noglider 

Yes, I notice that Japanese seem to have more trouble learning English than any other foreigner. I don't know why that is.

My brother in law goes to Japan often for business meetings, as he works for Nintendo. (It's a great company to work for.) The Japanese don't even want him to try speaking Japanese!

southpawboston

An American friend used the Engrish/Japlish barrier to comedic effect when getting married in Japan to a Japanese woman. He pretended to say, in Japlish and in all seriousness, that he was only marrying his wife for the money. After her family stared in bewilderment for a few moments, figuring something must have gotten lost in translation, he said in perfect Japanese that he was only kidding. They all thought that was the funniest thing. It totally won them over.

robatsu

Well, unlike the other mostly European languages that Americans commonly learn, the intersection between Japanese and English is way, way, back in human history, like in cro-magnon era. I can pick words and phrases out of many European languages, at least written, based upon latin/germanic roots, but fuhgeddaboutit with Japanese, it is like Klingon, except for recent loan words.

Surprisingly, though, the spoken language at a survival level really isn't too bad with some study. There are only two irregular verbs and the other grammatical rules are completely consistent, very few exceptions. But the written stuff is killer. I can read hiragana and katakana, but only a few kanji, which puts me at basically at the level of a typical beginning 1st grader.

Pretty humbling overall. Fortunately, I have have my 7yo son, who I can get to interpret for me if I bribe him w/some candy or something.

A couple of fun facts about Japanese:

1) Plurals are rare, infrequently used. Talking about my bike or my bikes is largely the same.

2) No articles - one just says "bike", rather than "a bike" or "the bike" or "the bikes".

3) Very weak future tense, as in I will go ride is more or less expressed as "I ride", it is all largely context dependent.

And don't even get me started on address systems. Lots of roads/streets don't even have names in Japan and w/in a political district, buildings are often numbered in the order in which they were built. So people, even in places like Tokyo, navigate like rural people - "Go until you see the red barn, turn left, when you see a cross-eyed cow, turn right...". Everyone has maps on their business cards...

Sort of hard to believe that you can build this advanced technological society where you don't have logical street addresses/names, plurals, future tense, etc, but it all is a testament to human flexibility, I suppose.

robatsu

Interesting thing, people draw a lot of parallels between Japan and Germany. Both have famously imprecise languages, paradoxically, for peoples known for the precision of their efforts and products. But when it comes to sense of humor, the Japanese kill and the Germans are left befuddled, at least in my experience. Japanese tend to enjoy pretty outrageous humor, although that is a broad generalization for a country of 130 million people.

noglider 

German an imprecise language? I would never say that. They still have declensions for their nouns.

robatsu

Well, I'm probably opening a can of worms here, but yeah, I'll agree that German according to Hoyle is quite precise, but this is so onerous that in reality everyone retreats to idiomatic German, which is impenetrable. Again, I'm probably going to get murdered by the German experts, but so be it.

wahoonc

That was my thinking too. I have a fair reading comprehension of German, French, Spanish and a couple of others. Only speak English and I am not even sure I am competent in that anymore. :-P

Aaron

noglider 

Oh, I get it now. I don't know German idioms, so I take your word for it. Idioms are a bear when learning any language.

CMC SanDiego

That's great! I wish I'd taken photo's of all the ones I saw. Unfortunately they were so common, I just laughed and remembered the best ones.

CMC SanDiego

I do like Japanese humor, because often it's so over-the-top. Their gameshows especially are amusing, there was one show called "Fun with Kato and Ken" that I liked to watch (even though I didn't understand what they were saying, their gags were hilarious. On the flip side, I married a German girl (she was raised here though so she has a good sense of humor) and her Dad is completely serious and most humor goes right over his head.

CMC SanDiego

My brother who lives in Japan (his wife is Japanese) recently confided in me that his 3 younger kids weren't allowed into the international school where his two older boys are going because they don't speak enough English (the probably speak some engrish). He says from now on he's going to try speaking just English with the kids because for too many years it's been all Japanese. When he comes to the states and pulls out his Japanese laptop, I can't even begin to comprehend how he uses that thing, but I guess with enough total immersion in a culture and language you eventually pick it up.

I once watched him reading a newspaper and with one article he was reading horizontally like our papers then I saw him jump to reading vertically on the next article. When I asked which way they normally write (up-down, across) he said they just do whatever fits into the available space best, and when you start reading you just read which ever direction makes sense. It blew my mind.

robatsu

I took several years of German in junior/senior high school, so naturally I continued w/a year of this to satisfy my undergrad language requirement in college.

We also had an arts and literature requirement, needed 2 courses of this, so rather than taking an easy route, I figured I would continue to hone my rudimentary German and took German Lit I&II, I was classic German literature, II was more modern stuff.

C&V German literature was the most insanely difficult course I took as an undergraduate despite the fact that my major was physics. Talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool. The lectures were all conducted in German, along with all papers had to be submitted in German. And, unlike the language courses where the topic was, "Excuse me sir, does the bus stop here at 3 o'clock?", the topic of discussion was all this ponderous 19th century Teutonic philosophizing. Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (William Tell) was the worst, laden with archaic Swiss-German dialect that showed up in no dictionary that I could find.

