Japanese Question Thread: 日本語に関する質疑応答

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Japanese Question Thread: 日本語に関する質疑応答

Post by Ghoster »

Konnichiwa!
I started to slowly get into Asian languages. My first shot was Chinese (I've been bursting through it for the last half year and in two months I hope to give a speech in it), so I got pretty familiar with the hanzi (although I've been doing them in simplified version only, I can recognize some traditional ones just by pure attentivness) and my next step will be Japanese, so in June I'll be doing simultaneous Chinese and Japanese. My main focus will still be on Chinese as I decided to get in it as far as possible, but I'll try to spend fair bit of my time on Japanese and I give myself a maximum span of a year to be able to hold a decent conversation in Japanese (it took me about five to six months in Chinese, so I think one year for Japanese is quite doable). I had studied hiragana and katakana before, although as of now my reading abilities decreased a lot, so I'll probably have to relearn that.
Now, question time. Do any of you have any advice for me what should I concentrate on, where should I start, maybe even recommend me some websites/YT channels?
I think phonetics will be no problem (especially after Chinese), but different readings of kanji and grammar for sure. My native tongue is Polish so cases seem rather fine, although I guess verbs will cause me some trouble. Is there anything else I should be aware of?
How common are the simplified Japanese characters compared to Chinese? I originally planned to learn the simplified version for Chinese and traditional for Japanese, but I think I'll end up learning all three/four sets (traditional ones in both readings, Chinese and Japanese). Any tips?
Arigatou!
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by clawgrip »

I don't know any good websites or anything, sorry. Things that can be tricky for learners of Japanese include politeness distinctions and the extreme head-final directionality of the language, which for me was a major hurdle early on in my studies, because nearly everything is essentially backwards to English.

As perhaps you know, Japanese simplified characters are simplified differently, and the simplifications are not as extensive or generally as extreme as Chinese simplifications (cf. 廣広广, 傳伝传, 歸帰归 讀読读), and sometimes the differences are quite minor or even identical (cf. 壓圧压, 單単单, 國国国), but outside of certain names, old prewar things, or things done in a deliberately old-fashioned style, Japanese simplified characters are ubiquitous. The strange thing though, is that only a common set of characters were simplified, so relatively rare characters fell outside of the simplification umbrella and thus retain their traditional forms (cf. 剣 険 験 but 瞼, 竜 篭 滝 but 襲).

How best to tackle this, though, I don't know.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by Lao Kou »

Ghoster wrote: 19 Mar 2018 20:15I originally planned to learn the simplified version for Chinese and traditional for Japanese, but I think I'll end up learning all three/four sets (traditional ones in both readings, Chinese and Japanese).
If the prospect of that doesn't depress you to utter distraction, I think this is the right mindset to approach this with. Mind, it depends how far into it you want to go, but as a Sino-Japanophile, I personally find it useful to just keep all the options open.

Quick tips? Like Clawgrip, I don't know of any (which isn't to say they may not be out there, just that I, too, don't know where to steer you). The good news is that, at least for me, after a year or two of intense heavy lifting of character studying (interrupted/interspersed in my early collegiate years by/with a lot of Wang Chunging), there comes a point where it starts to get cumulative.

Case in point: two years ago, I think it was, the character 隅 was on a building development billboard of my school. Now both the native-speaker boyfriend and I had a vague handle on the meaning from context (he more than I, because it had a 成语ish feel, but no one was sure), but neither he nor I were sure of how to read it (and if the native speaker doesn't know, it often indicates the character isn't on Your Hit Parade -- though frankly, he's not very good with local flora and fauna vocab, either, but I digress). I went with "gu"; he just wimped out. Anyone who knows the Kou knows I went straight to the dictionaries upon arrival back home. Oh look, it's "ggu" in Taiwanese, and I lived in Taiwan before. And oh look (as I found out today), the onyomi is "guu". Question is: an educated guess by analogy with something else, I know not what? I encountered it somewhere, forgot about it, and it resurfaced (and there are plenty of those -- I've pulled that rabbit out of a hat to marvel the natives from time to time; e.g 僊).

