Japanese Language

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ようこそJapaneseLanguageへ！日本語に興味を持てば、どうぞ登録して勉強しましょう！日本語に関係するどのテーマ、質問でも大歓迎します。 This is a community dedicated to the Japanese language. Feel free to come in and ask questions or post your thoughts and opinions about this beautiful language.

Feel free to check out the web archive of r/LearnJapanese's resources if you're looking for more learning material or tools to aid you in your Japanese language journey!

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Remember that you can add furigana to your posts by writing ~{KANJI|FURIGANA}~ like:

~{漢字|かんじ}~ which comes out as:

{漢字|かんじ}

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@japaneselanguage I like how Japanese is simply structured. Especially as a programmer, I have been able to pick up Japanese due to how sentences are structure (mastodon.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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@japaneselanguage I like how Japanese is simply structured. Especially as a programmer, I have been able to pick up Japanese due to how sentences are structured.

(I don't have a Japanese keyboard.)

watashi wa (
niji ni (
hirugohan o (
tabemasu
)
)
)

Everything can be broken into blocks which is really nice. This is what programming languages do, so this feels very natural to me.

My native language is English, but I am thinking of moving to Japan.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

To be honest that’s also not exactly how I picture Japanese anymore, but I do remember feeling like this at some point during my learning process.

I think it’s partially because of the way in which Japanese is taught at large. You learn that Japanese follows a very rigid [word+particle] structure and these are your building blocks. Which while not completely untrue, obviously doesn’t exactly represent the way the language operates in the wild either.

Nowadays I’m far more likely to see the patchy and very chaotic nature behind Japanese. How okurigana uses are inconsistent a lot of the time, or how you can see the places where Classical Chinese was retrofit to very awkward grammar for it, or how historical changes in pronunciation has led to weird spellings or even entire conjugations.

But I guess that comes with getting more intimate with the language and knowing how to shape it to your own needs. I can see how a first approximation to Japanese language makes it appear blocky and structured. That’s kind of why you start with many of those forms in the first place.