I and fellow named Robbie were the only civilians in this course, everyone else was German or had spend years growing up there w/their family on some foreign posting or some other such connection. We were both in shock and awe after the first weeks of this. We both were going to drop the course, but the prof really urged us to continue, so we did.

Thus, we continued on through this dark impenetrable quagmire. Finally, we get to Minna von Barnhelm, which billed itself as Ein Lustspiel (a comedy). My hopes were soon dashed - while it was a little less dense than the other stuff, it was largely more of the same.

So eventually I go to visit the prof in his office:

me: Minna von Barhelm...

prof: Yes, what about it?

me: It's a comedy, right?

prof: Your point?

me: Well, we are about halfway through it and nothing funny has happened yet.

prof: You have to understand that to the Germans, anything with a happy ending is a comedy.

Now to be fair, we both knew that lustspiel means comedy in the classic Greek sense of the term and there is another German word for our modern American understanding of it as a farce, but I've always appreciated his tongue in cheek observation.

robatsu

We're a little worried about that sort of thing with my boy. He spent his first six years and kindergarten here in the U.S., albeit w/long annual trips to Japan. We were pretty successful in raising him bilingually to that point - mom always talked to him in Japanese and versed him in hiragana/katakana, plenty of video skyping with Japanese relatives, the only TV he ever watched was Japanese language, my wife would rent videos every week at the Japanese grocery store. Actually, once when my sister visited and insisted we all watch Mary Poppins, my son was astonished that our TV could actually speak English.

Naturally, though, at that point his English was stronger than his Japanese, but he was fine with starting first grade at a regular Japanese public school w/absolutely no provision for Japanese as a second language.

A year and a half on, Japanese is definitely his strong suit and we are starting to figure out how to maintain and develop his English. The Japanese only TV idea was pretty effective in his toddler years, kids are fascinated by TV and it gives examples of the language in all sorts of contexts and usages, so we've thought of imposing an English only TV rule while he is in residence in Japan.

The problem with that is that I think the Japanese kids TV programming tends to be a little better. Generally, it seems more wholesome and uplifting, but what I really like is that Japanese TV is laden with lots of stuff about how things work at a fairly high level and it occurs in the most unlikely places. Once I was hanging out in the kitchen w/my mother-in-law, some typical housewife talk show was on, talking about shopping or something. They then move on to a segment about the yen carry trade, bring on a high level economist or two, real technical discussion/diagrams of the mechanism, ramifications, and so forth. This sort of thing happens all over Japanese TV.

And fish, just like it is always Hitler Week on the History Channel, if you flip through the channels, you can almost always find a program about fish or some aquatic creature, its life cycle, habitat, and, being Japan, how it is caught, prepared, and eaten. These shows almost always end with some host taking a tentative bite, eyes widening a bit, making an appreciative "mmmmm" sound.

The other interesting thing is that Japanese pictographs and syllabary have a much greater information density than English written out in roman characters. So all the books tend to be much thinner/smaller, including translations of western works. My wife is always taking days/weeks slogging through these tiny little books, a similarly sized one printed in english you could probably read in a couple of hours.

DiegoFrogs

Having studied Spanish all through high school, I was able to go through college without studying any languages. For my two semesters of a non-western culture requirement, I decided to do Japanese.

I have a weak memory, and really had to work hard to be successful. All the people who took it because they liked Anime quickly disappeared or were ridiculed by myself and my roommate who was also taking the course.

The only connections to the western languages that I found were modern technical words in Katakana and the Japanese word for bread is pan, which is also the same in Spanish.

I'd love to go there and learn more, but alas it's been almost ten years and I work entirely too much...

rhm

First point. I think it is fair to say German is an imprecise language. I will explain that, but I just wanted to start with that point.

Second point. You should assume that any and every human language is perfectly capable of expressing what it needs to express. From this standpoint no human language is better than another.

First point, again. Two examples:

First example, English has a much more nuanced sense of tense. This is lost on most speakers of English and on most speakers of German as well, but in the hands of a precise speaker English can be awesomely precise with tense.

Second example: German requires more words to say the same thing. Take an English book with 100 pages and translate it into German, and you'll have 110 pages.

But as for that LED headlight, I think that is really cool, I would definitely buy a few of those.

I have mounted a lot of sidewall dynamos to my bikes over the years, and I can tell you it is not an exact science. They guys whho make these things do not think through every problem of attachment you or I will encounter. You just have to go ahead and make it happen somehow. I wouldn't worry about the dynamo being cantilevered out forward; they are designed to do this. I think it's a matter of flexibility; the longer the arm the greater likelihood a crash will result in a bent dynamo arm rather than a bent fork or frame. Is it possible to separate the dynamo from the headlight unit? That would be really nice. It probably isn't possible.

robatsu

Actually, the headlight is separable.

JohnDThompson 

Ok:

https://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html#x1

Among other things, the essay quotes an anonymous student as saying he'd "rather decline two drinks than one German noun."

RobbieTunes

My wife was born in Tachikawa, or however you spell it. She's also part Cherokee.

I've long since resorted to hand signals.

RobbieTunes

Very interesting story behind the Gameboy, which is an excellent insight into a culture of loyalty.

RobbieTunes

Growing up in Wisconsin, I met plenty of German idioms.

-holiday76

i use those with my wife too, but mainly just because of her bad attitude.