For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking about starting to learn Japanese. I don’t quite know where the urge originally came from, but for at least two or three years now I’ve found Japan, both in language and in culture, extremely interesting.
As it happens, I’ve lately come into contact with an abnormally high number of people who either know the language or have been to Japan for longer periods of time. I’m certainly no fatalist, but this does feel a bit like an omen. A timely reminder, if you will.
So I decided to go ahead and start with the lingo. For now, I’m a complete illiterate—I’d probably die of starvation if I were to find myself in Tokyo for any extended period of time—but I’m slowly learning.
So I decided it would be a whole lot of fun to chart out some of the general vibes I get from things Japanese. Plus, incorporating snippets of East Asian text (or at least something reminiscent of it) on these pages gives me my first chance of trying out CJKV and i18n techniques, something which I have a hunch I’ll shortly be bumping into at the workplace, anyway…
The Japanese language is something that I find peculiarly fascinating. I guess it sort of pushes my Finnish buttons, as the two languages have a number of unlikely similarities. But then, on the other hand, not too many.
To a Finnish ear, the sound of contemporary spoken Japanese is the one of an overly regular shotgun delivery of syllables. The overall prosody bears little similarity to the Finnish one; the tone of voice used by the Japanese cannot even begin to be decoded starting from a knowledge of the Finnish language, and moods do not gracefully cross the language gap. It is profoundly difficult for a naïve Finnish person to tell what is going on with a Japanese speaker, even after learning the basics of the language.
For some reason there appears to be a large difference between Japanese spoken by males and females. The female pronunciation sounds a bit like Motherese, that is, the mode of speech adults tend to switch to when speaking to small children, or perhaps even a bit like the way Finnish children speak. This lends Japanese spoken by females an eerie, endearing quality.
The male pronunciation often sounds considerably harsher, sometimes even hostile. The latter probably happens because some of the cues that Finnish uses to signal aggression are used in entirely different contexts. In fact, some of these cues arise seemingly out of nowhere, being part of some Japanese people’s personal manner of speech. The variation in tone simply isn’t significant in Japanese, or serves to signal the background or social status of the speaker, something that rarely happens in Finnish. This can make Japanese sound quite masculine and powerful, something which probably has a lot to do with the kick Western people get out of samurai movies and the martial arts.
One particularly weird characteristic of Japanese caused by its alien prosody is the detached quality this gives to the language when heard through Finnish ears. Normal, unemotional Japanese can sound as though the speaker is not even there, but speaks only through total automation. The transition to an excited or intimate tone of voice is then quite a jump indeed.
From what little I know of its grammar and pronunciation, Japanese
seems not to be an especially difficult language for a Finnish person
to learn. This is of course limited to the spoken form, since written
Japanese is an utter nighmare. The only true difficulties I’ve
encountered thus far are the complexities of enumeration (e.g. there
is absolutely no sense in the counter used when counting rabbits), the