Japanese person post that if you can’t think of a word in Japanese and instead just say the English word in a really racist Japanese accent, then you’ve got about a 50% chance of being right
The worst part is you have to do the accent. You can’t say すみません、hamburger をお願いします, you will watch them say back in their heads to figure out wtf you just said.
I started learning Japanese and it quickly became clear where that accent comes from. This comment is about the mechanics, as I understand them, so skip if you dgaf.
Most of their consonant sounds are paired with a vowel sound that follows, eg: ta (tah), te (teh), ti (tee), to (toe), tu (too), though they aren’t always audibly pronounced (eg, in Naruto, Sasuke is the spelling, but it’s pronounced like Saskeh). That’s where the “su” sound sometimes replacing an “s” sound at the end of words comes from, or “ru” replacing an “r” sound. It’s correct with and without audibly pronouncing the “u”, so Japanese speakers might add or omit it based on preference.
They also don’t have all of the consonant sounds we do. Most notable is their lack of an “R” or “L” sound, but they do have a sound that is like a mix of the two. Sasuke’s voice actor pronounces “Naruto” with that sound instead of an “R” sound. It’s like an R with a slight roll, not as pronounced as in French, but from making an R sound and briefly touching your tongue to your teeth as if you were making an L sound.
They are also missing the V sound, their closest would be the B sound. Their word for GPS navigator is “Nabi”, for example.
And they have so many loanwords from other languages that they even use a seperate alphabet (katanaga) for them. It’s a one-to-one translation from their other alphabet (hiragana). Though even two alphabets wasn’t enough and there’s kanji on top of that, which is another set of over a thousand symbols that help disambiguate their many words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently (basically which syllable the rise in pitch changes to a drop in pitch).
Also, their sentence structure is very different. Like a typical english sentence might go: Subject verb object. Jaoanese sentences are more like: Subject object verb, though, like English, their grammar allows for many variations, and also omissions. Like they can drop the subject entirely from the sentence. Like I could introduce myself as “Buddahriffic desu”, but I could introduce you as “SaraTonin desu”. A direct translation would be “SaraTonin is” or “Buddahriffic is” and you’d need to figure out who the subject is using context.
The end result is that I’m impressed with any Japanese person who can speak english well enough to communicate, let alone if they are fluent, because it’s a lot more than I was able to do with theirs, unless the necessary communication is very basic.
Couple minor nitpicks, just for the sake of knowledge sharing:
ち is usually pronounced “chi” instead of like “tee,” though is often written as “ti” in Kunrei romanization to be consistent with the other characters in its set. Hepburn romanization usually writes it as “chi” however, and is the more widespread (e.g. Sapporo Ichiban beer instead of “Itiban”; the protagonist of Spirited Away is named Chihiro instead of Tihiro, etc.)
It’s also called “katakana,” not “katanaga”. “Kana” is the term for syllabary (the consonant-vowel pair we see) and K is often voiced to G for compound terms. Hiragana means “even syllabary” because it could be written smoothly in a cursive-like format. Katakana is “fragmented syllabary” because its shapes derive more directly from pieces broken off from Chinese characters.
Katakana actually developed before hiragana, with hiragana being considered less refined (it was a “woman’s” script). But hiragana’s ease of writing helped it catch on as the default script over time, with katakana being reserved for words with emphasis. It’s commonly used for loanwords (but not universally so) because it’s similar to how “proper” English italicizes foreign terms that have not been totally subsumed into the vocabulary.
Lol thanks for the reminders with the corrections. Funny thing was I had started with S, then remembered shi, so switched to T. Should have done K instead. T also has tsu instead of tu, so even S would have been more correct than my “correction”.
I think I might have initially had katakana written down but second guessed (though I did initially misspell it again right here, so it was probably another one that started wrong and was corrected wrongly).
And yeah, the origin of hiragana has a story of overcoming oppression. From women not being allowed to use katakana to them just deciding to invent a new alphabet so they could write anyways, and apparently being better at it because that’s now the main alphabet, it’s like the hero’s journey.
