The sins of Japanese orthography

[@Ataleay]

as a Polish person, I no longer feel the urge to complain whenever a word decides to not follow a rule that 99% of other words follow.

[@MaoRatto]

xD As an American dealing with Swedish, Indonesian, and half of the major romance languages... Except French and Romanian. English's writing must be the worst in Europe. It doesn't help as a native speaker. I got a non-standard accent. Yet leading to spelling being tedious. English needs more letters.

[@prfwrx2497]

​@@MaoRattome, I just gave up on having a consistent regional accent altogether. Whatever flows off the tongue good is how it is. You could simply steal letters off other languages. We did it with entire words, why not letters?

[@MaoRatto]

@@prfwrx2497 There are times I would rather just write "Ð'other" or any word with a vowel. xD Ð'+ANY WORD with a vowel or eăN vs. eön vs ei. due to how fast regionally we speak or just intense stress enough to ablaut or umlaut words in certain contexts.. xD Almost a messy í to replace ee in everything. Make í vs. i due to sound dynamics. Make it clear when L colors a vowel or when R impacts vowels before it. That would clean orthography. Though I would say. Make it closer German or Swedish's writing system, but still deal with cutting off silent letters and replace with a circumflex as a word divider. :X Why do we need CH? When TSH would be more reasonable? xD

[@azarishiba2559]

As a native Spanish speaker who teaches Japanese, and it's learning both Portuguese and Polish, and have studied also French in the past... I still have to say English is the worst regarding spelling XD XD Like really, despite all the explanation here in this video, I still finding Japanese MORE predictable than English.

[@K7MOD2]

What did you say?

[@hsjoihs_linguistic]

7:52 News broadcasters sometimes intentionally add the explanation of a word immediately after saying it, to avoid confusion. For example, a retrial in court case is 再審 (saishin), but to avoid confusion with the homophonous word 最新 ("newest, latest"), newscasters read it aloud as 「再審、裁判のやり直し」("saishin, the redoing of a trial"). In another instance, the news text only said 補償 (hoshō, compensation) but it was read aloud as 被害の補償 (compensation to the damage) to avoid confusion with 保証/保障 ("guarantee, assurance"). When a field of study needs to employ a pair of homophones that must be distinguished at all costs, another strategy is to intentionally "misread" one of the two. 科学 (kagaku, "science") / 化学 (kagaku, "chemistry") pair is disambiguated by reading 化 in kun'yomi; 抜歯 (basshi, "tooth extraction") / 抜糸 (basshi, "stitch removal") pair is handled by reading 糸 in kun'yomi. Reading 抜糸 as batsu-ito sounds so wrong and hilarious, but sounding funny is hardly a concern if your job seriously requires disambiguation.

[@BSBMteam]

Amazing!!

[@litfill54]

wow indeed

[@xdcfjngkjdrx]

Reminds me of the Cantonese words 恒星(hang4 sing1, "star") and 行星(hang4 sing1, "planet"), which sound the same. Cantonese also has a distinction of 'literary' and 'colloquial' readings, for a few characters. The character 行 in the "planet" word should be using the literary reading "hang4" theoretically, since it's a formal compound word, but some will use the colloquial reading "haang4", as 行星"haang4 sing1", in order to distinguish it from the "star" word.

[@nijucow]

I misread your comment and now I wonder which field of study requires homophobic employees

[@robbo415]

That’s really cool. Reminds me of the pin/pen merger, which means people now have to say stick pin and writing pen to disambiguate in some parts of the US. I’m less familiar with Japanese but this happens a lot in Chinese, and the strategy is to say another word or words with the character(s) you want to disambiguate. Like “技艺，就是技术和艺术” to distinguish from 记忆

[@cFyugThCzvAqYaGmxRgfCKTuvHMEjQ]

In case yall didn't catch it at 12:12 that's the Schroedinger equation. The cornerstone of quantum physics having ascribed a pronunciation of "sekai" and therefore the meaning of "the world". This is the most unhinged linguistic freestyle I've seen outside of conlang youtube

[@prfwrx2497]

More unhinged than the unhinged accents Eminem used to create new rhymes out of the notoriously rhyme-poor English language for the album "Relapse". Personally I still find people's names to be much more egregious in terms of linguistic freestyling.

[@starpeep5769]

OH MY GOD COSMO BOUSO FCKIN P RREFERENCE? HW=EY

[@starpeep5769]

OH MY GOD COSMO. FUCKIN BOUSOJ P IM SUBSCRIBING

[@zmaj12321]

That's actually hilarious

[@retokazene5085]

Blame cosmo, man cooking so hard (or maybe too hard) with the song

[@reflex1124]

I’m Japanese, but after watching this video, I have no idea how I can speak Japanese normally anymore. And I don’t even understand English at all!

[@azarishiba2559]

Don't worry, I'm a native Spanish speaker who teaches Japanese... and English doesn't make sense for me either XD XD

[@tranzilla213]

@@azarishiba2559 really? i would say that the hardest part of learning english (from a spanish perspective) is the pronunciation. syntax and grammar are roughly similar. the phrasing gets very weird if you translate between them 1 to 1, but you can get the gist of it

[@azarishiba2559]

@@tranzilla213 It's not only the pronunciation, but also the fact that the writing doesn't reflect either said pronunciation. Grammar is simple yes, but enough that actually sometimes I have trouble distinguishing between English past indicative and subjunctive, while in Spanish, although grammar is more complex, it actually helps to establish better the difference between indicative and subjunctive past, and imperfect and perfect simple past. Also some plurals are weird, and phrasal verbs don't make much sense either (turn on, turn off, get up, look after...).

