Japanese and other Languages

Recently, I've been feeling a lot more international, and I've been recalling my language experiences throughout my life. My first language was Chinese, followed soon after by English. While in school, English took over, and I began hating Chinese school, leading me to quit after 6th grade. In high school, I tried learning Japanese to no avail (my teacher was terrible), so I ended up hating it too.

Because of all my failures, I nearly gave up on becoming bilingual, until I began to watch anime in college. Hearing Japanese spoken naturally and in context, I remembered all the things in high school that I tried to learn, but never could. I decided to give it another try, and enrolled in Japanese language classes at UCSD just for fun. I learned the language effortlessly, passing all my tests with flying colors without preparation. I learned more in 3 months than I learned in 3 years in high school. It became as natural as breathing, and I took a year and a half of classes before I had to shift my focus back to engineering. I attribute my success both to the Japanese professors (they really knew how to teach a language) and to the copious amounts of anime I watched (and my efforts made to avoid reading the English subtitles). Nevertheless, I had such a good experience that I added a Japanese Studies minor to my degree, and took the final few non-language classes needed for it.

Now, I'm in Japan, and I'm also a certified language teacher. My time in Japanese class, the TEFL program, and the classroom had gotten me thinking more about languages and how they work. What are the nuts and bolts of various languages, and how do they vary? We all know that some languages are harder than others, but are some BETTER than other? Is there a perfect language?

English is obviously the most prevalent language in the world. It's regarded as the most universal international language, and anyone that wants to consider doing international business must know some English. But, does English deserve to occupy that throne?

English is a nice spoken language. It has 10 vowel sounds and 25 consonant sounds (depending on the IPA you use, but these are the numbers I prefer), which combined make for nearly endless unique syllables. There are few rules for syllable production, as a syllable can have multiple consonants and vowels in all kinds of orientations. Many unique syllables allows for many unique words. English has fewer letters than sounds, but there are enough of them to form written words that are unique, yet not overly cumbersome.

However, that's pretty much where the benefits end. Since letters and sounds are not directly correlated, there is somewhat of a rift between the written and spoken portions of the language. When reading a new word, we know that it is most likely pronounced a certain way based on pronunciation patterns, but we have no guarantee until we consult a source. The fact that English is molded from a buttload of other languages doesn't help in the pronunciation and spelling department either. English grammar is also comparatively difficult, where placement of different parts of speech is important, and modals dominate the meaning of the sentence. Tenses can also be quite difficult, since many verbs don't follow a common pattern when changed to different tenses.

Japanese grammar is much more simple. The sentence ends in a vowel. The tense of the vowel is only determined by what letters the verb ends in (with very few exceptions). The ending of the verb is also used instead of modals to change the meaning of the sentence, making verbs forms smooth and very easy to learn. Placement of parts of speech doesn't matter much, and the parts of speech are flagged by particles that make them easily recognizable. Japanese has also adapted greatly to international languages, adopting Chinese characters (kanji) and creating a knew alphabet system to distinguish foreign loan words (katakana). Unfortunately that's where the benefits of Japanese end.

In the Japanese language, there are only 5 vowel sounds and 14 consonant sounds (plus 3 somewhat unique ones). This is exasperated by the fact that each syllable can only be either a vowel alone, or a consonant followed by a vowel (with only a few exceptions). This means that syllables are not very diverse. In total, including small /y/ combinations, /ng/ endings, small 'tsu', and excluding a few holes, the Japanese language has 156 possible syllables (I may have counted wrong, but it's definitely close). That's it. You know there are very few syllables when the alphabet isn't written as vowels or consonants, but rather the syllables themselves! Imagine if a single-syllable word like "bridge" or "trash" were written with only a single letter! Preposterous!

We all know that words must be made out of syllables. However, a word with more than 5 or 6 syllables is bulky and awkward, so most words stay under that threshold. For Japanese, this basically means that, after a while, words ran out of unique syllable combinations, and they were forced to share. What's worse is that adjectives generally end in a certain pattern (~i), while verbs must end in a certain pattern depending on formality (masu/~u), leading to even less syllable diversity. Basically, spoken words are not unique in the Japanese language. A certain combination of syllables can mean several different things, and this makes Japanese a very weak spoken language. The written system would be equally problematic, had the Japanese not turned to China for the solution.

