The Japanese language puts students at a disadvantage
japaneseruleof7.com
japaneseruleof7.com
> Every bookstore, magazine stand, and school, has a significant portion of its bookshelves packed with comic books. Why? It’s generous, and a bit dismissive, to say that Japanese folks simply love “cute” things. It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level.
> Kids in Spain are reading Kiss of the Spiderwoman , kids in America Harry Potter, and kids in Japan . . . Naruto, the adolescent ninja. What’s Japan famous for? Literature? Movies? Music? Web design? Please. Comic books. Anime. Illustrations everywhere.
Right, I'm guessing they haven't read Tales of Genji or Saikaku or watched many of the films out of Japan in the Criterion collection. But let's dismiss an entire culture and history because of the popularity of anime (which, by the way, is not just for kids, but that's a different topic).
> Japanese people themselves are aware of this; if not individually, then at least as a group. In recent years a flood of new words has entered the language, and guess what, they’re all written with the Japanese phonetic alphabet, katakana.
And that's because they can't read it? WTF. Katakana is pretty. It's marketing. Sometimes Japanese poetry (yes it exists) uses katakana for style and emphasis. I don't claim to know how Japanese marketing works but you, author, don't either.
> Nobody bothers to make kanji for stuff anymore, because half the time, no one can read it.
What? Even if you're being hyperbolic, that's still too much. Yes, there's a lot of difficult kanji even for native speakers. For foreigners like me, it's the biggest barrier to learning it. But to claim that native born speakers can't recognize half the words in common use...
> Ever wonder why Japanese people have such trouble learning English? Just look at how well they speak their own language.
Again, even if you move past the reductive reasoning and general racist stereotyping, it's just plainly wrong. Even in a logical level. Do you really think a nation of people who speak a language can't do it well? Why do they choose that language then?
Seriously, I get "skepticism", but wtf HN. If it looks racist and smells racist, let's not just skid past it and just inquiry about "supporting data".
The author has lived in Japan and studied Japanese for a long time. If you read some of his other posts for context you will see that he deeply admires and loves the Japanese people and their culture.
This article appears to me to be a cathartic rant about Japanese being so difficult to learn that even many Japanese don't master their own language. I lived in Japan for about 3 years and I can corroborate that Japanese people struggle with their own language. For example, the development of word processing has made the problem even worse. When Japanese people consistently use computers for writing they call themselves "Wa-pu-ro baka" (translation "word processing idiot") because they quickly forget how to write kanji by hand.
Actually it is two rants in one. The first rant is about how college level educational standards are very different in the U.S. and Japan. Although I never attended university in Japan, I've met many Japanese college students and their stories corroborate the author's claims of ridiculously easy grading standards.
Regarding word processors, it is true that a lot of people cannot write kanji by hand but that's orthogonal to literacy. I can barely write legibly in the latin alphabet and that's purely because I almost never need to write by hand but that doesn't stop me from consuming books or writing.
In term of the level of universities here, he does have a bit of a point, the undergraduate level in a lot of universities is very low (it gets better in graduate classes though) but, in my experience, good universities like Todai or Kyodai are much better... That's hardly a problem limited to Japan though, I've seen liberal arts degrees in other countries that weren't worth much more than the paper they were printed on.
And, lastly, I agree with Yifanlu, his claim about writings, movies and music is laughable and show a lack of culture from someone who claims to like Japanese culture.
It's not because someone has been living in a country for x years or that someone claims to admire the culture of the country that that person is not racist. If he makes racist comments then he is racist (a cultural racist to use the correct term in this case) ..
But that's besides the point. Just because you lived there and learned the culture (who's to say how well) doesn't mean you can't be racist against them. Otherwise, there's a lot of colonists who we own an apology to.
I've read the author's bio on their site and even there it downplays Japan and Japanese culture and up plays the author themselves.
>"It’s probably truer to note that a significant segment of the population isn’t accustomed to reading, or thinking, at an adult level"
This claim is ridiculous. There is no way you can construe this as anything other than racist.
Edit: I should mention that I live in a "relatively" small city in Japan (180k inhabitants), that many qualify as "inaka" (countryside), although I wouldn't. So the population of Japanese people I know is not necessarily biased towards highly educated people.
I am from India and I have basic familiarity with Japanese and Sanskrit. Both languages rely heavily on context. Since knowledge was mostly passed from master through disciple the information is compressed into smaller sentences easy to memorize. The full meaning was always conveyed through the human interaction. English on other hand seems to have grown during industrial revolution where mass producing information and passing it to people who may no have human being to explain it around was very important. Over years English has evolved to describe all possible information even without the context.
I see western scholars translating Sanskrit word "Namaste" as "Hello" but in reality it is "I bow to you" something that Indians might have well forgotten but they are surely to know the context and a elderly person will not do a "Namaste" to a child. We bow to elders not younger ones.
Similarly Japanse phrase of Itadakemas might be translated merely as "I take" but the English translation does not do justice to it. As an Indian I think I total understand the sentiments behind the phrase.
So I think it would be a mistake to call Japanese people retarded without fully understanding their culture.
