An amusing anecdote I wanted to share. I was sitting in a noisy food court. There were some Chinese students sitting nearby. At one point there was an announcement over the public address system. It was kind of scratchy.

The students came over to my table and asked me (in good English) what the guy on the loudspeakers had said. I, being a native English speaker, had understood every word with no trouble, so I explained what the person said.

I was a bit surprised that, considering their apparent English abilities in talking to me, they couldn't understand the announcement.

The only anecdote that comes to mind for me was when I was in a Chinese language class some years ago and had gotten to know one of the classmates quite well, at least enough to conclude that she was completely fluent in English. I wouldn't have doubted it for a second, even her barely noticeable accent suggested as much. Then we got a sheet of paper that contained a scripted conversation with an English to Chinese translation, and at the top the first line read: How do you do?

This person I assumed was as fluent as can be turned to me and asked: what does this "How do you do?" mean? It was such a simple phrase I never would have expected her to be troubled by it in the least. I told her it just meant how are you, how are you doing, something like that. She almost couldn't believe me because to her it looked like it was supposed to say how do you do xxx?, like a word was missing or something. Yeah, kind of surprising what little things can trip up non-native speakers!

But of course "how do you do?" is grammatically meaningless. How do you do what?

It is one of those expressions that, unless you know it, it is impossible to guess from the grammar and not necessarily easy from the context.

Actually that is one reason that with listening one needs to get to a point where one can take impenetrable expressions in one's stride and not be thrown by them for the next three sentences, because they will occur however much one studies.

And of course if a native speaker is to hand one should take the opportunity to ask as these Chinese people wisely did.

It certainly is the easiest way to become highly proficient in a language.

[Zgarbas]

I don't understand things spoken through megaphones in any language. If it's automated sound systems it depends (subway is ok; most other speakers are not). I always wonder what the little shouting cars and employees at supermarkets are saying =(.

Zgarbas Wrote:I don't understand things spoken through megaphones in any language. If it's automated sound systems it depends (subway is ok; most other speakers are not). I always wonder what the little shouting cars and employees at supermarkets are saying =(.

I know a few people that have a hard time understanding things like that; they also have difficulty understanding the lyrics of songs, even when the vocalist sings clearly (relatively), do you experience this too?

Part of me thinks there might be some kind of connection related to the context the language is spoken in and the ability to understand. In a sense, a kind of reverse of spasmodic dysphonia that affects comprehension. Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comics, suffers/ed? from this. Basically it made it impossible to vocalize anything. In a blog post once, he said he discovered that he could talk normally if he rhymed words though, such as reading a Dr.Seuss book, or if he was standing up and giving a speech/talk.

[Zgarbas]

sholum Wrote:

Zgarbas Wrote:I don't understand things spoken through megaphones in any language. If it's automated sound systems it depends (subway is ok; most other speakers are not). I always wonder what the little shouting cars and employees at supermarkets are saying =(.

I know a few people that have a hard time understanding things like that; they also have difficulty understanding the lyrics of songs, even when the vocalist sings clearly (relatively), do you experience this too?

Yeah, I have songs that i've liked for years but i still couldn't sing the chorus. It depends a lot on the genre though. I also need subtitles for films, speeches, etc., or I can't really follow what's being said.
I get almost perfect scores in hearing tests, aside from one pitch (one doctor told me that it's the pitch for human voices, but i never bothered looking into it)

What I'm curious to know is whether or not Japanese stand-up comedy is funny to non-native speakers who have achieved a native-like fluency of the language? Or even foreign language stand-up comedy in general for people who have achieved fluency in said foreign language.

Because as much as I can understand a person becoming fluent in another language, my own experience and understanding of Japanese is such that, even though I am capable of understanding words and acknowledging that grammar points go here and there, the words are still "foreign" to me, and their phrasing in stand-up comedy seems like it just wouldn't connect like stand-up comedy would in one's own native language.

However, I'm still far from advanced enough in my studies to truly know for sure. But it was just a lingering curiosity I had.

TsugiAshi Wrote:What I'm curious to know is whether or not Japanese stand-up comedy is funny to non-native speakers who have achieved a native-like fluency of the language? Or even foreign language stand-up comedy in general for people who have achieved fluency in said foreign language.

Because as much as I can understand a person becoming fluent in another language, my own experience and understanding of Japanese is such that, even though I am capable of understanding words and acknowledging that grammar points go here and there, the words are still "foreign" to me, and their phrasing in stand-up comedy seems like it just wouldn't connect like stand-up comedy would in one's own native language.

It's certainly different from, say, English comedy.. but I certainly find Japanese comedy to be funny. It's a different sense of humor for the most part. ESPECIALLY stand-up. And I don't like all of it! Just as I don't like all English comedy.