[@Demopans5990]

strč prst skrz krk

[@billyswong]

@@azarishiba2559 As a native Cantonese speaker who learn English since kindergarten (Hong Kong education), spelling inconsistency in English was taken as a normal fact and didn't occur to me it is weird/strange/bad until I find people in internet complain so. English spelling is already a lot more rule-based than Chinese characters pronunciation.

[@probablysanny9351]

I was playing a game last night and saw a character use 分かる in one sentence and わかる in the very next text box during the same conversation. It really is just vibes, I guess.

[@ううももも]

As a Japanese, your comment made me realize that the process of inputing Japanese is a little bit unique. When we input Japanese, we have to type ひらがな first, and then change some words to 漢字 or カタカナ to complete the text. However, we miss the second process when we're in hurry, dull or just feeling like it.

[@有良由螺裕アルラユラユ]

わかる is very exceptional in Japanese. Kun'yomi is very old Japanese language's pronunciation that ancient Japanese people added the kanji to kun'yomi to write them because the old Japanese is oral language. わかる is one instance of them. わかる has many meanings, including "understand", "know", "find", "learn", "recognize", but 分 has only "find" in them. Because of that, the other Kanji, 解(understand) and 判(find), were used to write わかる. Therefore, わかる has six orthographies, わかる, 解る, 解かる, 判る, 分る, 分かる. (The reason why there are different types of Okurigana is because in official documents, it is sometimes extended “for easier reading”.) This complication made it so tedious for an ordinary person like me to decide which one is better to use (the answer isn't always only one) that the formal orthographies is わかる, and 分かる, but all of them are also correct. The usage depends on the feelings of a writing person. And this kind of problem is in common because most Kanji has kun'yomi, which was older than using the Kanji of it (もの, つくる, かく, いう, さす...etc.)

[@Nebelworfer]

Also depends on how much kanji is already in a sentence, usually people try not to string too many words written in kanji together, so you write a word in kana right after kanji, especially with compound words.

[@seisveintiocho-x9e]

Kanji are children under roofs?

[@jebslept8515]

キャラクターの性格や年齢によってもそこをわざと使い分けたりもするね

[@paseri9697]

The three characters have their own nuance. Kanji is formal or firm, Hiragana is adorable or amiable, Katakana is unique or special. The words written in such, "猫" "ねこ" "ネコ" are the same word "cat". But "猫" is normal, "ねこ" is more adorable, "ネコ" is like some special context, like academic or something. I like my language that can be represent my mind more accurately.

[@Diametric_]

"After the second world war, the Japanese stopped raping Chinese civilians and decided to work on their orthography instead" Bro you didn't have to go so hard lmao

[@tesouro2146]

I was expecting anything out of this video but that, I had to pause and finish wheezing before I pressed play again XDDDD

[@Zestieee]

​@a.kataoka2917 naaah the Chinese are crazy pissed at you guys

[@widciyamck8677]

it's so cringey to see an uneducated westoid miserable attempt as being humorous

[@yeoseotidle2290]

@@Zestieeeand the Koreans too. Singapore and Philippines suffered as well but it looks like these two countries mostly forgave Japan

[@bobbywhite5319]

@@yeoseotidle2290 It's almost comedic how badly China lost the culture war compared to Korea and Japan.

[@Espickt998-k2z]

I've never seen such a precise explanation of Japanese orthography and its origin. It was wonderful. I think that flexibility and efficiency of a language are opposites; Japanese is clearly biased towards the former.

[@Diskoe]

not as biased as english

[@siyacer]

​@@Diskoeenglish is neither flexible nor efficient

[@danielantony1882]

@@siyacer Darn, bro… I don’t disagree, but that was a sick burn😂

[@random832]

I think 今日 is actually a pretty interesting case because pre-spelling reform, it was written as けふ, with each kana being a kun'yomi of one kanji. The sound shifts had turned "efu -> ehu -> eu -> you", so the sound shift caused the morpheme boundary to get lost inside a diphthong. I'm curious if there are any other cases like this.

[@2712animefreak]

Well, there's 昨日 for one, and then there's a bunch of words ending in 人, such as 狩人 and 素人.

[@YellowBunny]

Yes, but け is the kun'yomi of 此 rather than 今.

[@kisaragi-hiu]

Oh yeah, the writing -efu but pronouncing yo-u thing. 旧仮名遣い is quite cursed.

[@randomised3818]

@@YellowBunny yet the け reading is preserved in 今朝, read as けさ though this instance is the only one i can remember

[@consumingkazoos]

​@@kisaragi-hiu cannot wrap my head around how 思われる used to be 思はれる and pronounced おもふぁれる

[@aidenb3069]

This is a really good video, the "ugly calligraphy" comment killed me

[@Yubin_Lee_Doramelin]

That "ugly calligraphy" is actually called "草书(cǎoshū: read in English style as 'tsao-shoo')" in Chinese, which was born for speed-writing; however, since its inherent limit, it's quite difficult or even impossible to read without certain knowledge (e.g. how to tell patterens of each character)...

