> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
> We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
> at our Flemish school
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.
The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: <https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.
Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".
Calling people racist when they try to be helpful might say more about you than them.
I mean what I say and say what I mean is also something worth striving for.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
> My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
I disagree with this. I never want a stranger to give me a correction on my language skills. Unless they've been asked to help, they're being rude, even if they don't mean to be rude and even if they aren't being derogatory.
I go back to the point about "how would you feel if someone corrected your english pronunciation". Maybe they're doing it to be helpful. Maybe the rest of your pronunciation is pretty spot on, and they're helping you correct a single word. It's still embarrassing (and embarrassing someone is rude!). Maybe it isn't for you, but it is for most people.
I already have a teacher, and I've asked friends and family to correct me, but I don't want a stranger correcting me.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.