That despite the fact katakana are often spelling “English” words, I get stuck trying to figure out what word it is all the time!
And then sometimes you realise the word isn’t English, it’s actually Japanese but written in Katakana for some reason lol
I find it funny that the adjective version of 大人, 大人しい, doesn’t mean “adultlike” (at least not directly) but rather means meek, obedient or docile. I don’t pretend to know Japanese culture to know why this might be and the most obvious assumptions seems like it could be very patronizing if wrong, but it’s an odd little mismatch!
The sheer amount of homophones. At first I was bothered by them, but with time I started to appreciate them, because it’s easier to memorize, for example, a word like 臍下 (せいか) if I already know many of its homophones (成果, 聖火, 青果, 生家, 盛夏, 製菓, 精華, 聖歌 etc.). So now I find them an interesting quirk of the Japanese language.
It isn’t exactly the same, but we kinda do the same thing in reverse with gerunds. We take verbs and turn them into nouns. But we just use the base form instead of adding something. Also the を can be added but isn’t necessary :).
The “english” that not really english. I was playing a visual novel and the phrase ノーデリカシー came up to describe a tactless person. That phrase was then used as a -な adjective. The combination of “english” with japanese grammar rules is always funny to me.
I think its kind of funny how japanese uses a lot of english words but the japanese people themselves tend to be pretty bad english (at least from my experience)
The inordinate amount of time learners of Japanese devote to making posts about random stuff on this subreddit instead of asking questions to get further along in their studies.
That the normal, default way of saying “must [do something]” is a convoluted double negative.
金玉
How some things are pretty simple to say like there’s no need for nouns and sometimes you can just say one word to respond to a question because everything is implied but also because everything is implied, there’s so much assumption so that’s why a lot of Japanese have problems with miscommunication 😬
>For me I think it’s funny that many verbs are just a noun and the する tied to it.
We do this a bit in English but I think not as much just cause of how our language structure makes it easier to invent a verb from any other word. Like how in the social media era ‘friend’ became a verb in certain contexts and everyone understood pretty much immediately, even if it made for some awkward conjugations at first (friended, unfriend etc).
But in Japanese, because of how verbs are structured one couldn’t just wave their hand and make 友達 a verb… unless you add する 😉
I find the mimicry words funny, I wish we used them in English (I’m sure there’s some but common ones would be cool)
I always thought Takadanobaba sounded funny on the train
13 comments
That despite the fact katakana are often spelling “English” words, I get stuck trying to figure out what word it is all the time!
And then sometimes you realise the word isn’t English, it’s actually Japanese but written in Katakana for some reason lol
I find it funny that the adjective version of 大人, 大人しい, doesn’t mean “adultlike” (at least not directly) but rather means meek, obedient or docile. I don’t pretend to know Japanese culture to know why this might be and the most obvious assumptions seems like it could be very patronizing if wrong, but it’s an odd little mismatch!
The sheer amount of homophones. At first I was bothered by them, but with time I started to appreciate them, because it’s easier to memorize, for example, a word like 臍下 (せいか) if I already know many of its homophones (成果, 聖火, 青果, 生家, 盛夏, 製菓, 精華, 聖歌 etc.). So now I find them an interesting quirk of the Japanese language.
It isn’t exactly the same, but we kinda do the same thing in reverse with gerunds. We take verbs and turn them into nouns. But we just use the base form instead of adding something. Also the を can be added but isn’t necessary :).
The “english” that not really english. I was playing a visual novel and the phrase ノーデリカシー came up to describe a tactless person. That phrase was then used as a -な adjective. The combination of “english” with japanese grammar rules is always funny to me.
I think its kind of funny how japanese uses a lot of english words but the japanese people themselves tend to be pretty bad english (at least from my experience)
The inordinate amount of time learners of Japanese devote to making posts about random stuff on this subreddit instead of asking questions to get further along in their studies.
That the normal, default way of saying “must [do something]” is a convoluted double negative.
金玉
How some things are pretty simple to say like there’s no need for nouns and sometimes you can just say one word to respond to a question because everything is implied but also because everything is implied, there’s so much assumption so that’s why a lot of Japanese have problems with miscommunication 😬
>For me I think it’s funny that many verbs are just a noun and the する tied to it.
We do this a bit in English but I think not as much just cause of how our language structure makes it easier to invent a verb from any other word. Like how in the social media era ‘friend’ became a verb in certain contexts and everyone understood pretty much immediately, even if it made for some awkward conjugations at first (friended, unfriend etc).
But in Japanese, because of how verbs are structured one couldn’t just wave their hand and make 友達 a verb… unless you add する 😉
I find the mimicry words funny, I wish we used them in English (I’m sure there’s some but common ones would be cool)
I always thought Takadanobaba sounded funny on the train