[@白猫で煽る弁護士]

日本人だけど知らないことがいっぱいあって面白かった 日本人のほとんどはパターン認識で言葉を覚えていて、勉強して覚えたのってせいぜい漢字の読み書きくらいだから…

[@kunchamp-5195]

確かにねこのビデオの情報がいっぱい解説で漢字の深い。日本語がいっぱい音声で"訓読みとか音読みとかそれでなんで日本語が漢字＋漢字音声が変わって😂😂😂難しいだよね深い情報習得すると実は俺とって全部まだ合理が。。。。そんなにない(外国人としてこの動画見た人 タイ人です 日本語難しい詳細)

[@白猫で煽る弁護士]

@@kunchamp-5195 ภาษาญี่ปุ่นเป็นภาษาที่ยากมาก แม้แต่คนญี่ปุ่นเองก็ยังพูดไม่ถูกทั้งหมด ดังนั้นสำหรับชาวต่างชาติที่เรียนก็ต้องยากมากขึ้นแน่ๆ แต่สู้ๆ นะ! ฉันเป็นกำลังใจให้!

[@kunchamp-5195]

@@白猫で煽る弁護士 ขอบคุณครับ ありがとうございます

[@user-kn5fy5hr2z]

逆に日本人だからこそ知らないんだろうね。 幼少期から”そういうもん”って刷り込まれて、ただ思考を閉ざして暗記するだけだから。

[@conho4898]

I once saw a Japanese song lyric where 2 kanji are read with English loanword. The kanji is written out, but the furigana shows its pronunciation as an English loan. Insanity.

[@starpeep5769]

its not insane its the pinnacle of aesthetic!

[@starpeep5769]

What is it

[@PeterLiuIsBeast]

In the manga/anime Bleach, the antagonists the Arrancar (Spanish for to tear) is written as 破面 (ripped mask) but has katakana telling you to read it as the Spanish word アランカル. This applies to some of the techniques used by them such as 虚弾=> バラ => bala (Spanish for bullet).

[@starpeep5769]

​@@PeterLiuIsBeastwtf

[@MrCantStopTheRobot]

That's hilarious. The terminal stage of foreign barbarian brainworm. Was it Calli?... someone told a story, where a JP student asked her what the English word for "meron" [melon] is. And they were surprised that Americans used the same word as the Japanese...

[@fuzzymandrake]

Katakana is also used the same way Italics in English are. That's actually the primary use, and the reason why loanwords use katakana is like how English publications will style loanwords _comme ça_

[@BurnBird1]

They intentionally wanted to mimic the use of italics?

[@Espickt998-k2z]

Some may say that Japanese orthography is too complicated and cumbersome. Yes, we Japanese know that very well. If it seems incomprehensible, think, “Why do they go to such trouble?" The answer is simple: because they want to. The more complicated it is, the more free we can play with words. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we are stubbornly maintaining this complex language merely for the sake of word play and flexibility of expression, would it?

[@CaptainWumbo]

I have read many stories on aozorabunko and this seems true to me. For better or worse the writing system offers a lot of artistic creativity. I think the video did a good job of showing how it can be complex, but not what makes sense about it. The author may not have a large experience using the system. There are real frustrations learning it as a second language though, because so much retrieval from memory while reading really tires the mind. I like that Japanese uses characters freely for meaning with kun readings. I think of jukugo less as words and more as acronyms, conveniant jargon for various contexts that pack a lot of meaning into a small space, but like acronyms in English they are not always comprehensible to the uninitiated. Because sounds carry more meaning than characters, you can still sometimes get the idea just when hearing them even if you don't intuit exactly which character it should be spelled with. I still have yet to see a video explain everything I know about the system. It seems most people understand it very poorly. They both make it seem harder than it really is and somehow miss what I think is difficult about it. It is funny though to see all the exceptional cases put next to each other 😅

[@Espickt998-k2z]

​@@CaptainWumbo I'm glad to see someone who agrees with my senses. I have never seen Japanese language learners reading Aozorabunko before. How cool! The correspondence between Japanese jukugo and English acronyms is very clever. My thoughts might be similar to yours. I often compare language systems to “data compression algorithms". The more complex algorithm gives us the higher compression ratio. But in most cases, the processing time increases. The reverse is also true. (Occasionally, the sacrifice may not be time, but quality.) In my idea, a language is a tool that encodes and outputs our thoughts as a sequence of words. And Kanji is just one of the output options in an encoding protocol called “Japanese”. I know I shall get flack from beginners, but I believe Japanese is a very “reader-first” (decoder-first) language. I don't mean readability; Kanji is not an easy writing system to either write or read. But the more you learn, the faster and more directly you can recognize the meaning. It's said that man's central vision is very narrow. Therefore, there is a physical limit to the length of text that we can recognize the meaning of a whole sentence at once when reading it. By “compressing” a text by good means, the reader's reading speed can be greatly improved. I'm not sure if Kanji is the “good means” or not, but I think it's one of the methods created by the history of the Japanese language. However, it might perform slightly better only in terms of artistic diversity of expression.

[@starpeep5769]

​@@Espickt998-k2zyou're so real for this

[@starpeep5769]

​@@CaptainWumboso reall

[@litfill54]

wow, amazing

[@alice_atari]

Using Mikochi as an example of natives struggling is unfair, we all know she’s HoloEN! I gotta say, I think my least favorite feature in Japanese is when they just decide to spell things in Chinese and pronounce them in Japanese, like 向日葵 “himawari” which has kanji that literally make no sense. I think this is more common in animal and plant names, which thankfully are going to katakana but unfortunately sometimes the kanji convey something important about the animal or plant which is lost in kana. Truly a cursed catch 22 of a written language.

