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| (pic from google) |
One of the reasons as to why I wanted to learn Japanese is because I thought the language was really beautiful, but as you learn a language more and more you'll realize that there are both really cool and somewhat annoying things about it. I've been thinking about my likes and dislikes about Japanese as a language and decided to write them down.
Like - No need to use pronouns! In other languages (though not all ofc) you have to say he/she his/hers and so on to indicate who owns/does something etc. So sometimes you will call people by the wrong pronouns and stuff like that, which some people care about. But in Japanese that wont be a problem. You will basically never hear yourself saying he or she or have someone say that about you and I like that!
Dislike - Limited ways of expressing yourself. In English for example there are so many ways to say so many things and so many words and expressions that do not have an equivalent in Japanese. This becomes really clear when you watch a movie with Japanese subtitles and they say something really funny that just becomes something bland or boring in Japanese. When I watched the Avengers with Japanese subs in the cinema here this became very clear and it kinda sucks.
Like - Kanji! Yep, it's true, kanji has helped me a lot! Every time I hear a word I don't know I try to think of what kanji that word is made up of, and if I can find out the kanji then I can get an idea of what the word means or in fact remember that I know this word and now thanks to the kanji it has been restored in my memory!
Dislike - Kanji! Oh? Yes, kanji is not all fun and games as we all know. I really hate it when I am reading something and there is no furigana and the text is full of kanji I do not know. I can't read when that happens, I can't understand the story and I can't even pronounce the kanji I don't know! Sucks.
Like - Not just a different accent - different words! People in Osaka (for example) use a lot of words that people from Tokyo don't. Wherever you go in Japan it seems like each new prefecture has their own way of talking, kinda like their own language in a way. In Sweden we don't really have this, accents can vary a lot by tone etc, but the words people use are pretty much the same all over.
Osaka dialect:
Sehen = shinai (normal dialect)
Donaisho = doushiyo
etcetc
Dislike - This is just a small one but I dislike that there is no way of differentiating between for example your grandma on your mothers side and your grandma on your fathers side. This is not possible in English either, which is annoying too. In Swedish we can differentiate between these two, for example grandma on mum's side = mormor, grandma on dad's side = farmor. I wish more languages had this!
Dislike - Two ways to say everything! Thanks to kanji there are two ways of saying everything (you might have heard of kunyomi and onyomi). So "inside the car" can be said as "kuruma no naka" but it can also be said as "sha nai". "After school" can be said as "Gakkou no ato" but also as "Hou ka go. And this happens for almost everything! Which means that you have to learn two versions of everything, something that for example doesn't happen in english or Swedish. There are no two completely different ways of saying "inside the car", right?
These are just some likes/dislikes that I could think about now. Would like to know other peoples likes and dislikes too!