The Chinese writing system is essentially a refined form of pictography. Characters were created based on drawings of real objects, and therefore contain their likeness. This means that Chinese words are very unique, being created by an endless variety of base characters. No two paintings are ever the same, right? The same applies to Chinese words.

Kanji characters are these same characters, stolen from the Chinese and some slightly modified. Kanji deals with the problem of word diversity by replacing some Japanese alphabet characters with a Chinese character. Now, two words with the same pronunciation can be differentiated from each other. Of course, this only works in written form (you can't "speak kanji"), so the usefulness of kanji has it's limits.

Kanji is also notoriously difficult to memorize. A kanji character can have different pronunciations depending on the way it is used (part of speech/combination with other kanji/origin of the word), since it is a representation of meaning rather than pronunciation. For example, the character 油 means "oil". By itself, it is pronounced あぶら (abura), and is the same when combined with other Japanese words, such as ごま油 (goma abura - "sesame oil"). However, when used in some situations, it is pronounced ゆ (yu), like ラー油 (raayu - "spicy oil"), 石油 (sekiyu - "petroleum"), or 灯油 (touyu - "kerosene"). I asked the other teachers at school why it's like this, and none of them could give me an explanation. The truth is, I already knew. The reason is that these words are derived from the Chinese pronunciation long ago (more accurately described as "yoh" with rising intonation, but the Japanese are legendary at butchering foreign pronunciation), but there's no way to tell just by looking at the kanji characters. While already quite annoying, this example is actually one of the easiest of the kanji pronunciation anomalies that dominate the language. Some characters have 10 or more different pronunciations!

The strokes in the kanji characters aren't easy to memorize either. Comparing it to art, if the Mona Lisa had a few brush strokes missing or misplaced, it would be a different painting altogether. For this very reason, the literacy rate in China was abysmal until the Communists came and forced education upon the populace, all while simplifying the original writing system.

As much as I can speak English and am capable of teaching it, I'm certainly not an advocate of it. There are too many problems with English to recommend it. Japanese and Chinese have plenty more problems than English. When I realized this, I descended into a language depression, where all languages seemed to be too problem-ridden to be able to connect people universally.

In the last few months, however, I've become much more of an advocate for Korean. I hail from a city with a high Korean immigrant population, and I've even had a Korean girlfriend in high school. How I never bothered to try to learn Korean until now is beyond me (I was a bit of a useless turd back then, which is probably why that girlfriend left me T^T). Korean shares many of the same grammar concepts with Japanese, like use of particles and verb ending modification. Korean has more vowels (8) and consonants (19) than Japanese, and vowels can me modified with semivowels (y/w) in front. Korean characters can be any combination of a vowel with or without a consonant at the front and/or as many as two in the back. This gives them high syllable diversity (not as high as English, but that's overkill anyways), so there isn't a problem with word diversity. The pronunciation and writing systems correlate like in Japanese, so spelling is usually not a problem (some of the consonant combinations get a little tricky, but it's not nearly as bad as English). Essentially, it's the best of both worlds!

The thing about Korean is that it is a relatively new language. In the past, Korea was a vassal state to China, and so they naturally used Chinese characters. After the Japanese came and meddled with that relationship, the Koreans recognized the problems with the Chinese writing system and decided to create their own. Thus was born Hangul, the brainchild of King Sejong of the Joseon Dynasty, in the 15th century. Abandoning pictography in favor of a phonetic system, Hangul provided the poorer, less educated people a way to communicate in writing, and literacy rates soared. The difference between Korean and other languages is that it isn't some ancient beast, that's been slowly evolving and mutating over time despite being detrimental for the society it serves. Korean was conceived and planned for the purpose of simplicity, sensibility, and utility over useless tradition and habit.

I think we can all learn something from the development of Korean, and I'm personally a big fan now. I've been doing some self-study for the past month or so, but I've gotten in contact with a Korean teacher who is willing to teach me in exchange for English lessons. I've been a little concerned about what I will do once I finish the JET Program, but I'm heavily considering giving Korea a turn. Sure, I have a thing for Korean girls, but that's not the reason at all...

Anyways, thanks for reading! I'm sorry this post turned into linguist pornography, but I hope it was interesting and got you thinking a bit more about the world around you and how people manage to communicate! See you next time, when we get moving...