[@danielantony1882]

We have this cool thing called 𝓯𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓰𝓪𝓷𝓪, little pog champ; use it. And also, spread it more so that we can press tech companies into making it available on as many sites as possible. - A lot of sites don’t have it, so you can’t provide smooth and seamless pronunciation above Kanji or any other word with ruby text. “Ruby text” is the actual name for the system btw.

[@ozzi9816]

Those are fun! One way to write サルスベリ (sarusuberi (literally "a tree so slippery even a monkey can't climb it"), crepe myrtle) is 百日紅, which roughly translates to "100 days of red", referring to how crepe myrtles bloom for about 100 days. But in Japanese even that spelling retains the sarusuberi pronunciation

[@SakanaKuKuRu]

Imagine a plant following the sun being called日回り

[@alice_atari]

@@SakanaKuKuRu right? That’s the most cursed part, you hear the word and think “surely it’s just written exactly like that” and then BOOM Chinese borrowing jumpscare. And the worst part is that it actually makes sense character wise but the word order is Chinese and so the written form and spoken form create a sort of friction or contradiction that just… anyways good thing plant and animal names can be written in katakana.

[@danielantony1882]

I hate that I get notifications on comments where the auto-moderator bot decided to shadow ban me for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

[@-Raylight]

Fire in the water, why???

[@JustyHakubi]

Yeah, Korone reeled me in too.

[@kmakma8]

I'm die. thank you foerver

[@cmyk8964]

One of my least favorite parts of Japanese orthography that I encounter in daily life is that “foot” and “leg” are the same word when spoken (ashí), but different words when written (足 vs. 脚).

[@becc_snipe]

at least they have the separate kanji, in many languages there is no distinction which can be a little annoying

[@cmyk8964]

@@becc_snipe If they DON’T have separate kanji I can just say “Oh we don’t distinguish feet and legs in Japanese”, but they do and that frustrates me

[@MrCantStopTheRobot]

Maybe be glad that you have some way of separating the homophones. Also every language has something like this. Through, threw. They're, there, their.

[@elizakeating8415]

Speaker of (Mandarin) Chinese rushing in here to say that this is doubly infuriating because both of those mean foot in Chinese (leg is 腿 lol)

[@cmyk8964]

@@elizakeating8415 That character, in turn, is pretty much only used in Japanese 大腿骨 (daitaikotsu) "femur; thigh bone" and sometimes in 太腿 (futomomo) "thigh", though that's usually just replaced with hiragana 太もも.

[@ZimLee]

まじで面白かった。神動画

[@danielantony1882]

英語分かる？ じゃなきゃ自動字幕の翻訳だけで平気？

[@prfwrx2497]

​@@danielantony1882auto-translated subtitles are a fucking godsend for watching stuff in foreign languages. It's pretty good these days.

[@starpeep5769]

滅法(ホント)最高(すごい)神神(さいこう)

[@ZimLee]

@@danielantony1882 Engurish so easyi！！

[@danielantony1882]

@@ZimLee 左様でござるか······

[@MooImABunny]

oh god the HΨ = EΨ is so good 😂 btw, the H and E are not Greek, it's H for Hamilton(ian) and E for energy (that was originally a Greek word, but when talking you call that Ee, not Eta) I did see Ψ used in Japanese in the disastrous life Saiki K., it's a pun because Saiki is... psychic. And psychic comes from Greek where it was spelled with a psi Ψ

[@starpeep5769]

COSMP BOUSOU P. COSMO BOUSOU P

[@gustavosilveiradeazevedo-ph9el]

Eta would actually be Η. Ε is epsilon.

[@athandog]

Ψ is the international symbol for psychology as well. Much like how the Bowl of Hygieia (Υγεία - now pronounced iyía but in ancient times it used to be Hygeía - meaning "health") is used for pharmacology. When it is written as Psi, it's a reference to the letter itself. When it is written Psy, it is a reference to the word ψυχή (psychē, in ancient greek pronunciation) which means "soul".

[@prfwrx2497]

Learning English: coming to terms that there's so many goddamn regional variations and getting used to not worrying about it - even natives butcher it all the time. Learning anything in Cyrillic: getting used to having an alphabet for every minute consonant and vowel yet somehow there's *nothing* to render a hard J without siamese twinning the D and Zh. Also so many God damn grammatical cases. Real useful for juggling multi-lateral conversation flows once you nail them though. Learning Japanese: face the consequences of what happens when there's multiple abortive attempts at partial orthographical reforms. Learning Thai: recognizing that redundant characters are reserved for transcribing Sanskrit and Pali loanwords, that these words are used for official documents and communiques, and that the regular people don't readily understand half of these formal Sanskrir/Pali loan words that the state still stubbornly insist on using in lieu of common native Tai-daic words.

[@mikechiu9767]

7:34 Well, mostly from the context. As much as Chinese being a tonal language, Modern Mandarin itself has a lot of homophones even if you put the tones into consideration. For example, 蝨子 (lice) and 獅子 (lion) sounds objectively the same to any human being, but you'd never confuse 他頭髮裡長蝨子 (he's got lice in his hair) with 他頭髮裡長獅子 (he's got lions in his hair). Therefore, I believe Japanese speakers probably get by through the similar mechanism. By the way, great video. I learned a lot of things I never knew I wanted to know.

