I was reading the comments on an n5 japanese learning YouTube video and someone’s comment said this-
私は日本で日本語を学ぶ日本人です。 この動画によっ て、私は賢くなれた気がします。 ありがとうございま す!
To my understanding the first part says “I am a japanese person studying japanese in Japan”
Am I mistranslating this? If they are japanese why are they studying low level japanese? Are they just a kid? Does the 日本人です have a different meaning I don’t know of?
10 comments
Your understanding of the sentence is correct. Maybe they’re trolling? Maybe they’re some other nationality but had a brain fart and typed 日本人? Maybe they were born in Japan but moved overseas soon after birth and are now having to relearn Japanese? Maybe it’s some other possibility that I’m not thinking of?
Perhaps he was an aspiring Japanese teacher and wanted to know how foreigners learn? Or perhaps he was not aware of Japanese grammar because he is a native speaker.
Well, a Japanese kid going to school in Japan is in fact learning (about) Japanese in 国語 class, and as he/she will definitely be better than the learners he/she may well say: due to this video I feel smarter. At the right age, I might have said the same, watching a video about studying German, seeing all those easy as a pie questions 😉
Maybe they lived abroad and moved to Japan and now works towards learning the language.
I think the most likely idea is that they are Japanese (ethnicity) and recently moved to Japan for whatever reason. Plenty of Japanese people were never taught the language due to growing up in countries that aren’t Japan, and having parents that don’t speak Japanese or choose not to teach their child Japanese. If their parents were Japanese and didn’t teach them… that seems to have bit them in the ass a little, lol.
I think the first sentence would be more natural like this:
私は日本で日本語を学んでいる日本人です。
The exclamation mark at the end also seems odd.
Well it seems like they’re still learning Japanese, so they probably just made an error. Happens to everyone
There are many Japanese (ethnicity) people that are born and raised outside Japan and learn Japanese as a second language.
A new Japanese learner would not know the difference between 日本人 and 日系人.
So they are probably a 日系人 from some non-Japan country.
The first sentence feels like a troll sentence which is a sentence.
Japanese people studying Japanese usually call it Kokugo.
A fair number of Japanese speakers who want to learn English have learned not to trust resources written in Japanese, or by Japanese people to study English, because in general the English in those courses is hilariously bad.
So they use foreigners studying Japanese at any level to learn English. A native Japanese person already knows that the Japanese that JSL student use is a horrible mess, but they can usually kinda figure out what the gaijin is trying to say. And more importanly, they already know the proper Japanese. They use the English discussion about the Japanese to learn the English.