Can anyone translate?

ily2╰(・◡・╰)

i'm talking to my friend who lives in japan rn and i showed him this vid and a vid of some chic saying "nyaaaaaa" over and over and he's was like "wtf?" except in japanese. i was like.........ikr.

 

Or one set of characters, rather. There are at least three different alphabets in Japanese.​

 

I will never know Japanese.

 

And the Kanji alphabet isn't even based on sounds. Each character has a meaning, and those characters with meanings can be combined to make other words that mean other things.

You see, the Japanese are a very intuitive people. For example, you can combine the kanji for "woman" and the kanji for "small" to get the kanji for "carburetor."

 

how do you say 'eggroll' with kanji?

 

卵焼き = tamagoyaki or the japanese version of an egg roll. egg rolls are traditionally chinese and you would say:

蛋卷 = dan juan ​

 

Kanji would perhaps be the most common characters in use and also the most complicated for English-speakers to learn and understand. They are typically used to denote a large amount of words in Japan. The other two systems are hiragana and katakana, which are the syllabic characters. The more loopy hiragana you are prone to see involved with Japanese grammar and morphology constructions, and katakana is typically used with words of foreign origin such as wasei-eigo and gairago (English loan words and general loan words respectively, I believe).

Kanji is a very interesting system because it is logographic - that is, like Keyblade Spirit said earlier, the characters represent ideas and are independent from pronunciation. Now, this means two things:

1. Kanji can have multiple meanings for the same logograph, noted as different readings of kanji
2. These logographic systems are pronounced differently among different languages that use them, e.g. Kites' example of the eggroll. Namely because various mainland Chinese languages/dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan) all have varying pronunciations for these same ideas which are represented equally.

However, Japanese orthography and phonology are typically approachable by English speakers. The current romanization system in use, Hepburn, known as the standard style or simply now just rōmaji, easily breaks things down - not only so, but Japanese phonology in general is again, fairly approachable (barring accent development, because you will still probably sound like a gaijin).
There are a few exceptions of course. the "u" is not pronounced like the rounded but is unrounded [ɯ], along with the fact that in certain instances the "u" appears to be silent altogether since it is not a very strong vowel (contrast the French "e"). The "fu" is pronounced more akin to being between that and "hu" [hɯ] and the most challenging phonetic sound would probably be the "r", which is between an "r" and "l". Of course, there are variations in regards to dialect and internal Japanese regional accents. Personally I find Japanese phonology much easier to pick up than a mainland Chinese language or even Korean (the Korean Revised Romanization is a deal more ... complicated than Japanese Hepburn, but it is fitting considering how Korean is a CVC language and Japanese is more a CV(C) language). Not only that but tying into the aforementioned kanji usage, it would be easier to pick up.

Japanese grammar is funky but okay. It is at its roots an SOV language (subject-object-verb) but besides that word order is extremely varying, more so than German and perhaps equal to Russian, and context has a much greater basis in Japanese. If I understand correctly, the context is what drives most casual Japanese conversations - one does not have to be so specific and overly-careful with "complete sentences" because the idea is generally understood from context, and over-filled sentences would make them sound redundant and unnecessarily verbose (like this post). Nouns typically have few inflections (changes), adjectives are inflected based on two general types if I recall correctly, grammatical particles exist through postpositions (see, watashi wa, where "wa" is the subject particle suffix). Verbs are actually equal in complication of conjugation to a number of Romance languages in my opinion, if not slightly more complicated due to the variation and difference in why the verbs are complicated.

Due to cultural and historical development, along with Chinese influence, Japan, like Korea, has a greater base on well, social position and hierarchies. The result of this is a fairly complicated honourific system that also shows up quite a bit in how one conjugates verbs. Understanding the totality of the honourifics is key to getting one's head around verbal constructions and the like, along with not looking like a disrespectful person I suppose. Japanese grammar has a number of other interesting peculiarities which I suppose you can look into on your own time, like the pronoun variations which are also tied into honourifics.

That being said, the kanji remembrance is most likely the greatest challenge of Japanese, besides getting used to the grammar. If I recall correctly, 7000 or so kanji are required to be remembered in order to pass high school? But that is very slippery and someone please correct me on that if I am incorrect.

All of this being said, Japanese is a beautiful language, and the kanji and grammar combine to make a language that is extremely rich and vivid. It is no wonder that both Japanese aesthetic taste and literary works have been commended for being beautifully elegant.

Please, anyone correct me with any inaccuracies in the above (looking at you, Kites-sama).


tl;dr - What? splurges about Japanese like a linguistics nerd

 

very well put. a lot of japanese have difficulty remembering kanji so it definitely is hard for even japanese nationals to recall. what you see on many building signs is hiragana most of the time (speaking from personal experience). russian on the other hand has a pretty set structure but the word order has a tendency to shift around a lot. For example if one wanted to say "I love you" you could say Я тебе люблю or Я люблю тебе (easiest example i can think of since i say it all the time to my grandmother). Same meaning, different order. Other phrases are more strict, but it's just something you pick up over time through conversation. SEE WHAT YOU DID ASHWIN? MAKING ME TALK ABOUT LANGUAGES!!

 

Notable example:
糸
色

望

This, I believe, is pronounced Itoshiki Nozomu, a name. When written horizontally (糸色 望), it resembles 絶望, which is pronounced zetsubou, which means despair. It's a common joke in this one anime about a depressed and suicidal schoolteacher.

tl;dr: KS discusses the most complex thing he knows about the Japanese language.

Disclaimer: I don't really know how accurate any of this is.

 

The confusion in this thread is really Misty. I wish I knew What? The Fuk? you were talking about. . . .

 

Congratulations, you've figured out the most used joke in forum history.

 

Yes! Just a side note regarding both languages: Russian is typically more flexible in word order than Japanese, in retrospect. Namely because Russian's case system allows you to have virtually any order and one can still be understood because the case system changes or inflects the various words in the sentence, meaning that the word is assigned a grammatical role (subject, object, possessive, etc.) not from its sentence position but from something inherent in the word's case inflection itself.

Apologies Kites.

and to Keyblade Spirit's point, his despair example is generally a good example of how the versatility of kanji allows for an extremely large amount of puns in Japanese, more so than English. Much more so than English.

 

ahahahahahahahahaa

 

Yo, dis **** be crayfish dfacts bean as dey is dat japspaneez ain't done use no alfabits. Dey gon go yous a fukkin syllabarry an a fukkin pictograffix sistam mane. Dat nigs be santy bogglin' day ain't nobady fukkin seis no sheet 'bout dat nigguh. Swag, tryna post srs ain't gon work like dis dawg.