While learning Japanese, I’ve noticed a reoccurring pattern: Any time there’s something that’s really hard for me to grasp (as in, even after I look it up in multiple resources or videos, I still don’t feel like I really “get” it) the actual reason I’m having trouble isn’t because Japanese is particularly difficult but rather because my background in English is the thing that’s preventing me from properly understanding it. I want to tell the most recent and extreme example of this: My journey to understand the omitted subject.
In Japanese, it’s considered 100% okay to say 「[行](#fg “い”)きます」 or 「[食](#fg “たべ”)べます」 without specifying who will be doing the going or eating. That made me uncomfortable, like it couldn’t be the whole story, so I asked people more knowledgeable than me how you’re supposed to know who is going or who is eating and the answer I got was “Probably ‘I’, but it depends on context.”
This didn’t feel like a satisfying answer to me. Surely a language spoken by an entire country of people is not so fragile as to be reduced down to a single verb crudely affixed to a wad of context. If that were true then surely misunderstandings would happen all the time, right? Surely people would be stopping others mid-story to ask things like “wait, who are you talking about exactly?” The lack of precision felt only one step better than making impromptu gestures at each other to communicate.
More confusing yet, Japanese doesn’t even keep the subject consistent in the *same sentence*.
Aさん：「[聞](#fg “き”)いてくれない？」
Bさん：「[仕方](#fg “しかた”)ないだろう。どうせ[断](#fg “ことわ”)っても、[言](#fg “い”)うんだね。」
The last sentence means even if *Bさん* refuses to listen, then *Aさん* would still say what they want to say anyway. The subjects performing the action changed without ever being stated explicitly.
Outside of these admittedly rather simple examples, this worry of mine was realized when I was listening to a Japanese friend tell a story of a conversation between them and another friend. The story kept jumping back and forth between what each person was saying and doing and I kept constantly loosing track of which person was the one saying or doing what. I once again researched how to know what the omitted subject is, I once again got answers that didn’t feel satisfying. I was frustrated.
Each time this sort of thing happens, it’s at this point of frustration that the big lie is invented in my mind: *”Japanese is so hard! There’s gotta be some sort of secret trick Japanese people are using to understand what each other are talking about. If I can only find out what it is, everything will all finally make sense!”*
So I set out to figure this trick out, namely by watching a bunch of YouTube videos on the grammatical subject in Japanese. I’m going to skip over this part and just summarize the interesting stuff, but if you want more details and have an intermediate Japanese level I highly recommend [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTqAU_kiKM) two [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZKS5lBSOsw).
Here’s a summary:
* From the late 1800s up to the 1930s, an understanding of Japanese grammar called [橋本文法](#fg “はしもとぶんぽう”) was developed which borrowed largely from the more well-established study of European grammar. This way of thinking about grammar highly promoted the grammatical subject, as that’s what European languages do. It tries to fit Japanese into the Subject/Predicate structure we’re familiar with from English.
* This grammar system from the 1930s is still taught to Japanese children in schools today. If you ask a regular Japanese person to explain the grammar of their own language to you, you will almost always get some hazily recollected version of this.
* In the 1960s, a new way of understanding Japanese grammar called [三上文法](#fg “みかみぶんぽう”) was created. It asserts that Japanese doesn’t have a subject in the European sense. In particular が was given no more importance than particles like に and で, they are simply things that can optionally be used to give more detail to the verb if needed or desired. The person or thing doing the action is therefore not promoted to being any more important than, for example, the place where an action takes place, or with whom, or at what time, etc.
* [三上文法](#fg “みかみぶんぽう”) *did*, however, promote は to special status, separate from the other particles. His work was used to classify Japanese as a topic-prominent language, and it’s used as the basis for many foreign-language learners’ grammar materials because foreign learners often struggle to differentiate が and は and his work gives a very robust differentiation. Oddly enough, because of [三上章](#fg “みかみあきら”)’s lack of linguistic credentials, his work was not as widely accepted in within his own country.
Learning all this made me think about English. Does the subject really *always* deserve a special status above things like the time or place an action takes place? Consider the following:
Alice: “Have you cooked yet?”
Bob: “I cooked earlier in the kitchen.”
It’s a weird sentence, right? If you’re cooking, then we can assume it’s in the kitchen – that’s what kitchens are for! It feels better to leave out the “in the kitchen” part and just say “I cooked earlier”. But hang on a minute, why do we need the “I” part? Alice asked “Have **you**(Bob) cooked yet?” The “I” part should therefore be even *more obvious* than the “in the kitchen” part, right? So why does it feel weird to just respond with “Cooked earlier”? Logically, it makes more sense, but my experience with English has biased me into thinking that just saying “Cooked earlier” is a strange way to respond to “Have you cooked yet?”
Another situation:
Alice: “It stinks like hell, could someone open a window to get the smell out?”
Bob: “I already opened it.”
Again, why is “I” needed here? Alice only cares about whether the window gets opened, she doesn’t give a shit *who* opens it. Does Bob want a reward or something, so that’s why he’s trying to take credit for opening the window? It doesn’t make sense. And while we’re at it, it’s clear we’re talking about a window – “it” isn’t needed either. “Already opened” is a better version.
This whole time, the problem wasn’t that Japanese was difficult. It wasn’t that Japanese people are especially good at following an unsaid subject. It’s that I’m especially *bad* at it because English has made my brain so lazy that it expects the subject to always be explicitly stated. I’ve got the same skills as Japanese people at intuiting unsaid locations, times, and other things context can fill in adequately, but I’ve just not had the same amount of practice in filling in the “who” parts of sentences from context because I’ve never needed to before Japanese. *That’s* the real problem.
Is finding out that English is the cause of you not properly understanding Japanese a universal experience for native English trying to learn Japanese? I’ve had it several times personally. Anyone have stories to share?
1 comment
In the time you spent larpity larpity larping that you could have gotten used to it instead.