The reason I mention this is that it popped up today on a Japan travelogue program. There's a place called 大隅大川原 (oosumioogawara). So I can just glom the kunyomi "sumi" onto this. Even if I don't remember this immediately by June, it will still be easily retrievable. If you loves your hanzi/kanji, just learn 'em by hook or by crook -- the rewards are well worth it.

(For those of you playing at home, it's "yú" in Mandarin, which, having been quasi-learned two years ago, I was able to dredge from the gray matter without too much effort. And frankly, I think anybody using characters, Chinese, Japanese, or foreign, has some of the cerebral murkiness -- more about how much visual reinforcement you get. But please do come play!)

(Too, I Wang Chunged while typing some of this, which only proves that Wang Chunging is still fun -- though I date myself. Then I shook my groove thing, thanks to a Lambuzhao entry a while back)
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by Ghoster »

clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49Things that can be tricky for learners of Japanese include politeness distinctions...
I suspect that to be the most difficult part actually, because none of the languages I attempted to learn had any kind of advanced honorifics. Do you have any specific tips about this one?
clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49...the extreme head-final directionality of the language, which for me was a major hurdle early on in my studies, because nearly everything is essentially backwards to English.
But this I suspect to not be such a hard problem actually. My first language with any problems about the word order was Dutch (very similar to German in this sense), so that wasn't that big of a challenge, but tackling on Chinese was quite hard to get used to (a lot of it consists of left-branching as well as some circum-positions), so I really not suspect to see in Japanese much more harder of a structure challenge than Chinese already was. More of left-branching seems doable and from the example sentences that I've seen (because, to be honest, I already started to learn some words as my Chinese talk was declined haha) it looks actually quite logical. I don't know, far-west languages are weird, but somehow make logic to my brain.
clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49As perhaps you know, Japanese simplified characters are simplified differently, and the simplifications are not as extensive or generally as extreme as Chinese simplifications (cf. 廣広广, 傳伝传, 歸帰归 讀読读), and sometimes the differences are quite minor or even identical (cf. 壓圧压, 單単单, 國国国), but outside of certain names, old prewar things, or things done in a deliberately old-fashioned style, Japanese simplified characters are ubiquitous. The strange thing though, is that only a common set of characters were simplified, so relatively rare characters fell outside of the simplification umbrella and thus retain their traditional forms (cf. 剣 険 験 but 瞼, 竜 篭 滝 but 襲).
Of these I'm also aware, although I tried to find some answers about simplified Japanese and failed to. How common are they? Because if it comes to Chinese, for the most part I could just skip learning any traditional ones whatsoever, because it seems that most of the country standardized on simplified and I could really postpone traditional ones up until now. How spread out is the usage of Japanese traditional and simplified characters? I even heard that they can mix them up in one sentence. Care to elaborate on that a little bit more?
Lao Kou wrote: 25 Mar 2018 15:44If the prospect of that doesn't depress you to utter distraction, I think this is the right mindset to approach this with. Mind, it depends how far into it you want to go, but as a Sino-Japanophile, I personally find it useful to just keep all the options open. [...] The good news is that, at least for me, after a year or two of intense heavy lifting of character studying (interrupted/interspersed in my early collegiate years by/with a lot of Wang Chunging), there comes a point where it starts to get cumulative.
Well, if someone said to me that I would be out to learn thousands and thousands characters in the next years, I would call them crazy, but for the past seven months I have done a great deal of mental push-ups and got myself to a level when I roughly know 1600 Chinese simplified characters (probably forgot some, but my reading abilities are still getting better and I'm trying to keep my character-frenzy every single day). Also right now it's way, way faster than it was seven months ago when I learned my first character (是), so it really seems doable now. I've already seen most part of the radicals and "got how the system works", so the main struggle with kanji will be the readings (it's actually really hard as I started to learn vocabulary by learning words with their respective kanjis and it's fascinating what kind of characters did the Japanese choose from the vast pile of Chinese ones to express their thoughts, but it's also like coming back to the first days of Chinese when remembering a pronunciation of anything was a deadly struggle. I admit that Japanese might cause me if not more, than at least comparable amount of problems if it comes to reading abilities (although hiragana was very okay - I'm still resistful to katakana, but eventually I'll have to do this one as well haha). The good thing is, it actually seems to me that Japanese has lots and lots of Chinese and English borrowings, so it might be a very helpful thing, since Chinese was difficult on so many different levels (complete lack of cognates, tones, their weird very-not-aspirated consonants, weird sentence structure, hanzi, insanely difficult process of listening abilities, the sheer difficulty with unability to simply translate a sentence into it without sounding weird to a native ear).
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by GrandPiano »

