Also the insane amount of media we "export". And there are several large countries where the primary language is English, US, Canada, UK Ireland, Australia South Africa nee Zealand , And then all of the countrys where English is a second language parts of Europe. Parts of Africa. Almost everywhere you go in the world even in the middle of somewhere like Vietnam or Thailand someone speaks English to an extent.
Some may think it's the "American mindset" being "full of ourselves" it's just that some of us understand that English is a vast language used almost everywhere by educated and non educated people.
Yeah, there good reason for America centrism. Most of the scientific research, block buster movies, AAA games(although we share that one with Japan), and importantly military power. Comes from the United States, we are the primary super power of the 21st century. Sure china is getting close economically and militarily but their still no where close to us with pop-culture media.
To give some credit to speaking lanuages like Japaneese. The syntax of speaking these languages is actually a lot easier than English. Not much in the way of conjegations, just learn the small handful of tones (Japaneese only has 2, I learned Mandarin and that has 5), and it actually pretty easy to get to a point where you are actually speaking and able to hold conversations, at least compaired to English. There is just not as many weird conjegations that changes other words in the sentence depending on the sentence structure, different ways of making a word plural depending on the word, etc.
Writing and reading these languages are a completely different story, however. That is where the kanji/character memorization comes in, and thats like, 95% of the difficulty of the language. This is where the latin lettering system English use is handy.
Yes. There have been suggestions for them to drop Kanji, with evidence that doing so has worked for other languages (take Vietnamese and Korean as examples) and they simply refuse to.
Or for Japanese, they could just use Katakana or Hiragana, and don't give me any of that homophones nonsense--spoken language seems to manage with them just fine.
When I was in college and taking Linguistics, my professor was a Japanophile and Japanese language expert, and she said that while she spoke Japanese, she would never speak or understand it like a native.
I also like watching videos of people who have moved to Japan and their experiences there, and one thing a huge proportion of them talk about is how difficult it is to master Japanese. Some admit they’ve lived there for years and still only have a “working” knowledge of it.
Learning any language is difficult, but one benefit of English is its RELATIVE simplicity. The spelling is absolutely atrocious, but the speaking language is far less complex: There are only two present-tense verb inflections, as opposed to six or more; it does not possess variations in pronouns and grammar depending on rank; objects do not possess gender, outside of popular jargon, such as referring to ships as “she”.
More like (for Japanese): we have three different writing systems, two of which are alphasyllabaries and which both use the same sounds, but different characters for the exact same sounds (hiragana and katakana) and one of which is pictographic and which has many characters which could stand for multiple different words, so context is just as important as memorizing the thousands of characters (kanji). We will use all three of these systems at the same time; hiragana for native words, katakana for foreign loanwords, and throw kanji willy-nilly into the mix in no apparent order and for no apparent reason.
Speaking Japanese isn't horrendously difficult (although the honorific system and the tonal side of things are tricky). But learning to read and write it is an absolute nightmare.
Don't forget their counting system, which changes dependings on what you're counting, if I remember correctly, based roughly on the shape of the item you're counting.
Whereas in English, if you have two rocks and two crayons, you have two rocks and two crayons. In Japanese, they have completely separate words for the two used to count the rocks and the two used to the count the crayons.
Lmao this. Add to that that the meaning and inflection of those sounds changes depending on the region. An “eeh” in Tokyo is gonna be different than an “eeeeeehhh?” in Osaka, and it’s gonna sound even more different depending on if it’s a male or female speaker.
And that’s not even getting into the onomatopoeia that you would never know about learning just business or self-taught Japanese, all that shit comes from common speaking with peers. Which also brings up that you only use certain words when you’re speaking to an older person - at least the pronunciation is pretty easy to get down, it’s all the unspoken cultural rules and idioms and such that bogs the learning process down lol
Sure, but we don't have a pictograph system with multiple readings depending on context (Japanese), and we don't have a system of three gendered articles that are vital to understanding what's been said (German), or an extensive system of different word endings that indicate what they're each doing in the sentence (Latin).
japanese : we have 3,000+ kanji that make up our modern spoken and written tongue, you better memorize it and if you don't, we will call you stupid
There was is a Japanese advertisement and the plot to it is a Japanese company joining an American corpo. One of the workers laments that it's too late for him to learn English and his coworker says: "Man, you're not even super fluent in Japanese."
one to write Japanese words, one to write foreign loan words, and one to confuse and anger foreigners.
Sidenote: The one to confuse foreigners is actually three separate writing systems. Which is why signs in Japan say: "Sibuya" instead of Shibuya despite English mainly knowing it as Shibuya. Because Shibuya is the Romaji version of the word and phonetically tells English speakers how to pronounce the word, but Sibuya is (or at least was) the official government Anglicization of the word despite Shibuya being the more popular and well known version of the location.
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u/RueUchiha IDAHO 🥔⛰️ 2d ago
If Japaneese was the international buisness language, I am sure we all would know Japaneese too.