Some examples of what I mean:
* The stroke order for 必 is nearly backwards relative to the stroke order of 心
* The existence of words like 秋刀魚 where there is no reasonable way to map individual kanji to hiragana
* 鋒 and 鏃 when you could just use the much easier to read 切っ先 and 矢尻
* 大人気 can be either だいにんき or おとなげ — two words that have nothing to do with each other at all — and it depends entirely on context
Would prefer responses from very advanced learners of Japanese if possible because I’m sure there’s a lot out there on the fringes of the language
22 comments
は vs が … beginner or not it’s scary as hell (and i enjoy watching other ppl get tripped up :>)
One of the most famous is「はい、結構です」
No, thanks.
Yes, please.
四 doesn’t have four strokes WHY JAPANESE PEOPLE 😏
The frequent use of double, triple, maybe even quadruple negatives.
安 is basically that it’s easier/cheaper to have a woman in your house.
There are too many words like 先祖 and 祖先. Which have the same meaning, but with flipped kanji. F that all the way up.
Coming from a Chinese background, I write 必 [like this](https://bihua.bmcx.com/e5bf85__bihuachaxun/), so there is no horror at all.
I don’t know if it is horrifying, but here are some annoyances for me:
行って can be いって or おこなって (to the extent of writing 行なって for disambiguation)、通って can be とおって or かよって.
In classical Japanese, the 助動詞「る•らる」have four meanings「受身•尊敬•自発•可能」. This corresponds to modern Japanese「れる•られる」, which also have these four meanings but they are easy to differentiate due to various developments. 尊敬 can be expressed by special verbs or other constructions (食べられる→召し上がる、座られる→お座りになる). The 自発 meaning only exists for 「思われる」. 可能 can be expressed in slang with ら抜き言葉 (食べられる→食べれる). This leaves most other cases to be 受身. In classical Japanese though… they all look the same.
Yet, this still does not compare to「べし」which corresponds to modern day「べき」. Modern「べき」has two main meanings「当然•適当」, but classical「べし」has six:「意志•推量•当然•適当•可能•命令」. And you have no way of decisively differentiating some of these apart even with context (unless you are the author), which gives rise to different interpretations.
Edit: Oh here’s another one. I sometimes can’t tell if a sentence in song lyrics is actually one sentence or two. For example, say there’s lyrics that go「桜を 見る 人が 笑う」with pauses between them. I sometimes can’t tell if it is supposed to be 「(桜を見る人)が笑う」or「桜を見る。人が笑う。」 The problem comes from modern Japanese verbs 連体形 (the former, used to connect to 体言 (e.g. nouns)) and 終止形 (the latter, used to end sentences) having the same conjugation. i.e. 見る and 見る. In classical Japanese, some verbs make a distinction. E.g. 「**流れる**水←**流るる**水」vs 「水が**流れる**。←水が**流る**。」Other languages like Korean also make distinctions (i.e. 벚꽃을 **보는** 사람이 웃는다 vs 벚꽃을 **본다** 사람이 웃는다) so in a Korean song this confusion wouldn’t occur, *I think, am not really fluent in Korean*.
misreading 一人前 as ひとり in my head before registering that the 前 is there is a habit that i can’t seem to shake
Why do you have 5,000 kanji…
I’m obviously not a very advanced learner, so here’s my noob take on this:
I’ve only been going for about 3 months now, been practicing a few hours a night every night.
So… so far, I’d say, .. er.. basically everything?
Well not everything, there’s some stuff which just went into my brain and stuck like a piece of cling wrap around something you don’t want wrapped in cling wrap.
*(Really random stuff too, like the word for summer, なつ, for some reason still echos through my head almost every day after learning it, the word just routinely pops back into my head like a song stuck in my head.. it must just sound nice or something?)*
But, the sheer number of kanji, writing kana, *(success, I now have bad handwriting in TWO languages!)*, learning all the new words for everything and getting stuck on words that sound similar, and the rules on how to structure sentences and the little nuances there too..
