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Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

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Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#41

Post by YmMot »

gommm wrote: post #4
Symmetry wrote: post #2

maybe conversational Japanese lets more go unspoken. From the little Japanese I speak I've found that this is indeed the case. Japanese speakers will happily leave out subject, topic, or object of a sentence when it can be inferred from context.

Exactly, the less formal the japanese is, the more unspoken words are left to be guessed by the context... Another interesting thing about japanese is that because of the lower number of different syllables it's easier to understand in situations when it's not possible hear clearly (like on mobile phones when the reception is not good). I've remarked on it when living there and had a researcher working in the field c…

> the lower number of different syllables

I have a theory that this is why the Japanese are so (seemingly) fond of portmanteaus. It makes it easier to smoosh words together.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#42

Post by batista »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #33
batista wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Japanese (at least from what I've gotten from my 4-years in University Studying Japanese literature or something similar for your degree, or just taking some class? Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language...

Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics. Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."? If you mean that the difference in utterances is obvious, sure that can be argued: Doing loose translations with a paragraph of Japanese would probably convert down into a few sentences in English, again d…

>Double major with Japanese and Linguistics, with more of a focus on applied linguistics.

OK, that sounds qualified enought ;-)

>Aside from that, can you clarify more on: "Because the second implies an order or magnitude less insight on the language..."?

Oh, just asking about your involvement with Japanese, if it was just some foreign language class at uni (that almost everybody forgets much about later) or a major.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#43

Post by vorg »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #30
chao- wrote: post #28

Having learned Mandarin and Japanese as a second and third language, respectively, I've been sharing this as an opinion for years, with some examples and anecdotal evidence to back it up. My core observations have been thus: Mandarin, while there is of course grammar, it doesn't get in the way much. The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic id…

Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.

> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective

I tried saying "比+B++A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#44

Post by evincarofautumn »

vorg wrote: post #43
evincarofautumn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandarin grammar isn’t nearly as lax as you make it sound. It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective and 把+object+verb, for example. Still, I agree: Japanese grammar is rather complex and cumbersome, especially if as a foreigner you don’t know the casual abbreviations.

> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+ +A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".

That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment. (I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.)

“他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatically as a topic. In other words, #1 = subject + prepositional phrase + predicate adjective; #2 = topic(al prepositional phrase) + subject + predicate adjective.

I mean, the claim’s not untrue—throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar, because it is simple.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#45

Post by vorg »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #44
vorg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just a (mostly) positional grammar, with few exceptions—A+比+B+adjective I tried saying "比+B+ +A+adjective" to some native speakers the other day, then asked if it was grammatical: they said it was. So I would more go along with Chao's comment on Mandarin: "The basic idea is that you throw some words one after the other and the other person gets the right idea. That basic idea can get you very far.".

That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment. (I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.) “他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatica…

Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of speech.

> throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar

I'd argue pauses, like tones and stress and other "prosodic features", have just an important place as grammar in natural languages.

And... not sure if you're a programmer (this IS Hacker News after all) but... computer languages could also use an equivalent of pauses, stresses, and tones alongside grammar to communicate semantics to the computer and/or other readers. If whitespace and newlines is like pauses then Python uses a combination of pauses (i.e whitespace) and grammar to communicate semantics.

Re: Japanese Conveys Information More Slowly Than Other Languages

#46

Post by evincarofautumn »

vorg wrote: post #45
evincarofautumn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just topic-fronting, used for emphasis or to give context to a comment. (I probably should have said Topic+Subject+Verb+Object.) “他比我高” is “he’s taller than me”; “比我，他高” is “compared to me, he’s taller”. In the first sentence, “比我” is a prepositional phrase, coming as it usually does before the predicate (高). In the second, “比我” is still structurally a prepositional phrase, but its position marks it grammatica…

Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of speech. > throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. Bu…

I’m not a native Chinese speaker. I’ve been studying it at college for about two years, so probably around 300 class hours. I am a programmer, though—that’s probably an understatement. I agree that whitespace is like “silence” in a way. But programming has much more in common with written language than spoken—and as much in common with mathematics as prose—so not everything matches up directly.
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