[@saulemaroussault6343]

Japanese has pitch accent, yes. And it’s quite useful.

[@javjuegos_8917]

@@saulemaroussault6343 finish writing and anal prolapse have the same pitch accent tho

[@azarishiba2559]

@@saulemaroussault6343 It's not enough. Look at 7:28 , there aren't just enough pitch accent patterns to cover 10 or more words with the same pronunciation, and this happen with so much more words. Even some common pair of 2 words has the same pitch accent, like "spider" and "cloud". When pitch accent and context even aren't just enough, there is one last resource that is used (and I have applied it): speak the kanji. For example, with the video same words, when someone says こうかい can dissambiguate by saying "I mean the Red (あか) and Sea (うみ) kanji" or something similar.

[@betsegg]

in turkish, which has no tones or pitch accent, "kurt" means both worm and wolf. but like in your example, everyone would understand you if you said "un kurtlanmış" ("the flour has worms in it" or "the flour has wolves in it")

[@yeoseotidle2290]

Fortunately in the past these two words sounded different. In modern Cantonese it’s 蝨 (sat) and 獅 (si). The problem is that Mandarin lost this phonemic distinction

[@prfwrx2497]

All I've taken from this video is that forensic orthography must be one hell of a thing in Japanese. Basically, the science of identifying who wrote what based on how they use written language.

[@floptaxie68]

There’s a few mistakes in the video Katakana was only used as the only silabary in official documents, like the Meiji Constitution for example, newspapers and other stuff where written using the three systems the same way we used today, except that it was written top to bottom right to left. I’ve seen it in newspapers from before 1946 where ゑ and ゐ are still used because it was following the ancient orthography. Also I noticed that a lot of kanjis had okuriganas, come kanjis that are somethong not as common today. But again, outside of legal documents and militar stuff, full katakana wasnt the standart, and after they started writing legal documents, such as the Constitution in that more “popular” way.

[@CdiRevival]

"Don't subscribe, I won't upload any more videos." Great way to filter the real fans from the flakey ones!

[@mikechiu9767]

And I fucking subscribed just for that, lol.

[@Maxawa0851]

"REAL fans would subscribe for no reason! This guy is so smart for asking people not to subscribe!"

[@DisgustedDisgustingDude_DDD]

"I won't upload any more videos" So that was a fucking lie.

[@siyacer]

​@@Maxawa0851people will be amused by anything these days

[@Termenz1]

"Don't subscribe it's meaningless" means "don't subscribe it's meaningless". Not that hard to understand

[@teknolozik]

17:01 Korean here. Yeah we are still not sure around word spacing. For example, 너 나 안 본 지 두 달 다 돼 감 (It have been almost two months since we met) is correct, while 너 나 안본 지 두달 다 돼 감 is also allowed. Hell, even the chairman of National Institute of Korean Language (국립국어원) once said "I can't say I'm 100% confident with spacing"! 17:50 LOL Calculus! I'm sure many of non-STEM major Koreans also wouldn't understand that second paragraph! Especially when 사상 normally means "ideology" or "in history", but in calculus, it's "mapping".

[@h.i.sentertainments8580]

My dad used to mention that Kanji Jukugo makes a long sentence easier to read. I originally dismissed this notion as both me and my father were Japanese native speakers, but hearing from a foreigner, this theory is making a comeback in my head. I think it's kinda similar to how you can pick out important words from German just by spotting capital letters, but on steroid.

[@denimator05]

7:52 Context is important for telling apart homonyms, but you completely left out pitch-accent which can help you differentiate between words they sound similar based on which parts of the word are accented.

[@ethanthompson431]

Yeah i have to admit I was surprised he never mentioned pitch accent at all, I kept thinking he was setting himself up to talk about it

[@spaghettiking653]

@@ethanthompson431 I think pitch accent is unlikely to help in a big number of cases, especially the ones like the literary Chinese compounds presented, because most of those have the exact same heiban reading type and are therefore just indistinguishable. Check out this video called 「こうしょう」 which will give you a very fat string of about 50 of these in a row that you will never distinguish through pitch accent... Tbh I'm with the video author on this one, I don't have a half damn clue about how to understand that vid.

[@jon9103]

Except that pitch accent is regional, yet homophones tend to be comprehensible across regions, moreover many homophones are also the same in pitch (at least in Tokyo-ben). It's mainly context.

[@on_the_off_beat]

In few cases, yeah. Hashi, hana, and so forth. The examples everyone knows. But my impression is the bulk of the homonyms come from kanji compounds using the "on" chinese readings, and most of those have pretty boring uniform (hei-ban) pitch patterns. Low-frequency formal or literary words, encountered almost all the time in writing, not speech. That is where the astounding multiplicities of homonyms can be found. I think that is an important element of why the language can tolerate so many, they are mostly encountered in writing, where they can be distinguished.

[@rogercruz1547]

Like Brazilian Portuguese used to have "pára" and "para". One is the third person participle of the verb "stop" as in "he stops" ("ele pára") and the other is the preposition "to". New orthography dropped the marker in the first A so now we have to guess by context, pronunciation still emphasizes the first syllable though...