Or how to pronounce r sounds which I’m paranoid about because I don’t have anyone to practice with in person so I have no idea if I’m getting it right or not. *(Is there some kind of japanese speech to text program I can use on a computer to practice with?)*
Perhaps ***the most horror inducing*** ***thing*** is the fact I’ve spent 3 months watching videos that teach pronunciation, teach words, teach reading and listening, practising writing Japanese on paper, practising memorising how to spell or say things, practising listening to japanese speech and understanding it, an hour of duolingo every night, etc…
And last night I thought:
>’OK it’s been 3 months, maybe it’s time to start trying to dip my toes into watching and listening to some actual Japanese content to start immersing myself’
So I watched an episode of Pokemon Season 1 in Japanese, it was the first thing I could find that seemed like it should be reasonably easy, most scenes in the show have some pretty clearly spoken dialogue that isn’t mumbled or spoken at a very fast pace, or with distracting noises in the background etc…
^(.. and because I like pokemon…)
I could pick up on perhaps… 1% of what is being said? And only vaguely understand some sounds, and picked up on a lot of sentences ending with ‘desu’ while not really understanding the rest of it.
**So yeah that’s pretty horror-inducing, the thought that 3 months of practice amounted to not much more than “Hey Ash said ‘Moshimoshi’ when he answered the phone, I know what that means!”.**
But I’m determined (pronounced: stubborn) so I got a plan.
I’m gonna keep finding shows like this, get the japanese versions, with english subtitles, I’m gonna pick apart words and sentences I don’t understand, practice new things as I find them, and repeat that process over and over with each episode until I feel I can understand most of the spoken dialogue in the episode, then move onto the next episode or another show etc.
By the way if anyone has any recommendations for content to watch, I’m all ears.
Japanese has an onomatopoeia specifically for the sound of a large peach floating down a river.
彷徨, 彷徨く, and 彷徨う having vastly different readings while meaning practically the same thing
I honestly don’t see the problem with 大人気:
– “otonagenai” is only ever negative, you never say “otonagearu”
– you would never say “dai-ninki nai” so you’d never get it muddled with “otonagenai”
Passive voice. That table with verb endings just terrifies me because God forbid you mess it up in conversation.
Transitive and intransitive verbs. MAN.
Hey now, words like 秋刀魚 are glee-and-wonder-inducing, not horror!
The biggest horror is that we don’t get to use ゐ and ゑ anymore.
This is to me specifically, but I often can’t distinguish D and R in Japanese. For reference, my native language is Mandarin and Taiwanese, so I also have trouble to pronounce both letter correctly in the first place.
When first starting to learn kanji, our teacher told us of the importance of them. She told us a story of a bridge being built that collapsed soon after completion. Apparently there are two words, pronounced the same, but with opposite meanings: keep moist or keep dry (something like that, I can’t remember exactly). The only way to tell them apart is with kanji. During the process of making the bridge, I guess they got mixed up, one thing lead to another and yeah…
So yeah that’s one pretty horror-inducing aspect.
When i read a novel and knew 苦笑い is read にがわらい but in 苦笑をする it read くしょう
The fact that nothing reads the same in all the words where such kanji is used. Like yeah i do know that 人 usually stays as にん or ひと but when the fuck am i supposed to use the other pronounciations? 🙁
Never met a Japanese person that could handwrite 魑魅魍魎
老若男女（ろうにゃくなんにょ）is a phrase that is helpful, but I can never trust myself to say in actual conversation because it’s basically a natural tongue-twister.
And yea I get that there will always be exceptions, just gotta learn it, yada yada, but inconsistent pronunciation of kanji drives me nuts. I can inconsistent 連濁 as a result of what happened to “sound good” or be easily understood at the time; I can accept onyomi vs kunyomi, I can even accept that there might be multiple onyomi because Chinese pronunciation changed over time and words got imported at different periods in history, but _why_ do you have shit like 東西（とうざい）/北西（ほくせい）where they are basically from the same concept, but with a difference in reading? Like, it would have been so easy for that to just be とうせい or とうぜい.
And why do you have words like 湯桶（ゆとう）, surely that could have been either ゆおけ or とうとう/とうよう. Or 金色（きんいろ）and 茶色（ちゃいろ）with the kun/on mix, but 黄色（きいろ）with the consistent kun/kun? And I get that it’s an idiomatic phrase, and who knows maybe even on purpose given the meaning of the phrase, but the pronunciation of 十人十色（じゅうにんといろ）basically had me sounding like atsugiri jason in front of my host family. I guess at least that one they kept each “pair” with consistent on and kunyomi readings, respectively, but like every other number of colors (e.g. 三色＝さんしょく）uses the onyomi, why not here too??
Oh and lets not forget the mess that is keigo, especially when mixed with causative and/or transitive forms. Gotta do mental math every time to make sure I’m 謙譲ing the right verb.
Classical Japanese. I’ve just started a course on classical Japanese and so far it seems to be Japanese without any of the parts that make it remotely do-able, like (almost entirely) regular verb conjugation. Send help