Ghoster wrote: 25 Mar 2018 19:51
clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49As perhaps you know, Japanese simplified characters are simplified differently, and the simplifications are not as extensive or generally as extreme as Chinese simplifications (cf. 廣広广, 傳伝传, 歸帰归 讀読读), and sometimes the differences are quite minor or even identical (cf. 壓圧压, 單単单, 國国国), but outside of certain names, old prewar things, or things done in a deliberately old-fashioned style, Japanese simplified characters are ubiquitous. The strange thing though, is that only a common set of characters were simplified, so relatively rare characters fell outside of the simplification umbrella and thus retain their traditional forms (cf. 剣 険 験 but 瞼, 竜 篭 滝 but 襲).
Of these I'm also aware, although I tried to find some answers about simplified Japanese and failed to. How common are they? Because if it comes to Chinese, for the most part I could just skip learning any traditional ones whatsoever, because it seems that most of the country standardized on simplified and I could really postpone traditional ones up until now. How spread out is the usage of Japanese traditional and simplified characters? I even heard that they can mix them up in one sentence. Care to elaborate on that a little bit more?
The simplified Japanese characters are the current standard and the ones in common use. Traditional characters (which are for the most part the same as traditional Chinese characters) aren't used too much nowadays except sometimes in names, and most resources will either only give the simplified form or list the traditional form as a variant.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by Lao Kou »

GrandPiano wrote: 26 Mar 2018 02:38
Ghoster wrote: 25 Mar 2018 19:51
clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49As perhaps you know, Japanese simplified characters are simplified differently, and the simplifications are not as extensive or generally as extreme as Chinese simplifications (cf. 廣広广, 傳伝传, 歸帰归 讀読读), and sometimes the differences are quite minor or even identical (cf. 壓圧压, 單単单, 國国国), but outside of certain names, old prewar things, or things done in a deliberately old-fashioned style, Japanese simplified characters are ubiquitous. The strange thing though, is that only a common set of characters were simplified, so relatively rare characters fell outside of the simplification umbrella and thus retain their traditional forms (cf. 剣 険 験 but 瞼, 竜 篭 滝 but 襲).
Of these I'm also aware, although I tried to find some answers about simplified Japanese and failed to. How common are they? Because if it comes to Chinese, for the most part I could just skip learning any traditional ones whatsoever, because it seems that most of the country standardized on simplified and I could really postpone traditional ones up until now. How spread out is the usage of Japanese traditional and simplified characters? I even heard that they can mix them up in one sentence. Care to elaborate on that a little bit more?
The simplified Japanese characters are the current standard and the ones in common use. Traditional characters (which are for the most part the same as traditional Chinese characters) aren't used too much nowadays except sometimes in names, and most resources will either only give the simplified form or list the traditional form as a variant.
Yeah, with regard to Japanese, I really wouldn't get hung up on a simplified/traditional distinction (you've asked how common they are -- as GrandPiano points out, they're standard). If you find a pre-war Japanese book in a used book store, fine. If there are still people weirded out by "traditional" characters in post-war renovations, then they'll also swoon at ゐ and ゑ. For my money, what you see is what you get in Japan.

The simplified/traditional distinction has political considerations for Chinese.
Ghoster wrote:Because if it comes to Chinese, for the most part I could just skip learning any traditional ones whatsoever, because it seems that most of the country standardized on simplified and I could really postpone traditional ones up until now.
In terms of accessing 1.4 billion people ("most of the country"?), simplified is the better option. But I personally wouldn't "skip" or "postpone" anything.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by All4Ɇn »

Ghoster wrote: 25 Mar 2018 19:51
clawgrip wrote: 25 Mar 2018 08:49Things that can be tricky for learners of Japanese include politeness distinctions...
I suspect that to be the most difficult part actually, because none of the languages I attempted to learn had any kind of advanced honorifics. Do you have any specific tips about this one?
As someone learning Japanese, the best advice I can think of when it comes to this is to find/make a friend who speaks Japanese. It really does help a lot when it comes to getting the cultural nuances with politeness.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