[@-.-._---_--_._-]

The end of the video is so insanely real

[@kkb_7267]

this video is fucking phenomenal, holy shit. clean-ass, snappy editing, super informative, plus the wonderfully deadpan delivery ofthe jokes is just soooooooooooooooooooo good, goddamn

[@chaconneind3777]

I cannot stand the slander that the Chinese cursive script was “ugly calligraphy.” 2:45

[@markb5249]

Is it ugly? No. Is it readable? Also no.

[@chaconneind3777]

@@markb5249 It is readable like the script of any other language you can’t read.

[@MrCantStopTheRobot]

Your comments are unreadable and ugly!

[@danielbriggs991]

It just mean he's jelly of anyone who can read it well, 🍩?

[@カモジ]

I am Japanese, but I can sympathize with what I perceive as slander. However, it is not the Chinese cursive script themselves that are “ugly” but this document. Hiragana is indeed of Chinese origin, but the ancient Japanese found it cumbersome to write, so they took it apart, and the result is ugly.

[@sleepysakamoto]

15:40 is a hell of a burn

[@prfwrx2497]

After 5 decades of raping foreigners and colonial subjects and having two artificial sunrises dropped upon the home island, Japan went back to the 14 centuries long time-honored tradition of roughly fucking their orthography into the hot mess being covered in this video. (5 decades is from the first Sino-Japanese war and the beginning of the occupation of Korea; 14 centuries is from the introduction of Kanji and resumed contact with mainland sinosphere languages and introduction of Chinese loan words that started this entire orthographical mess)

[@azarishiba2559]

Agree. I hate reading 金よう日 or similar, just no. Go full kanji or no kanji, but not that monstruous hybrid, please.

[@ozzi9816]

15:15 One thing I remember reading is that Japanese people have an innate understanding of what is a good kanji to hiragana/katakana ratio for sentences, and subconsciously avoid writing sentences where there are long clusters of discrete words written in kanji. This is because hiragana serve a double function of making it easier to parse individual words by breaking up kanji. In fact, in old JRPGs where there wasn't the memory to store kanji and writers had to rely solely on hiragana and katakana they actually employed spaces to fulfill this role (there was also a push in the 1900s sometime to abolish kanji and use spaces instead, but the homophone problem was too bad for it to take hold). In some cases, if there is a word that can be understood even without its kanji, and doing so makes the sentence easier to parse, they will write it in its hiragana form. I remember hearing the ideal ratio for kanji to hiragana in an everyday conversation sentence is about 70% hiragana to 30% kanji.

[@cashewnuts2152]

I’m native Japanese, but I’v never been aware of the ratio. sure, I think almost all Japanese use Hiragana and Kanji at a ratio of 7 to 3

[@ルナ-m4s]

"but here's where things become very haram" I'm going to start implementing this in my daily vocab

[@L1amba]

Great video! Super informative and interesting for a Japanese learner. It was fun trying to find kanji I was familiar with in the examples. Edit: just realized you were the guy who made that Lalűta video. I had no idea your channel was so small; your videos are awesome, keep it up!

[@starpeep5769]

aaaa

[@hehe-t6t]

I studied Japanese for a bit many years ago but then stopped and started studying Korean for many years, I would say my Korean is way better than my Japanese now. But I still think my reading experience in Japanese is more pleasant than in Korean. The huge diversity of symbols I had to input into my brain was sort of painful, but the effort it took to put them into my brain I think is reflected in the ease at which they get processed now. Like it feels like more information instantly enters my head when trying to read Japanese whereas Korean it just kind of.. sits there, even if I know all of the words if I read them. What I will say about Korean though is that I love the regularity of Sino-Korean words. Especially coming from Japanese where I don't even think I knew that each individual character was supposed to have its own pronunciation and just memorized the whole compound and its whole pronunciation. But Sino-Korean words just feel right especially in writing where you get 1 chinese character=1 hangul block it's just so satisfying, it almost feels artificial in how logical everything feels, especially coming from Japanese. But I still love Japanese and its writing for the opposite reason, it feels absurdly natural and organic like no single process working in isolation could have managed to come up with something so absurd and weird but also fun.

[@himjl2]

Wow! I literally just learned the 躊躇い/躊躇 thing a few days ago (I've been cramming kanji) and this shows up in my feed. KZbin reading my mind.

[@CaTcH_mE_iF_y0u_aRe_tHe_CaT]

that's pretty common thing to meet something you've learnt recently just EVERYWHERE

[@RoboBoddicker]

I remember 躊躇 because I always ~hesitate~ when I see those insane-looking kanji together :D

[@Killybillee]

I don't really care about Japanese, but I am glad you decided to upload more stuff. Great work!!

[@prfwrx2497]

Also, Korean having spaces to separate words but having yet to use them properly reminds me of Thai using spaces like Anglos would use commas.

[@user-hukkinshiro]

一歩進んだと思ったらまた無限に暗記すること出てくるのマジで地獄の言語だな… 勉強してる人頑張ってください🔥

[@theonlymegumegu]

this makes me feel like we should be way more forgiving of miko's elite Japanese XD

[@AlphaCas_art]

Thank you for the video. I’m studying Japanese and this video is the best explanation on Japanese orthography I’ve ever seen. I’ve learned a lot of new things from this video, and gained a better understanding on how Japanese language actually works.

