I’m Japanese and learning English, and there are many English grammar points or sentence structures that seem “English” to me like the sentences below. And I was wondering what kind of Japanese sentences you guys find so “Japanese” as a learner. I’m a weekend Japanese teacher by the way, so your perspectives as a learner will be so helpful.
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* *My father gave it to me*
* Sounds like the father gave it to a person called “Me”. My Japanese brain prefers “I got it from my father”
* *This photo reminds me of my childhood*
* Similar to the first one. “I remember my childhood when I see this photo” sounds Japanese to me.
* W*hat brought you here?*
* Again. “What” doesn’t bring anything. I came here of my own will.
* *It is 10 cm on the map. That is 100 km in real terms*
* Shouldn’t “that” be “this”?
* *Do you want to help me with this task?*
* Why on earth I “want” to help you with a task
* *It’s important to study everyday*
* What’s the “it” doing there?
19 comments
This is a great question and I look forward to seeing the answers. A couple from me:
〜させていただきます very roundabout and adds lots of syllables. Both seem extremely Japanese to me.
明日、雨は降るでしょう also seems very Japanese. Adding an extra (unneeded in English) layer of “can’t be sure”ness
And I guess people will point out the entire 敬語 framework which takes a lot of work for a native English speaker to master.
Hyphenated grammars in English approximate Japanese word order
I want the you-didnt-lick-it candy please
Sure you can say I want the candy that you didn’t lick, but sometimes we use this structure for various effects
Most famously the nyquil ad
The cough-sneezing-so-you-can-rest-better medicine
That’s a phrase directly modifying a following noun
I think of sentences in passive voice as being Japanese-like. Japanese uses passive voice much more than English does
Not grammar but パン is pronounced pan in Japanese and Spanish and it means the same Lol. I know they borrowed it from the Portuguese but I love it 🙂
Also, when my level of Japanese will allow me to talk to natives, I will introduce the phrase:
これはこれです (it is what it is). I will explain that it doesn’t have to make sense in Japanese but it does in English
Also, I will introduce my trademarked おはよう(ohiō)
SOV sentence order, agglutinative phrases, and particles.
The “indirectness” is specific to polite Japanese (敬語) and not a grammatical property of the language. こっち来いこの野郎! is also Japanese.
Double negatives is very Japanese to me. Like なければならない 😅
For #6, “it” at the start of a sentence doesn’t actually have grammatical meaning, it’s added only because English (and this goes for some other languages too like French with cela/c’est) has the “EPP feature”, meaning it needs to have something in the [subject] category for the sentence to be grammatical. So when there is no actual subject we have to add “it”
ツッコミ的なコメントが面白いですw
I never understood why Japanese doesn’t use an equivalent to “must”.
なければなりません
It is so…like long for nothing.
Can’t come up with anything for English but I got one for Russian:
Russian has a polite imperative verb conjugation that is exactly like the te-form in sound and use. As in the verb ends in a “te” sound (though the t is soft).
So something like “ПодойдиТЕ пожалуйста” is literally 来てください – with the first word being “come” (I capitalised the “te” part) and the second is just like ください.
A device that’s often used in fiction that I always thought was extremely Japanese is a whole sentence that modifies a free-standing noun, like:
昨日のパーティーで踊り続け、友達と笑い、夜空を見上げた美しい思い出を持つ田中さん
“Do you want to help me with this task?” is more polite than asking, “Help me with this task.” The first sentence is a question and gives the listener the option to refuse to help. The second sentence is a command and would be considered rude in most situations. Commands are more polite in English when you phrase them as a question.
It took me a while to fully wrap my head around the use of が and だ、です for all adjectives without interference from English semantics. Constructions like 彼女は故郷が恋しい still sound a bit strong to me even though I know it’s grammatical. I think it’s mostly due to the fact that I think of it as “to miss” something which is a verb.
Nobody seems to mention passives. (Which I don’t believe should count as passives at all, but whatever).
Here’s an example I pulled from the internet:
(あのおじさんに)タバコを吸われた。
In all the other languages I’m familiar with passive gets rid of the accusative case (arguably marked here by を), but whatever Japanese does doesn’t really get rid of verb arguments, it just reshuffles them in a very unique, Japanese way.
I think the most Japanese grammar point (to me) is relative clauses, which can be illogical from an English speaker when the doer of the action in the clause is omitted (as it often is).
Cos’ in English “the [noun] that [verb-s]” means that noun did the verb, no exception.
But in Japanese, you can have （私が）作ったご飯（食べないの？）, which if we apply the English logic means that the meal engaged in the action of cooking! The egg fried this rice indeed. Then, you can have the more logical English-like 作られた食べ物 (the food that was made), but the nuance changes.
This is similarly the case for things like 分かったこと or 書いた文章.
I’ve come to see relative clauses as something like ok, i’m just gonna throw a bunch of information in front of the noun. you figure out how it’s related to the noun.
This is a great post. I’ll try to think of some Japanese ones tomorrow but for now I’ll just comment on your examples.
Your example 1 is just indirect object stuff. We also get hung up on particles with もらう for example for similar reasons
>This photo reminds me of my childhood
‘remind’ is one of those great English words that doesn’t seem to have a one size fits all Japanese equivalent
>What brought you here?
Similarly the ここ in ここは日本だから日本語を勉強しな or the どこ in どこの会社？ make no sense in English. To add to your examples, the sentence “who do you work for?” is very strange in Japanese.
>It is 10 cm on the map. That is 100 km in real terms
>Shouldn’t “that” be “this”?
I believe this is something deeper in Japanese where you use “この” or これ to refer to something within the category of something previously mentioned, whereas in English we use ‘that / those’ for whatever reason.
庭にクリスマスローズを植えた。[この・✘その] 花はクリスマスにもローズ（ばら）にも関係はないのだが、なぜかこの名前がついている。
>Do you want to help me with this task?
Similarly, Japanese often phrases requests with てほしい, てくだしい and ご協力、which sound really pushy when directly translated to English, and for advertising you often use しましょう which sounds really wishy-washy compared to the command form in English advertising like ‘obey your thirst’ or ‘just do it’
>It’s important to study everyday
What’s the “it” doing there?
These ‘dummy nouns’ have been the subject of much debate among grammarians, even Noam Chomsky threw his hat in the ring on this one
I think your top takeaway should be that English has a ‘more alive’ way to say the same thing as the ‘more dispassionate ” way. Active and passive voice are critical for raising or lowering the emotional investment of the sentence. ‘My Father gave it to me” has a far more personal, emotional level than “It was given to me by my Father.” The passive voice is clinical and indifferent to an English speaking ear. That’s why, in Creative Writing, we stress to avoid passive voice as much as possible.
##1. adjectives
they work kind of similarly in English, you put them right in front of the noun
e.g.
little girl
小さな少女
##2. ~looking
～みたい grammar really reminds me of English
e.g., that car-looking thing
車みたいなもの
##3. Nouns don’t have a gender
Like English, Japanese nouns don’t have a gender. One less thing to memorize.
I cringe at certain ways of phrasing and omissions in things like （いただけ）ればと思います and じゃないか（な）と（思います）
Of course onomatopoeia, not only being used for effect but also seen almost as valid as any other word, is very Japanese also