Manga (comics) are the way most Japanese learn their language. One of the reasons that manga are so helpful is their usage of furigana which are small hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters printed next to the more difficult kanji characters (pictograms).
Japanese people come in a wide range of IQs just like any other culture. In my experience they are not any more stupid nor any more intelligent than the average U.S. citizen. They do often forget kanji characters, just like you would. It is common for Japanese to ask someone to jog their memory on how a character is written. In this case, people often respond by drawing the character on their palm or saying something like, "anshin no an" meaning it is the same "an" character as in the word "anshin". Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn.
Yes and no. Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing Roman letters/an alphabet to the point where there isn't a great deal of transferability between Western and East-Asian languages.
But people think in composites just as you said - people prompt each other with "anshin no an" or hand drawings. This isn't too different to thinking of spelling in composite blocks of syllables.
Characters are to syllables what strokes are to letters. And people can describe characters in their composite strokes just as a syllable is a composite of letters. The difference is that the association is mechanical/visual, rather than aural.
People making errors by using the wrong "an" or the wrong radical happens just like people getting the order of "i" and "e" mixed up in English... Or German, for that matter.
I'd probably agree that there is a steeper learning curve with character based languages. Possibly even more so with Japanese - Chinese people don't really get the option of kana so are forced to master kanji/hanzi from a younger age through exposure if nothing else. That said, after a certain point, it does genuinely suddenly click. I used to snort in disbelief when my Japanese friend claimed he could memorize 100 kanji in 10 minutes (he was a bit of a machine to be fair) but after my first thousand I was able to memorise entirely new characters after barely a glimpse.
Alas, you can forget them as quickly as you learned them!
arguably Japanese is not a Chinese character based language, but a Chinese character adopted language. Looking at Mandarin it kinda makes sense why a character based written language sprung up. Looking at Japanese and Korean, it boggles the mind why only the Koreans moved away from Chinese characters.
Except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English.
That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are plenty of features in Japanese that make learning Chinese (or vice versa) easier than Mandarin/English. Assuming by "borrowed words" you're referring to onyomi (which is a huge deal in learning languages) there's still the fact that in both Japanese and Chinese (off the top of my head) there is:
- no verbal conjugation
- no genders for nouns
- monosyllabic sounds
- gender ambiguity in pronouns
- no definite article
I'd also argue the concept of tenses is more similar between Japanese and Chinese than Chinese and English.
If you start factoring in things like onyomi, it's a whole different ball-game, and anecdotally I and other people familiar with South-East Chinese dialects (e.g. fujianhua/chaozhouhua) have noticed similarities in the pronunciation of Japanese and Chinese - which makes learning new vocabulary way easier see [0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-Chinese-dialect-is-the-most-simil...
I don't know how you define conjugations, but I consider 食べた a conjugation of 食べる. I know some tokenization systems will split the former into 2 tokens and keep the latter as a single.
The other points in your list I agree with, but I am sure we can find just as many dissimilarities between Japanese and Chinese, although I concede that I was exaggerating with my comment about English.
My point is that the way Chinese is shaped, the character system is befitting. The way Japanese is shaped, it is not, but effort has been made to put them there anyway, which has lead to (at least a written language) far more complicated than necessary.
A friend of mine once described Korean as "Chinese words with Japanese grammar" and the Koreans transitioned away from Chinese characters with great success (and I dare say they are better off having done so) and retain plenty of words that more than resembles their Japanese and Chinese counter parts. I'm assuming you wouldn't argue that Korean is a "Chinese character based language"
Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.
This poem was the go to for people against romanization[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
In short, education through high school is often very demanding, but Japanese colleges are quite easy for liberal arts students. Much less so for STEM subjects.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b...
similar scenario. the society and its insitutions pressure people into participating in academic life regardless of whether or not they have an aptitude for it. inevitably many of them basically fail and do so in ways that are shocking and appalling to their instructors. however, the institution itself (for a variety of reasons) will accommodate these people regardless of their poor state of educational attainment.
> The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit — economic or strategic or otherwise — of Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized) [1]
The author is either writing some kind of bad sarcasm or simple falling prey to the above kind of complex.
I don't want to assign motives but western civilization should learn that just because you don't understand other cultures that does not mean they are stupid, retarded or some how disadvantaged. Provide some data or it is just the prejudice. Japanese people have achieved a lot in short time in fact lot more than almost all their Asian peers. They have achieved this while using their language.
Author should have spent some time learning the Japanese culture and being one of them instead of being judgemental. Consider this line about Manga
> Young adults here read comic books for the same reason children do elsewhere: because they’re fun, funny, and not too hard. Sure, a few deal with “real” issues, but it’s not like we’re talking To Kill a Mockingbird. Who doesn’t like ninjas and pirates? No one in Japan, apparently.
Clearly the author is not familiar with manga culture and has not bothered to read one. I am from India, I have read Harry Potter, Song of Ice and Fire, Mahabharata, Ramayana and Death Note or Naruto. Japanese Manga and Anime both have significant depth, characters which have shades of gray and as an Asian I can relate with Manga characters and story themes lot better than Harry potter which I find too superficial.