[@danielantony1882]

16:27~16:35 Well… technically, they _are_ uniform; it’s just that they decided to not use the “Shinjitai Extended” font, for some reason. Actually, it’s like 50/50, I think; ’cause like… they simplified “輛” in “車輛” into “輌,” but then they decided to not use it and replace it with 車両 instead; and there’s several cases of these. “躊” in “躊躇う” has a Shinjitai form of “踌,” but they never use it. Like… at least in the case of 輌, I understand the idea of 両 being easier to see, but in the case of 躊, there’s no excuse they use it over 踌 other than tradition. There’s also 欺瞞 where you could spell it as 欺𥈞, but hey, seems like Japanese people gave up on Extended Shinjitai entirely. It’s weird.

[@MrRXY11]

love your sense of humour keep it up

[@ManuelSLaraBisch]

15:26 The issue usually isn't that a character is too hard or annoying to write, but that it's one that your target audience probably doesn't know how to read. Also, IIRC newspapers and other print media intended for the general public are not allowed to use kanji outside the Jōyō list without providing furigana, and there are style guides that advise for such mixed orthography when one kanji in the compound word is not on the list.

[@reeceulf]

Best video recommendation I've gotten in a while

[@NotSomeJustinWithoutAMoustache]

Best channel in my reccs for a while

[@starpeep5769]

I can't believe he made the UwU language... Two of my favorite interests!!!

[@-tinyang6867]

I’m a Chinese student who just started to learn Japanese and linguistics at the same time, so this video is very interesting to me. I really wanted to maybe share this to my teachers but they probably don’t have access to youtube

[@afk991]

14:32 Here distinction between 暖 and 温 seems inconsistent, but this is just a translating issue. Surely these both mean "warm", but 暖かい is used for "temperture of air", and 温かい is mainly used for "temperture of an object", which you can physically touch. So, both kanjis share meanings of a word "temperture", therefore 温 in 温度 pretty much makes sense. Indeed you actually have a word to specifically mean "tempture of air", and it's written as 気温. Um, wait...

[@portminded]

Great, great study. You reminded me how inconsequent our language is and being capable of using it at least to certain level kinda makes me feel like I am also accepted to be alive. You are no loser, you got great taste... Not only the trending holomens but also CLANNAD? ... OMG.

[@kmakma8]

12:12 HΨ=EΨ is one of the notations of the Schrodinger equation. In light of this, the lyric here, “HΨ=EΨ (the world) is for observers at all times,” seems to describe the world as a phenomenon whose state is determined by the act of observation. 18:33 best moment I also like manga, anime, games, Vtubers, etc., but only 7 of these characters were recognizable. (I am Japanese and used Deepl for this text)

[@nothombium]

im learning japanese and this video made me question my choices. but it was super interesting and educational, i really enjoyed it. great job!

[@Espickt998-k2z]

Looking at the comments, many people seem to think that the simpler and more efficient a language is, the better it is, which makes me tired. Don't they read any literary works? English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, and other languages we use in our daily life are natural languages. If you want to communicate so efficiently, just learn Esperanto or something like that.

[@KenBladehart]

>Cygames finding every way possible to say "Happy New Year" in Japanese >I lost track at 10

[@yurisei6732]

But what is life without a little sin? Latin orthography is dull, you learn the whole thing by age 6 and then you're done for a lifetime. Japanese orthography is exquisite. I'll be learning new things about it for decades to come.

[@tom11w37]

Tbf, Alphabets are so flexible that you have to learn the unique orthography for a different language Just look at the Letter ‘J’ out of context

[@jamueI]

It's hard for dum people

[@danielantony1882]

@@tom11w37 Oh, I know 4 pronunciations for J, I think: dʒeɪ, ʒi, xota, and je.

[@Vibrate69]

real, recently found a word with an interesting reading, which is 鯱張る read as しゃっちょこばる not that i'll ever use this word but it's fascinating

[@MrCantStopTheRobot]

Nobody is stopping you from mixing calligraphy into your Latin Alphabet handwriting though. That's still something.

[@Ballin4Vengeance]

I honestly admire how beautifuly complicated japanese orthography is. It's like a car that's had pretty much every part replaced, repaired, patched up, is held together by duct tape and prayers but by some miracle still works because it has to, since the owner doesn't know how to drive any other car and could never learn to.

[@君子ロベルト]

I totally understand your motivation for learning Japanese you mentioned at the end of the video. Well, I learned Chinese because I liked the writing system. And then I wanted to learn Korean to find out more about the original pronunciation of Chinese characters. And then I wanted to see how much knowing Chinese could help me learning hiragana and katakana, and then it was too late: I needed to test how much easier japanese would be for me now that all the foundations had been laid down...

[@HaraceHavoc]

I love how much disdain you carry in your voice

[@myaobyclepiej]

@@HaraceHavoc im just polish

[@eenyade1576]

I am studying Yamato kotoba (pure Japanese). Yamato kotoba has few homonyms, so it can be easily written using Latin characters. At a conversational level, you can avoid using foreign words at all. However, it is difficult to have advanced conversations about law or education using it, and it makes you sound childish.

[@eenyade1576]

Konna kanji de sotokotoba wo subete nakuseba, yomi yasuku narimasu. Sikasi, takaihanasi wa totemo muzukasiku Nakanokuni kara kotoba wo karinakereba ikemasen ne. Kanji is not 漢字, it's 感じ feeling

[@glunp789]

15:40 びっくりした 義務教育までで習う日本語を文法以外網羅して解説していてすごく良かったです。

[@sleepybraincells]

this is starting to become my favourite channel lol

[@on_the_off_beat]

I recently read that Egyptian hieroglyphics were also a crap hybrid writing system (some sound elements, some pictographs, some signifiers) which is part of the reason it took so long and so much effort to decipher it. Pity the future scholars trying to learn Japanese from surviving texts, assuming all knowledge of the spoken language has been lost...

