Japanese explained to programmers

I have often thought that people who advocate anything but rote-learning of English spelling are misguided. I know that phonetics are a popular myth in English.

Rote learning of English spelling is a much more daunting task than rote learning of kanji. To unfairly cherry-pick from the paragraph above, the English word "person" is about 10 strokes; "people" is also 10 strokes. But there is no obvious connection between the two words and the different spellings have to be memorized individually. 人 is two strokes; 人人 is four strokes; 人々 is six? All are easier to memorize, easier to write, and easier to read. Of course, I might have cherry-picked the most extreme comparison. But even that little four letter word "myth" is 9 strokes and must be rote memorized. It is a small word in English. Somebody else can correct my belief that 9 strokes is not short in kanji.

Ok, I'll correct myself. 神話 is a 9? stroke character and a 13? stroke character. So 22 strokes total? It's funny what we convince ourselves to believe when we cherry-pick. "God talk" is a 5 stroke word + an 8 stroke word. "God speek" is 5+10. So even if I go out of my way to justify my belief in Japanese brevity I have to start rethinking. Maybe if I can think of a word like "deity" or something with even more strokes I could eventually avoid having to adopt a new position on which language is easier.

Another observation is the number of times each day a Japanese person whips up their hand as a chalkboard and asks, "This or this?" while air drawing out two different kanji. The fact that the observer can recognize the characters written in air has always seemed instructive to me, though.

This is not uncommon for the children of Japanese people living in the West, particularly when they have married non-Japanese. They pick up the spoken language via osmosis but the written language…not so much. It is, as I said, very hard and cannot be mastered without extensive study. Many of these hafu, as the Japanese refer to them, nonetheless enjoy successful careers in Japan, presumably usually in environments that don’t require them to read anything.

As to your English example, it…doesn’t really work? There are languages that aren’t dependent on word order for their meaning, but English - shorn of the grammatical signifiers retained by many of its brethren - is not one of them. Latin is famously largely order-independent; another topical example would in fact be Japanese! Its particle-based system for annotating subjects and objects mean their position is unimportant; the only real requirement is that the verb comes at the end.

My understanding about Chinese is that what makes it hard for English speakers is that it’s a tonal language. Hearing the tones at all, and even more so reproducing them, can be very hard for many English native adults.

The Glaswegians would like a word…

> It may sound like nitpicking... [snip]

You're entirely right, what I said there was incorrect (or sloppy at best.) Thank you for the correction.

> That's why it's called a zero-が if there's no "が", because every valid Japanese sentence needs a subject.

This is the part which I find unhelpful. You could say "every valid English sentence needs a subject and a verb", and you'd be having a hard time finding a sentence in e.g. the U.S. constitution that doesn't explicitly contain a subject and a verb.

But in Japanese, not every sentence needs to specify the subject. Every sentence still has a subject, because the definition of a sentence is "a subject and a predicate", but that applies to every human language.

The problem then is that the "zero-が" then feels like bolting a potentially ungrammatical (or at the very least unnatural) construct onto every sentence to explain the simple fact that yes, indeed, Japanese sentences do have a subject, but it's often unspecified. It also misses the important point that が, by clarifying the subject, also has the role of emphasizing it, which changes the meaning of the sentence.

To go on a bit of a tangent, Hungarian has a similar problem. It also frequently omits the subject, and specifying it also changes the meaning of the sentence:

* Lefekszem. =I'm going to sleep. (The subject is already specified by the conjugation.)

* Én lefekszem. =It's specifically me, who is going to sleep. (For example, you are asked if you're going to the after-party, but in contrast to others, you're tired and want to sleep.)

You could add an "implicit én" to the first sentence, to show that yes, it indeed does have a subject. Maybe it's helpful for people whose native language can't just omit the subject. But it subtly changes the meaning, so ultimately I don't think it's very good analysis, but rather "translating into your native language."

As I said, I'm not an expert, but I hope what I'm saying makes sense.