I've laughed so hard I cried while watching Gintama before. Good times.

In my very early days of Japanese learning, when I was ploughing through 借りぐらしのアリエッティ with Japanese subtitles, looking up every second word (an unwise choice for so early, but I didn't know any better), I had a breakthrough moment toward the end when a short speech in Japanese actually made me cry. I was crying at the Japanese words, not any translation of them (even in my own head).

It was the first moment when Japanese felt "non-foreign" to me and I was interacting directly, as it were.

English, though my "native" language, has never really felt like "my" language. So, I cried even more at the realization that I had linguistically "come home". Of course I had not truly come home. But I had caught my first true glimpse of the shining towers of a linguistic home in the far distance. I had had my first true emotional reaction to words that felt like mine.

I have never found English-language comedy very funny. Sometimes I can see why it is supposed to be funny and mostly I can't but in any case it doesn't make me actually laugh. It isn't that I have no sense of humor. I positively cachinnate at my own silly jokes that only I seem to understand.

Around a year ago I actually started laughing at something funny in an anime in Japanese. Since then it has happened fairly often.

I don't suppose my experience is at all typical, and I don't know how I would get on with stand-up comedy. I certainly don't find it funny in English. In Japanese, who knows?

TsugiAshi Wrote:What I'm curious to know is whether or not Japanese stand-up comedy is funny to non-native speakers who have achieved a native-like fluency of the language? Or even foreign language stand-up comedy in general for people who have achieved fluency in said foreign language.

Because as much as I can understand a person becoming fluent in another language, my own experience and understanding of Japanese is such that, even though I am capable of understanding words and acknowledging that grammar points go here and there, the words are still "foreign" to me, and their phrasing in stand-up comedy seems like it just wouldn't connect like stand-up comedy would in one's own native language.

However, I'm still far from advanced enough in my studies to truly know for sure. But it was just a lingering curiosity I had.

I wouldn't consider myself fluent in Japanese, but when I understand the context of a Japanese joke (well, they're usually puns, from what I've seen), I can get a laugh out of it.
I haven't studied humor intensively, but I seem to remember that the entire basis of humor is that you were presented with a mistake that wasn't life-threatening (physical humor especially). If you understand the joke and are still able to find it clever, you'll think it's funny.

I think the problem with appreciating foreign comedy is that, more often than your native comedy, you'll be missing the context or the understanding, or you just won't think the joke was clever (the way I feel about most sitcoms).

In a shorter form: first, you have to get the joke; then you have to think it's funny.

@Zgarbas
That's quite interesting. I asked because, while I've heard such things from other people, I've always had really good hearing (frequency and amplitude), so I find it hard to imagine being able to understand regular speech easily, but not recorded speech; though I do know that a lot of frequencies get cut out during compression or filtering, so maybe it has something to do with those frequencies. The human ear can pick up between about 20Hz and 20kHz, if I remember correctly, and the human voice is between 85Hz and 255Hz (male and female combined range; from 5 seconds of searching). I don't know if that accounts for singing or not.

I know that there are three small bones in the ear which, through resonance, amplify certain frequencies; perhaps a slight malformation or displacement of one of these bones could cause certain frequencies within that spectrum of human voice to be on one side or the other of the peak of the resonance curve. Or perhaps something allows more interference from other frequencies.
It's interesting, but I know almost nothing about it...

Yeah, I like Gintama and visual comedy/slap stick comedy like with One Piece or Dragon Ball is understandably humorous. But I'm mostly talking about comedy that comes strictly from dialogue without anything slapstick or visual, like say a Japanese counterpart of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock.

To me it just seems like trying to appreciate the humor of foreign language stand-up would be somewhat difficult because the phrasing that's part of non-native languages just might not meet up to how one understands their own native language.

I watch some manzai and whatnot, and while I find some of the themes involved funny I want to laugh not because the taller, larger man wearing a bow tie is being constantly yelled at and ridiculed by the smaller, fast-talking guy or simply because other people are laughing, but because I want to appreciate it like a native would, comparably like I do English language comedy.

I want to be able to understand why the tall, large man in small clothes and a bowtie is constantly being shamed and why the smaller guy is just mad as hell at him all the time. It sort of makes me feel bad that the big guy is being slapped around and shamed so much.

I pretty much consistently watch anime to help my listening comprehension enhance. I agree that anime is pretty funny/sad, but a lot of that for me comes from it being with the right anime where there's always something visual or slapstick related, or even the interactions between characters alongside the voice acting making things funny.

Stand up in a foreign language like Japanese, however, essentially seems to be in its own realm in my mind at this stage of my learning.

But there are times where I'll listen to a lot of manzai stand up comedy, particularly with kansai comedians, to try to help boost my listening comprehension to see if I can pick out certain words or grammar particles in the angry, rapid-fire stream of Japanese being spoken and shouted. To my surprise I'm able to pick some stuff out. But now I just need to become better acquainted with vocabulary and Japanese language phrasing over time and see if that will make any difference.

