It is truly mind blowing when you figure stuff out about your own language when learning another one. For example:
Japanese often creates a question from a statement based on context. This never made sense to me, until I realized English does the EXACT SAME THING.
“You don’t know?”
“This isn’t real leather?”
“She’s not going with us?”
These are all just like statements! The only clues to indicate that they are questions in speech form are context and intonation. No words in spoken form are added or removed, and the only difference in written speech is the change in punctuation. True, they can be rephrased into proper question form, but the same is true of Japanese.
This is also how I came to realize that English lacks a proper future tense. We have helping verbs like “will” go, but our verb conjugation does not actually contain variants that are future tense by themselves. Once again, most is derived by the context. “I am going to the store” is present tense, whereas “I am going to the store tomorrow” by adding information indicates future occurrence, without changing the verb itself. It sounded almost crazy at first that Japanese lacks a proper future tense, until it was explained to me that English is also lacking such.
Context is a fascinating thing to me with language. Learning how other languages express things by context sounds awfully foreign or confusing sometimes. But then eventually you realize that there are ways your own language makes expressions based on context, and you just never noticed before!
8 comments
I feel absolutely the same! Learning Japanese has forced me to be introspective about the way my native language (英語、もちろん) works in a way I could never be bothered to learn in middle school.
Suddenly I find myself understanding sentence structure more fully. Like you, I have also started recognizing patterns in English speech that I took for granted because I simply understood what they meant from repetition, not fully grasping their construction until forced to confront them in another language.
Learning another language has been a truly fulfilling journey so far. I feel enriched.
It happened to me as well. It reminds me of this phrase “you can never understand one language until you learn at least two.”
This is absolute true. For every new language I have learned, I have learned more about my own native language without studying it… It is all about perspective, which is why it is so important to gain perspective in other matters too, not just language.
Every new language (from different language family) enriches you. Nice observations
It make me a faster reader in my native language
Learning Japanese made me appreciate my mother tongue and improve English.
Learning Japanese improved my understanding of the way I use English: my natural speaking style lends itself to frequent use of のです and related forms, less explicit than repeated “therefore” but still an explanatory tone
Learning Japanese helped me to understand in what contexts I would use in English such as でしょう、のです、etc. I would tell myself “oh! If I were speaking Japanese, I would use these expressions!”