Well this is the point from which you can no longer study the language, isn't it? Or at least the kind of studying you need to do is watching, observing, and experiencing how the native speakers use the language and how they act while doing so. I want to claim that if you're integrated to a Japanese environment and let yourself be exposed to the language constantly, then over time this is something you'll have to eventually learn and get used to.

Languages really are different ways of communicating altogether, that have evolved within separate cultures of people. The fact that many are similar today because they have branched from the same backgrounds or have influenced each other is just a bonus. When you want to acquire a language I think you have to forget about your native language at some points, because even if you can use it to translate messages you can't use it to translate the mindsets behind them.

Understanding a foreign language through that language, that's how I want to learn.

Who was it on here that had that quote that went something like "When you learn a new language, you gain a new soul"? It really makes sense in a way.

turvy wrote:

I think I keep failing in Japanese, largely because Japanese is a different thinking process, enough to make me miserable.

When I first came to Japan 2 years ago and studied abroad, this idea hit me hard. I don't remember where or when it dawned on me, but up to that point I had always thought you could simply do an A-B dichotomy  of L1:L2 and speak fluently. I later realized this is so false, it became more apparent the more closely I listened to and read the subs on anime.

True fluency is only obtained after you start to think like a Japanese person does. The way they compose their thoughts and then turn them into sentences and phrases. I think most learners of Japanese get their taste of this when they start to realize you don't have to attach a pronoun to every sentence. Coming from English this is a bit hard to shake.

These days I focus on a couple things when I interact or listen to Japanese.
1) How do they phrase stuff? What order does stuff come in in the sentence?
Japanese is grammatically loose as long as the verb goes at the end. Pragmatically though people expect things to come in certain orders depending on how you want stuff to mean. For instance, the time of the day/year of something will be near the start, the people involved near the middle and where its happening maybe afterwards, and then whats happening. Sure you can mix it up but people will have trouble understanding you. There's actually a run down of the typical order of things in the DoBJG in the beginning of the book.
Even with that though, there's always interesting nuances to things in spoken Japanese.

2) What words are they using?
As my vocab grows steadily I'm slowly traversing away from "soft" words into "hard" words (usually 漢語). I find it easy to remember "hard" words because they are semantically easy for me to build up in my head. "Crap whats the word to 'correct mistakes' I know its going to probably going to have 正 in it cause "right/correct," and then I'm sure there's a しゅう in there hmm AH しゅうせい. かいせい might work too, reform+correct." A lot of these are pretty "hard" words (They say "かたいご") and make you sound stiff, yet some are ok to use in normal speech. Knowing which of these to use requires quite a bit of experience. So I keep my ear out or ask Japanese if "blahblahblahって硬いか."

Don't get discouraged, keep at it.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Instead just use a rising intonation or の？

And that doesn't sound feminine?

maybe say 硬いっすか if you have trouble with making the no not sound girly.

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 June 24, 11:49 am)

howtwosavealif3 wrote:

maybe say 硬いっすか if you have trouble with making the no not sound girly.

っすか is a pretty obnoxious way of talking.  I'd stick with の.

Zgarbas wrote:

Sure, some concepts are bound to sound weird, but it takes considerably less time to get accustomed to them and start integrating them in your language use than it takes to, say, learn the grammar, vocab and other trinkets kinda necessary when learning any new language.

I feel like you are completely missing the point/problem.

Simply knowing a fact is one thing, but knowing when/how/why/where to use it is another.

Learning the vocab of something isn't as simply as just learning that 重要 is "important." For some of these abstract words, you also have a bunch of "meta data" to take in as well. Such as "Is this a good important? Or a bad important?" You might be able to memorize dictionary entries and learn that this is good, that is bad, this is mostly a business/legalese term, etc. but more likely you are picking this up from exposure. Its this stuff that you only get by learning to think like a Japanese person and is WAY WAY harder than simply dumping it into an Anki deck and memorizing it. This is one bit.

Then there is the stuff I mentioned above about knowing how to make sentences that a Japanese person would make as well. Again, this is based strongly on the way they think and organize stuff in their minds.

Actually the Cognitive scientist would say its probably the reverse. Its the Japanese language that's shaping the way Japanese people think, but its a bit "chicken and egg." There's a whole field in Cognitive science/psychology on this topic called Linguistic relativity. Some of the research on it has been fascinating and the strongest proof for "language affects the way we think" is the fact that some languages lack proper numeral systems and therefore can't conceptualize numbers in the way most of us can.

