I never liked the term 'pet peeve' either. It carries a connotation of being irrationally irked at insignificant things. Perhaps because I never liked people correcting things other people say while adding, "This is a pet peeve of mine." Maybe that means pet peeves are my pet peeve.

I'm not sure what you mean with #1. Like if someone typed in 英語 but randomly inserted 日本語 for no apparent 理由？ That's kind of 読み難いと思う。 Does anyone actually do that though? Either I haven't seen it much, or else I've seen it enough it doesn't stand out to me anymore.

I noticed Japanese people would randomly do that with English even though it actually made it harder to understand most of the time.

It's smart to learn -masu form first simply because you will use common form so frickin much, there's no way you're not going to get good at it anyway. -masu form is used way less, but when the situation comes up, you can't claim "um yeah I just know casual form, sorry for being rude". If you started with -masu form, you won't have a problem communicating in it, the same isn't true if you start with casual, there's less motivation for getting good at it.

QuackingShoe Wrote:

theasianpleaser Wrote:But then throwing in past tense verbs and adjectives as "extra" information or "not relevant" to the main point of the story still gives me a headache sometimes.

Isn't that the other way around?

Oops. My bad. Yeah, the present tense is circumstantial information when describing past events.

Now that I've thought about it some more... I notice this mostly when reading manga so it's not that big of a deal, but it's still annoying. Why are really easy common words written in kana, but more difficult words written in kanji?

I was reading something a long time ago where わたし was always in kana. It had neko as ネコ most of the time, ねこ, the rest of the time, but never written as 猫. But then it would have 桂 without even adding furigana, yet other more common words had furigana.

Speaking of furigana, it seems like it's never useful. Any time that I read something that doesn't have full furigana on everything, the words that have furigana were words I knew anyway.

alyks Wrote:What's ridiculous is when I run into loanwords where I don't even know what the original English word is.

Because it turns out to be Portuguese, German, or French?

My pet peeves:

1) The lack of a neutral "I" word that can be used in a casual context, particulary for men. I don't think of myself as boyish nor particularly masculine and feel that both 僕 and 俺 are unfitting. I had issues with my ex since I chose to use 俺 as I felt it was the most fitting but it irked her since she thought it didn't fit me. I also hate the feeling of saying something like 俺はそう思う and feeling this tinge of male authority being conveyed.

2) I don't like the euphemistic apologetic language. The prime example is 申し訳ない which literally translates to "I have no excuse", yet is almost always used when people have really good excuses. EG I heard a guy use it on the train I was on when it stopped due to some issue up ahead and everyone had to change trains. He explained that he would be late and had no excuse. But really, he had a damn good excuse!

Alright - this doesn't really qualify as a pet peeve - more like a thorn on my side...

What has been driving me crazy lately are adverbs 副詞
Lately, I've been so focused on grammar and vocabulary that my mind has had an automatic filter to ignore all adverbs.

Look at this list and tell me how many you understand? I've seen a couple before, but I can't say I really understand any of them, without studying:

めったに
ろくに
たいして
さほど
決して
とうてい
一向に
一概に
あながち
まんざら
よもや
なにら

Wish I were doing RTK1 instead... ...someone slap me if I fall asleep trying to learn this.

thermal Wrote:1) The lack of a neutral "I" word that can be used in a casual context, particulary for men. I don't think of myself as boyish nor particularly masculine and feel that both 僕 and 俺 are unfitting. I had issues with my ex since I chose to use 俺 as I felt it was the most fitting but it irked her since she thought it didn't fit me. I also hate the feeling of saying something like 俺はそう思う and feeling this tinge of male authority being conveyed.

私 is both neutral and casual, as long as you say わたし and not わたくし. The only reason not to use it is the same as for every other pronoun: Japanese people don't.

Raichu Wrote:Pet peeves about Japanese? Don't get me started.

(1) The ridiculous writing system. Not only do they have thousands of characters, but most characters have two or more different pronunciations. What on earth were they thinking! They should use romaji and scrap everything else.

(2) All right, given (1) won't happen, can they at least go back to using hiragana in ambiguous situations. When I was a kid learning Japanese at high school, in those days it was actually considered wrong to write あした as 明日. The kanji were reserved for みょうにち. Now they've gone backwards and reintroduced those absurd kanji usages.

(3) Please put spaces between words. Or at least between phrases. I don't know when the space was invented. I know many ancient languages didn't have it. But come on, it's the 21st century!

(6) Inconsistencies between various 自動詞・他動詞 pairs. Like はじめる・はじまる are one common pattern, but あく・あける is another, and おかす・おきる is another, and みる・みえる is another, and so on. I'm sure every language has it's inconsistencies, but it would have been nice if there was a single common pattern.

(5) Minor annoyance... using 卵 for たまご when they already have 玉子. Using 湖 for みずうみ when it should really be 水海. And so on. But every language has that sort of thing.