SaraTonin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I once saw a Japanese person post that if you can’t think of a word in Japanese and instead just say the English word in a really racist Japanese accent, then you’ve got about a 50% chance of being right
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 2 months ago
The worst part is you have to do the accent. You can’t say すみません、hamburger をお願いします, you will watch them say back in their heads to figure out wtf you just said.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I started learning Japanese and it quickly became clear where that accent comes from. This comment is about the mechanics, as I understand them, so skip if you dgaf.
Most of their consonant sounds are paired with a vowel sound that follows, eg: ta (tah), te (teh), ti (tee), to (toe), tu (too), though they aren’t always audibly pronounced (eg, in Naruto, Sasuke is the spelling, but it’s pronounced like Saskeh). That’s where the “su” sound sometimes replacing an “s” sound at the end of words comes from, or “ru” replacing an “r” sound. It’s correct with and without audibly pronouncing the “u”, so Japanese speakers might add or omit it based on preference.
They also don’t have all of the consonant sounds we do. Most notable is their lack of an “R” or “L” sound, but they do have a sound that is like a mix of the two. Sasuke’s voice actor pronounces “Naruto” with that sound instead of an “R” sound. It’s like an R with a slight roll, not as pronounced as in French, but from making an R sound and briefly touching your tongue to your teeth as if you were making an L sound.
They are also missing the V sound, their closest would be the B sound. Their word for GPS navigator is “Nabi”, for example.
And they have so many loanwords from other languages that they even use a seperate alphabet (katanaga) for them. It’s a one-to-one translation from their other alphabet (hiragana). Though even two alphabets wasn’t enough and there’s kanji on top of that, which is another set of over a thousand symbols that help disambiguate their many words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently (basically which syllable the rise in pitch changes to a drop in pitch).
Also, their sentence structure is very different. Like a typical english sentence might go: Subject verb object. Jaoanese sentences are more like: Subject object verb, though, like English, their grammar allows for many variations, and also omissions. Like they can drop the subject entirely from the sentence. Like I could introduce myself as “Buddahriffic desu”, but I could introduce you as “SaraTonin desu”. A direct translation would be “SaraTonin is” or “Buddahriffic is” and you’d need to figure out who the subject is using context.
The end result is that I’m impressed with any Japanese person who can speak english well enough to communicate, let alone if they are fluent, because it’s a lot more than I was able to do with theirs, unless the necessary communication is very basic.
vateso5074@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Couple minor nitpicks, just for the sake of knowledge sharing:
ち is usually pronounced “chi” instead of like “tee,” though is often written as “ti” in Kunrei romanization to be consistent with the other characters in its set. Hepburn romanization usually writes it as “chi” however, and is the more widespread (e.g. Sapporo Ichiban beer instead of “Itiban”; the protagonist of Spirited Away is named Chihiro instead of Tihiro, etc.)
It’s also called “katakana,” not “katanaga”. “Kana” is the term for syllabary (the consonant-vowel pair we see) and K is often voiced to G for compound terms. Hiragana means “even syllabary” because it could be written smoothly in a cursive-like format. Katakana is “fragmented syllabary” because its shapes derive more directly from pieces broken off from Chinese characters.
Katakana actually developed before hiragana, with hiragana being considered less refined (it was a “woman’s” script). But hiragana’s ease of writing helped it catch on as the default script over time, with katakana being reserved for words with emphasis. It’s commonly used for loanwords (but not universally so) because it’s similar to how “proper” English italicizes foreign terms that have not been totally subsumed into the vocabulary.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Lol thanks for the reminders with the corrections. Funny thing was I had started with S, then remembered shi, so switched to T. Should have done K instead. T also has tsu instead of tu, so even S would have been more correct than my “correction”.
I think I might have initially had katakana written down but second guessed (though I did initially misspell it again right here, so it was probably another one that started wrong and was corrected wrongly).
And yeah, the origin of hiragana has a story of overcoming oppression. From women not being allowed to use katakana to them just deciding to invent a new alphabet so they could write anyways, and apparently being better at it because that’s now the main alphabet, it’s like the hero’s journey.