Hopefully with a lot of exposure to the language itself and vocabulary/grammar over time will help with understanding the substance and context and jokes. I mean, I know the dialogue and the stories involved with the stand up have to be funny because I see people laughing at it.

TsugiAshi Wrote:What I'm curious to know is whether or not Japanese stand-up comedy is funny to non-native speakers who have achieved a native-like fluency of the language? Or even foreign language stand-up comedy in general for people who have achieved fluency in said foreign language.

Because as much as I can understand a person becoming fluent in another language, my own experience and understanding of Japanese is such that, even though I am capable of understanding words and acknowledging that grammar points go here and there, the words are still "foreign" to me, and their phrasing in stand-up comedy seems like it just wouldn't connect like stand-up comedy would in one's own native language.

However, I'm still far from advanced enough in my studies to truly know for sure. But it was just a lingering curiosity I had.

For me the cultural differences in appreciating Japanese comedy have been a bigger problem than the language. For me a lot of Japanese comedy is silly but not really funny, even when the language used is 100% familiar to me.

Then again, I'm an American and I even feel the cultural difference with British comedians a lot of the time. I really appreciate stand-ups like Dara O'Briain (Not British--Irish) or Frankie Boyle (Scottish) and some British TV shows, but I admit I appreciate the best of American stand-up more (George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Dana Carvey, Bill Hicks, Patrice O'Neal, Louis CK, Bill Burr). Just for cultural reasons, I assume.

Manzai is.. special. The whole ボケ／ツッコミ relationship is a big part of Osaka culture too so I'm used to it.
I know people even here in Osaka that don't find manzai funny, though.

And a lot of Gintama's humor *is* from dialogue alone. The slapstick is funny too, though.

[Zgarbas]

When i discovered gintama it was amazing, it still is one of my favourite comedies... But many times when i used gintama-like jokes people told me to not make such western-like jokes.
I've had a bit of trouble with japanese people not grasping sarcasm, no matter how outrageous or silly it was (saying that a song in German is japanese, or that one of the blokes in our group wanted to confess to another one... It ended up with a confused japanese man holding their hand, in tears, stating that they never meant to hurt them)

TsugiAshi Wrote:I mean, I know the dialogue and the stories involved with the stand up have to be funny because I see people laughing at it.

I'm just going to go back to my comment about sitcoms: It's a very successful form of television in the US, and almost everyone I know likes them, but I can't stand them (the few laughs I get aren't worth all the forcibly awkward situations, uninspired drama, and bad jokes (which you know were supposed to be jokes because of the laugh track)); it's just personal preference.
If you don't understand what the joke was, then it's lack of understanding; if you just didn't think it was funny, then it is what it is.

I agree though, that it's probably one of those things that you'll only get with exposure. Studying 'how to get jokes' would probably be about as effective as studying super-market layouts with the goal of not being lured by their highly effective design.

It's interesting that the thread topic turned to humor of all things. After I passed N1, I watched comedy shows in English for the first time in four years, and learned that my sense of humor had changed drastically. Shows I used to find funny before, I found dull. I don't know if it was the Japanese immersion, or a case of tastes changing with time, but that was definitely the oddest thing I noticed after my complete English media ban ended. I had to re-figure out what type of English humor I liked, which sort of weirded me out... It took a while, but I generally like Japanese humor (except for pure stand-up, but I've never gotten into that in any language).
The whole sense of humor changing thing made me wonder how much of the things I like are due to my own tastes, and how much is due to culture.

[RawToast]

Zgarbas Wrote:I've had a bit of trouble with japanese people not grasping sarcasm, no matter how outrageous or silly it was (saying that a song in German is japanese, or that one of the blokes in our group wanted to confess to another one... It ended up with a confused japanese man holding their hand, in tears, stating that they never meant to hurt them)

笑 Sorry, I am sure it wasn't funny for you at the time (just very awkward).

I think you need to introduce your friends to British comedies like Faulty Towers. If they can get British sarcasm and self-depreciation then maybe they will get your jokes.

[Zgarbas]

It was hilarious, but I felt bad for him. We never heard from him again for some reason...

I don't really like British humour that much... I mean, I love it on the telly, but IRL it usually just ends up in awkward silence. I prefer more outrageous sarcasm, but without a つっこみ nearby it rarely seems to stick...=( I might also be responsible a rather interesting misunderstanding regarding my country... (that text is taken straight from my Facebook feed...)

Another story: at this camp I was working for, the (US) head teacher joked that he used to be part of 嵐. We then later heard a lot of the girls fawn over them and starting to look up old videos to see which member they were...