You know it could be worse. You know how Japanese (and Chinese) can go vertically right to left as well as horizontally left to right? Well ancient Egyptian could go vertically right to left, vertically left to right, horizontally right to left, and horizontally left to right. Not so bad, I hear? Well get this. The way you distinguished left to right from right to left was that they drew the mirror images of each character. Like if you wrote "p" when writing left to right, but "q" when writing right to left. Now imagine if Japanese was like that...

I semi-agree with #1. Many other Asian languages, Chinese included, are simpler just based on only 1 reading per character. Japanese remains difficult to a certain extend for almost everyone. That's why the end up with game shows where people choose kanji etc. One could say English is similar based on our numerous spelling rules, but at least you can sound out any given word and it doesn't take 12 years of school to learn to do it. However, it *does* work so it probably won't go anywhere anytime soon...

2) The fact that even a pair of kanji can have multiple readings is annoying. Based on context, you'll find it being read one way or another, but I do agree to an extent. The number is small, I think, and whichever way you read it changes nothing, so in the end it doesn't matter much.

3) Spaces aren't needed to make Japanese readable. The kanji break it up just fine.

4) Hate to spin this around but English is absolutely horrible when it comes to consistencies. Think of the how many exceptions there are to the past tense rule of sticking -ed at the end... But regardless of that, there is a pattern. Not really a pattern to learn it, but it's there for at least recognizing it and then remembering which is which later. You can usually tell if a verb is transitive or intransitive right away. ~す/~える verbs tend to be the transitive ones.

5) I'm not positive, but I'd venture a bet that 卵 was around before they started writing it 玉子. And not even sure what you're saying about 湖. 水海 would be read すいかい wouldn't it?

I'm really argumentative on this subject I guess. Mostly because my pet peeve is having pet peeves about a language. No language is perfect. But the ways people use a language are amazing to me. And the concepts that translate, or don't translate, directly from one language to another are also extremely interesting to me.

Think about it this way: The language is bucked up in all these ways that confuse the hell out of us, and yet millions of people use it as their only means to communicate with the world. And they do it successfully. It's highly intertwined with the culture and you can't possibly learn the language without understanding aspects of the culture from which it was born.

Take 申し訳ない. It's is literally "there's no excuse" and we use that phrase in English for a very similar meaning! "There's no excuse for my actions. I'm very sorry." There probably IS an excuse, but by saying it like that, you are saying how no excuse is good enough to let you off the hook. Or, in English, you can use it to scold someone. "there's no excuse for that!". Whether or not said excuse exists, any excuse doesn't measure up. I believe the same nuance exists in Japanese and therefore 申し訳ない is a quite humble phrase for taking blame. Of course, most of the time it's used is surely robotic anyway so...

/rant

水海 could be read as either みずうみ or すいかい. It doesn't have to be onyomi.

Ha, why make your pet peeve be "no neutral first-person pronoun for men" when it could so easily be "no neutral second-person pronoun for *anyone*"?

Tobberoth, what does it sound like when you say わたくし, then? I was taught that わたくし is appropriate when you're speaking in ~ます form or using keigo.

Girls should use あたくし for everything, all the time.
Guys should use 俺様 for everything, all the time.

Problem solved.

I don't remember anyone saying any direct reference to I and you while using keygo. The changes in the vocabulary already make it obvious to notice: When you say something humble it is about you. When you say in the "respectuful" mode, it is the other party.

Wisher Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:I don't have a pet peeve with Japanese. I just have a pet peeve with the word pet peeve. What weirdo thought it?

Quote:This is mainly bred out because with Spanish/English speakers I see this a lot, and it is considered by the culture, whether mexican-american or just mexican, as a sign of laziness, lower intelligence, and immaturity. Spanglish

Lazy? Try cool, cabron!

Funny, I hated that word Pet Peeve when I first heard it too.

Lazy? Lower intelligence? My background is Mexican, but I was born in the USA. My

Because of this, your Spanish is only so-so.

This is not lazy. If anything, it is innovative. Lazy would be to give up and not even try to communicate.
I put all this to at least give a different perspective on the whole thing.

I know, I tried to not make it insulting but I said its merely a sign. You don't use spanglish in a serious formal conversation, and the perspective here is different because I grew up in Mexico as opposed to the US. I mean, no matter how you cut it, its basically people not having a good grasp of the language and that's going to lead to some pitfalls socially and in conversation.

Quote:I'm not sure what you mean with #1. Like if someone typed in 英語 but randomly inserted 日本語 for no apparent 理由？ That's kind of 読み難いと思う。 Does anyone actually do that though?

Yeah. Usually its not anything hard to read really, but to me it just looks weird. Its a pet peeve, which like another user said are irrational. I never meant to say my irks are logical or argumentatively sound. They're just thinks I don't like.

And yeah, I see it quite a bit. Not on this board really.

OK, here is another one. It's the fact that Kanji can only be taken down a certain size before it is illegible, at least to my eye. Romaji can be written very tiny and I could still read it. But Kanji becomes jumbled, due to the size of the pixels on a computer screen.