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Ghoster wrote: 25 Mar 2018 19:51Of these I'm also aware, although I tried to find some answers about simplified Japanese and failed to. How common are they? Because if it comes to Chinese, for the most part I could just skip learning any traditional ones whatsoever, because it seems that most of the country standardized on simplified and I could really postpone traditional ones up until now. How spread out is the usage of Japanese traditional and simplified characters? I even heard that they can mix them up in one sentence. Care to elaborate on that a little bit more?
I think you're trying to place a uniquely Chinese problem in the context of Japan, where it doesn't fit. You have Hong Kong and Taiwan and so forth where traditional characters are standard, and then Mainland China where simplified characters are standard. Essentially, there are two competing modern standards of writing, and the learner much choose which standard to learn based on their specific personal situation and the specific Chinese language they are studying.

Japan, on the other hand, is a single country with a single educational system governed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The characters to be learned in school are completely predetermined, no matter where someone may live in the country, so everyone learns the same 80 characters in grade 1, the same 160 characters in grade 2, the same 200 characters in grade 3, etc. etc. Japanese people don't generally make a conscious distinction between traditional and simplified, that is, as two separate systems...it's more like a distinction between normal characters vs. hard/confusing/old-fashioned/alternate versions that sometimes show up in names (as was already mentioned). Just learn whatever characters turn up in educational materials and you'll be fine.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by Ghoster »

clawgrip wrote: 26 Mar 2018 14:52I think you're trying to place a uniquely Chinese problem in the context of Japan, where it doesn't fit. You have Hong Kong and Taiwan and so forth where traditional characters are standard, and then Mainland China where simplified characters are standard. Essentially, there are two competing modern standards of writing, and the learner much choose which standard to learn based on their specific personal situation and the specific Chinese language they are studying.

Japan, on the other hand, is a single country with a single educational system governed by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The characters to be learned in school are completely predetermined, no matter where someone may live in the country, so everyone learns the same 80 characters in grade 1, the same 160 characters in grade 2, the same 200 characters in grade 3, etc. etc. Japanese people don't generally make a conscious distinction between traditional and simplified, that is, as two separate systems...it's more like a distinction between normal characters vs. hard/confusing/old-fashioned/alternate versions that sometimes show up in names (as was already mentioned). Just learn whatever characters turn up in educational materials and you'll be fine.
That clarifies everything, thank you. So it seems like I won't actually have to do as much work as I thought I would, that's very motivating.
Also I started some very basic Japanese lessons through Chinese and it already looks like Japanese on itself seems rather fine in comparison to advanced Chinese that I read the lessons' descriptions in. It's definitely much much easier to read that Chinese was in the beginning couple of months. It feels like after Chinese nothing will be quite as hard.

So, thank you everyone for your answers, it really shed some light on what kind of an approach I should begin it with.
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

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Ghoster wrote: 26 Mar 2018 23:14 So, thank you everyone for your answers, it really shed some light on what kind of an approach I should begin it with.
話してから3ヶ月が経ちました。日本語の勉強はどうですか?進んでいますか?
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Re: 日本語で人工言語と世界を…

Post by Ghoster »

じつわ私の勉強はとても薄ら。時間がない。
でも私は日本語が簡単の言語ですと思う。

Spoiler:
其实什么别的句子还不会写下,认真得学了日语大概两个星期,不太多。但平假名和片假名已认识。我基本上大多数时间在学汉字而基本的文法。
其實什麼別的句子還不會寫下,認真得學了日語大概兩個星期,不太多。但平假名和片假名已認識。我基本上大多數時間在學漢字而基本的文法。
So yeah, until the end of the summer I won't have that much time to learn it (unlike I predicted...), but the cloud of mystery disappeared in large part and I can feel progressing in Japanese. Compared to initial struggle with Chinese it seems so much easier (mainly because lots and lots of cognates with English and Chinese, the characters that I'm already familiar with from Chinese and, of course, phonetical scripts. Grammar seems okay, although it'll probably crush me down the road.
でも私は本当日本語が大好き、この言語は凄いよね。面白いと美しい。
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