Katakana, The Actual Hardest Part About Japanese

5 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Sorry, I couldn’t get through your video. I was curious to hear what you meant with “fixing Japanese” but I can’t torture myself with a minutes long explanation for what romaji is. Get to the point!

   Edit: You should know who your intended audience is. If it is normies that have never studied Japanese, then fine, explain romaji, but in that case it’s probably not a good idea to post that video on this subreddit. If it is active learners of Japanese, then the romaji explanation is superfluous.

3. Good luck with this 👍

4. The Chinese students at my language school said katakana was probably the most difficult at early stages. Most of them had not studied any English so a lot of katakana was gibberish to them.

5. I spent too long on this, so TL;DR: Romaji is a system of representation, not writing, katakana use for foreign loan words is incidental, foreign loan words =/= foreign words and shouldn’t be thought of as such, kanji use for loan words is a result of use in Chinese, and banning katakana would be like banning majuscule except with even more knock-on effects that make Japanese harder to understand.

   Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there.

   >Romaji is a writing system of Japanese

   Now, you’ve already mentioned that you’re aware people don’t always include this as a writing system, so I’ll be brief; Japanese *linguists* are among one of the groups that follow that train of thought. There is no consistent system of romaji, and it’s purpose is only ever to represent the other three systems, never to replace. This is why ‘konnpixyu-ta-‘ is a *valid* use of romaji, because if you type that in your keyboard, you still get コンピューター. And that’s all romaji is; a method of ***representing*** the Japanese writing systems using Latin script.

   >Katakana exists for foreign loan words

   Yes, but no. Katakana was originally the main script for legal documents, with hiragana being more vulgar, originally being the feminine syllabary script (this male/female divide is a big part of why there are two). The idea of hiragana being the legal script is something that changed only very recently. As in, [2005](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B0%91%E6%B3%95%E7%8F%BE%E4%BB%A3%E8%AA%9E%E5%8C%96) recently.

   Katakana has never existed for the *purpose* of being used for foreign loan words, this is incidental.

   >Foreign loan words are foreign words

   Again, this is not correct. Foreign loan words, in any language, are still words in those languages. The concept of ‘loan word’ only refers to the idea of them originating in different places. English is a massive culprit of this; only a fraction of English vocabulary originates within English, with the two biggest sources being French and *Latin* (English isn’t even a romance language). But we don’t say that English is 80% foreign words, we say that 80% of English words have foreign origins.

   So when you point out that バイキング means buffet, yes, that’s true…And not a problem. For the same reason why it’s not a problem that the English word ‘buffet’, itself a french loan word, came into English through a misunderstanding, as the actual original word referred to the furniture that the food was placed on, and only referred to the format later. Not to mention the kerfuffle with the Swedish word ‘Smorgasbord’ and how that, actually referring to a buffet format, came into English only to become a far more general word i.e. ‘a smorgasbord of ideas/emotions, etc.’ that could be applied to almost anything. This isn’t true to the original Swedish, but that doesn’t matter, because English ‘smorgasbord’ is now an English word.

   By the way, this does tie into a later point you made regarding katakana being used to learn English, and is the same reason why katakana is so detrimental in English education.

   I’ve already made this too long, and I’d like to thank anyone still reading. Last two, I’ll make this quick.

   >Wait, these loan words are in kanji

   [Thank Chinese for that](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-chinese-simplified/coffee). The Chinese, not having a syllabary, use closely-approximated characters to sound out foreign loan words. The Japanese only borrow these because they look more fancy (the same reason why English speakers think French/Latin loan words sound fancy), even when the Japanese on’yomi doesn’t match the sound of the loan word in Japanese. That’s a problem; this means that the use of Chinese characters to sound them out phonetically only works *because* the Japanese have a system that they use to spell them first, and then stack the kanji *on top* of that understanding. If you remove that system, you will force the Japanese into a square-peg-in-round-hole situation.

   >Let’s ban katakana

   No. Japanese katakana is surprisingly useful for the amount of effort required to learn it, since it provides that opportunity to distinguish between different types of words, different tones of speech (it’s sometimes used as an equivalent to ALL-CAPS), different contexts, etc. etc. and the idea that katakana is some kind of bizarre or unusual thing is especially strange coming from an English speaker. It’s really not that different to the difference between majuscule and minuscule. Example from one of my favourite authors; majuscule is how Terry Pratchett represents the otherworldliness of [Death](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1857065-mort).