Was thinking of putting together a Powerpoint about the Japanese language to share with family and friends just to give a general idea of what it’s like (in comparison to English). A little about the history and what makes it unique. Any particular points stand out that’d be fun to share? Things like how there isn’t a future tense (separate from present), no plural forms (generally), and of course the three writing systems (kanji, hiragana, katakana). Also, it being a subject-object-verb language, but both the subject and object are often optional. Any other things like that come to mind, or common misconceptions worth clearing up?
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https://youtu.be/x9-e_3GHrzw
Bruh what kind of family/friends do you have that want to sit through a PowerPoint presentation
I’d add the fact that negation and everything else happens through the verbs.
English doesn’t have a future tense either. We need to add other verbs. French and Spanish have future tenses.
Dialects, for one. Some dialects such as Tsugaruben almost sound like a completely different language.
Well, when i told some of my family members about it they found it captivating how some characters look like what they represent. Especially because people who dont know anything about the language think of the writting system as just a bunch of random scribbles.
木、林、森 are the classic example, same with 火、炎, and even 水、氷、泳, which dont really look like water but they still liked seeing how their meanings are so closely related (water, ice, swim).
田 resembling a paddy field.
血 representing blood on a plate as an offering (with 皿 being the plate, both figuratively and literally)
Also showing them a very short and simple example of how a sentence slowly changes by adding more and more stuff at the end is also pretty interesting (my mom asked about it herself when i told her you had to “conjugate” adjectives, which doesnt exist in our language):
家が大きい
↓
家が大き**くない**
↓
家が大きくな**かった**
My favourite part of Japanese is by far particles ([助詞](#fg “じょし”)). I could talk about them for ages. I think they’re interesting because they’re so distinct from English (or most non-Asian languages) but can still be related to things like tag-questions, and there’s a lot of them and nuance in how they’re used, which makes it really natural to talk about differences between Japanese and English linguistics and culture.