http://www.crr.unsw.edu.au/news-and-even...-1039.html


Wonderful lecture. I just got home but he is such a cute old man, reminds me of Tin Tin's Professor Calculus.


I know so many people here that would've loved to have attended, but any beginner level Japanese student would have been able to appreciate the examples he used and points he raised.

Dead tired now will write up about it later perhaps...

Please do. It looks really interesting!

Ah crap forgot about this.

I'll just write a TLDR version of it, because there isn't much I can really say more than what the summary says in the link.

He split the lecture up into 5 or so topics, and used examples from Murakami, Mishima and some other authors' works and tried to show how you simply cannot translate from one language to another.

One of the last examples was the ’んです’　and how there really is no English equivalent and how 'explanatory marker' is way off.

I actually have the lecture slides somewhere in my room, I would have to shoot him an email to see if i can actually scan it and put it up here (don't expect anything). But he's great, he came over and spoke to me, in Japanese, and since I have not spoken in like a year, naturally, I choked on my words.

Another interesting point he brought up was 彼 and how that was brought over very recently in Japanese history because there is no Japanese equivalent for the English pronoun She/He, so early Japanese assumed that it would work, but as any beginner would know, the first thing they're taught is to avoid pronouns. Perhaps Jarv or some of the other guys would know about the introduction of 'englishified-pronouns' in Japanese.

liosama Wrote:Another interesting point he brought up was 彼 and how that was brought over very recently in Japanese history because there is no Japanese equivalent for the English pronoun She/He, so early Japanese assumed that it would work, but as any beginner would know, the first thing they're taught is to avoid pronouns. Perhaps Jarv or some of the other guys would know about the introduction of 'englishified-pronouns' in Japanese.

Wow I have a whole new perspective on the Westernization of Japan in the early 1900s, now. I never even considered it went so far as introducing some new pronouns, but it makes sense. Wow.