nightshrooms
New member
From: Los Angelos
Registered: 2008-06-12
Posts: 2
Can anyone think of what things are unique and required in Japanese Grammar that aren't forced in English?
For example, when speaking in Japanese, it's required you use titles (-san, -sensei, etc) to encode social relationships. And this isn't forced in English.
Another example, is in English, where it's required you specify whether an object is plural or singular, but this distinction isn't forced in Japanese.
But yeah, things like that. I'm specifically looking for things from Japanese that aren't found in English. It's for a homework assignment, and I can't think of any. I can think of a lot of English ones however.
nightshrooms
New member
From: Los Angelos
Registered: 2008-06-12
Posts: 2
@Yonosa
uhhh? actually, I'm a 4th year Japanese minor taking a translation class. The idea behind the exercise is that even when you've been learning the language for this long, most people don't think about the language in such an analytical manner. This is intended to be a hard tricky linguistics question, but I can see how my wording makes it sound newbish. Or maybe everyone here is a pro and the answer to this sort of question is obvious, but I'm certainly have difficulty with it.
@deathspi and Umikuma
That's exactly what I'm looking for. Thank you.
@stehr
Thanks for the link, but it's sorta long. Do you have suggestions for chapters I should be looking at?