Last edited by vix86 (2012 June 25, 12:16 am)

No, what he means is that 2 people will express identical ideas differently depending on their native language.

For example, there are languages in the Americas and Australia that lack a "left" and a "right", and instead use cardinal directions like "east" and "north". This affects how they think, from describing driving directions (They don't say "take a left at the stop sign", they say "Go east at the stop sign, even in English) to things such as describing what's in a mirror (there's been a whole series of experiments on this stuff.

Also when they point at themselves, they don't mean "I" like we do, the are literally pointing through them and mean "behind" (whether it be south or north or east or west).

Plus, the Hadaza(?) language of Africa lacks numbers greater than 4, which is thought to influence the prediction and thought of its speakers.

People used to think that since the Japanese language lacked a future tense, its speakers didn't know what the future was. However, that's obviously not true. But research is suggesting that your native language influences how you express your ideas.

Read the wiki article, cognitive linguistics is fascinating.

Last edited by Marble101 (2012 June 25, 11:14 pm)

I don't think theres much to gained by us language learners in thinking too much about this. Just take it as yet more evidence of the importance of massive exposure. You have to get used to the way people express themselves.

nadiatims wrote:

I don't think theres much to gained by us language learners in thinking too much about this. Just take it as yet more evidence of the importance of massive exposure. You have to get used to the way people express themselves.

A way to approach this, I think, is to watch a show or native speaker react to a situation. How do they react? Also, what does the average Japanese conversation look like?

TwoMoreCharacters wrote:

Here's a clip of it that also has interesting examples. Not that it matters for us language learners so much, like nadiatims said, but it's fascinating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo

I saw it and I think it shows how different groups value things and how it reflects into their language. There was some research done on Nicaraguan Sign Language (abbreviated ISN) which is a language that emerged in the last 30 years form no other language (so it has no parents). They studied 2 generation, one which had learned the language from the age of 2, and the one that had developed LSN, the proto-language that the other generation turned into ISN. Since the proto-language lacked proper ways to define direction, they did some tests and found speakers of the proto-language and found they couldn't grasp the idea of directions as well as ISN speakers.

Inny Jan wrote:

It looks like there are two layers of "thinking" in the example you gave. At the upper layer you have relative placement/direction of things that you want to refer to. At the lower layer, you have your communication tool to describe that relationship. But is it that you really can put an equation sign between expressing your thoughts with different notions and having your thinking process different?

That's essentially the theory of linguistic relativity. The NY Times did a survey in 2003~ish about what  speakers of Spanish and German think of objects. Some objects (like violins) are masculine in Spanish and feminine in German. The reverse is true for things like bridges (fem. in spanish and mas. in German).

The survey showed that, on average, most Spanish speakers regarded objects like bridges "elegant and slender" while Germans thought of the same bridges as "Strong and Sturdy).

Zgarbas wrote:

you don't go around looking for the history of the English language's evolution which made that variation possible.

Nobody is saying you study the history of the language or even the history of the country. "Culture" does not simply mean history, or kimonos, sushi, anime, manga, calipgraphy, temples, and so on. No one is saying going and studying the history of Japan is going to somehow magically make you understand stuff better. However the history and growth of Japan gave birth to the culture today and slowly overtime changed the language differentiating it from its past cousins.

The point is that you don't have to study any of this "gain some magical insight to suddenly understand how to speak the language." That's stupid and it won't happen. The point is more being aware that there may be numerous differences between the way you would say things and the way a native speaker is going to decide to say it; up til the point that you learn how they would say it and start reproducing it the same. These differences came about by the history and progression of the language's people. The OP was simply stating/observing that the variables which gave rise to how Japanese people speak/think about things, is totally/slightly different from the way an English speaker might process/speak/think about the same thing. And again, nobody is saying that this is impossible to learn, merely that it takes time and that its probably not as easy as dropping an Anki card in you deck with 色=Am:Color/Brt:Colour.

@eslang Mmm what do you mean? And thanks for the articles, marked them to read.

Last edited by turvy (2012 June 27, 4:46 pm)

For a Japanese learning English 私はあなたの靴が好きです is the best sentence, because that's what you are actually saying in English.

For a Japanese already fluent in English translating "I like your shoes", 靴可愛いね is the best sentence of course. Because they already the underlying grammar and is aware of the cultural differences.

Last edited by turvy (2012 June 28, 12:00 am)