Is this a universal problem, or just to my untrained eye?

Wisher

Untrained eye. It is incredible like you get used to it. In the beginning, I tought it was impossible. Half of the kanji is smashed, some pieces ripped off, but you still recognize it.

Yeah, eventually you can tell what it is. I'm not quite sure how. I guess context and general density of the parts of the character. I remember looking at some smooshed solid black blob and saying, "How can anyone read that? Oh wait. It's 夏."

But if it's a character I haven't already learned, I can't tell what the parts are well enough to look it up.

joxn_costello Wrote:Tobberoth, what does it sound like when you say わたくし, then? I was taught that わたくし is appropriate when you're speaking in ~ます form or using keigo.

わたくし is really formal. It should be used in keigo, わたし is fine for teineigo (-masu).

Wisher Wrote:Is this a universal problem, or just to my untrained eye?

Just play a lot of Gameboy games in Japanese, and you'll become a pro at recognizing jumbled up kanji.

PrettyKitty Wrote:水海 could be read as either みずうみ or すいかい. It doesn't have to be onyomi.

Sorry, I was being intentionally fallacious to try and make my point. It could be absolutely anything, unrelated to any other reading of the kanji. Whatever word they happened to assign the kanji to ends up the reading of those kanji. They did use a system but clearly not in all cases or we wouldn't have 400 readings per kanji.

My point was, just because it's read みずうみ doesn't mean it should be 水 + 海. Back when they assigned the existing word みずうみ to a kanji, I'm sure they simply took the kanji from Chinese that meant the same thing and boom, you had a single kanji representation of a lake.

QuackingShoe Wrote:Already said I didn't disagree with that.
And anyway, every movie, drama, and tv show uses the formal form too. Simply in contextually appropriate situations.

Definitely. In fact, almost every live-action Japanese film I've ever seen makes quite extensive use of formal speech. I'm lucky if I ever even see a Japanese movie at the video store that isn't jidaigeki.

Tobberoth Wrote:

thermal Wrote:1) The lack of a neutral "I" word that can be used in a casual context, particulary for men. I don't think of myself as boyish nor particularly masculine and feel that both 僕 and 俺 are unfitting. I had issues with my ex since I chose to use 俺 as I felt it was the most fitting but it irked her since she thought it didn't fit me. I also hate the feeling of saying something like 俺はそう思う and feeling this tinge of male authority being conveyed.

私 is both neutral and casual, as long as you say わたし and not わたくし. The only reason not to use it is the same as for every other pronoun: Japanese people don't.

The Japanese don't use pronouns or they don't use 私 in a casual context? I do try and avoid pronouns since this is the most natural way to speak, but you do need them sometimes. As 私 I have never heard it used with anything but keigo.

thermal Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:

thermal Wrote:1) The lack of a neutral "I" word that can be used in a casual context, particulary for men. I don't think of myself as boyish nor particularly masculine and feel that both 僕 and 俺 are unfitting. I had issues with my ex since I chose to use 俺 as I felt it was the most fitting but it irked her since she thought it didn't fit me. I also hate the feeling of saying something like 俺はそう思う and feeling this tinge of male authority being conveyed.

私 is both neutral and casual, as long as you say わたし and not わたくし. The only reason not to use it is the same as for every other pronoun: Japanese people don't.

The Japanese don't use pronouns or they don't use 私 in a casual context? I do try and avoid pronouns since this is the most natural way to speak, but you do need them sometimes. As 私 I have never heard it used with anything but keigo.

Pronouns. 私 is easily the most commonly used pronoun in casual speech, using わたし in keigo seems a bit informal to me, わたくし is more proper. If you're a boy you use 僕. If you're a mans man, you use 俺. Everyone else uses 私. Unlike わたくし which sounds really odd used outside of Keigo, わたし is very neutral and can be used in most situations.

(I didn't pull the "most common pronoun" from my butt, it's actually from yahoo.jp dictionary: 現代では自分のことをさす最も一般的な語)

I've even heard an English professor say that the word "I" should not be overused in English essays because it can come off as a little arrogant and excessive to the reader. Imagine how much worse it sounds in Japanese when you constantly use the most common personal pronouns which are composed of multiple syllables. It would be a little like having a friend who always uses the word "magnificent" in place of "good." Its a word that might sound okay once in a while, but use it too much and you sound ridiculous.

Dragg Wrote:I've even heard an English professor say that the word "I" should not be overused in English essays because it can come off as a little arrogant and excessive to the reader. Imagine how much worse it sounds in Japanese when you constantly use the most common personal pronouns which are composed of multiple syllables. It would be a little like having a friend who always uses the word "magnificent" in place of "good." Its a word that might sound okay once in a while, but use it too much and you sound ridiculous.

Right. Peoples use of pronouns is actually a pretty good measure of how good someone is at Japanese. Their awesome pronounciation might fool you but if they use pronouns too much, it's a dead giveaway.