[@Komatik_]

As far as I know, it was sound-based, people just thought it was more logographic than it was.

[@tathandlung]

7:52 "spoken japanese probably uses less chinese words" is incorrect. spoken japanese uses as many "chinese words" as is done in written japanese, but context makes it possible to discern which word is meant. if there needs to be clarification (rarely) people read out the kanji in the japanese reading.

[@JohnSmith-of2gu]

This is a well made video! I knew about Onyomi/Kunyomi shenanigans, but I didn't realize how bad the irregularities on morpheme boundaries were! Fuck why does Ateji exist isn't that the whole point of Kana to avoid that?

[@starpeep5769]

Ateji exists to make Japanese more crazy and wordplayable!

[@h2knad]

当て字 is just 訓読み for multiple kanjis, nothing special

[@afdhalulakbar5382]

​@@starpeep5769 lmao I'm dead 💀

[@azarishiba2559]

Ateji is just for fun, I think, there isn't much common words written with it to begin with, and sometimes is used for artistic purposes, like writing foreigner names with kanji instead of katakana, but having the same pronunciation. Anyways, Gikun (not explained in this video) is THE crazyness with kanji. It's fun and liberty with kanji taken to the extreme, but it's used in manga and light novels for literary stilistic purposes.

[@azarishiba2559]

@@h2knad They can be 音読み as well o.o In fact, this is more common for ateji.

[@PeterLiuIsBeast]

Korean does have pronounciation changes very similar to what you've described for Japanese. For instance 學校 is 학교 "hag gyo" but is pronounced more naturally like 학꾜 "hag ggyo" where the g is instead pronounced as a tense g.

[@맹진영-b7q]

You're right, but they are pretty regular and natural. Most Korean people don't even notice those pronunciation changes are happening when they make sound.

[@ALBERTALIMOVICH]

perfect video, from start to finish. and presentation is also lovely ✨

[@vandarkholme8548]

Watching this on my way to a japanese lesson hits different

[@kuroitsukida]

You are so real for that ending. You're me.

[@EanaHufwe]

12:12 Totally didn’t expect a cosMo reference in a linguistics video

[@darkIkarus]

Missed out on a few historical things like "man'yôgana" or the usage of katakana as science language and hiragana as "diary language", but other than that really great summary of all the things I too always had, have and will have problems with in the Japanese language. Love all the visual examples for anyone to understand. Considering Korean: The writing system has it's flaws as well. For one, you don't know how a word is written just by hearing it because you can't hear which consonant belongs to which syllable. The other problem are indeed a bunch of homonyms, hence why there's an ongoing discussion on bringing back hanja into Korean.

[@timmyturner327]

私も日本語を勉強しています。 日本語の書き方も大好き。 日本語は素晴らしいパズルね？ 良い動画！お疲れ様、えりとぽんこつさん。

[@gun_gun_gun_gun_gun_gun]

dang your english is so good that you can talk about japanese in it professionally while i have to turn on cc subtitles to watch this video and comment with the help of google translate

[@jakubbriza7274]

Only two vids and already such a high quality?! I'm happy to be your new subscriber! Who knows what will come next. This was no joke the best video about Japanese Kanji👍

[@jebslept8515]

はえーそうだったんか、おもろ 逆に多分漢字にしない方がどこまでが単語か分からんくなるからむずいんだよな 小学校とかだとまだ漢字読めないからひらがなだけで書かれるけど　単語ごとに隙間を作ったりしてるのを見るよな

[@elenaekanathapetrova2282]

it was surprising helpful like some maybe obvious things i 'known' at some point but I didn't see it as a whole picture

[@はる-h2s7c]

As a native Japanese speaker, it's really informative and satisfying because you mentioned many examples of the historical matters of Japanese language, which most foreign youtubers avoid to explain, with accuracy. 11/10!

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

This is fascinating. I "just know" a lot of these words but never considered their consistency. 場所 (place) is one of the most common words so it's easy to remember. I still struggle with rendaku. It's even ambiguous or has context-specific rules I haven't caught onto yet. For example, I feel like the pronunciation of 三階 (third floor) is 50/50 さんかい and さんがい. Maybe it's regional, I dunno.

[@Killer_Space_2726-GCP]

I like your funny words, magic man. You get a subscribe for this video. Currently, the wife and I have been learning Japanese with the intent of also teaching it to our kids. It has been interesting, to say the least.

[@kimeiga]

yo thank you so much for making this video. Until now I basically haven't found a video that explains things in well defined linguistic terms and it's really refreshing. 8:03 I wanted to ask where you were able to find this table of how middle chinese pronunciations mapped to Goon and Kanon readings. I am interested in trying to create a statistical model that converts modern pinyin pronunciations of characters to their onyomi equivalents (and I realize due to the lack of regularity its a fools errand) with the hope of eventually creating a kind of graphic/flow chart that one could memorize and achieve at least 70% success or something with mental conversion. The reason being I'm sort of learning Chinese and Japanese at the same time and it would be great to have relationships of the pronunciations somewhat memorized, even if it's kinda many-to-one from chinese to japanese, and with goon, kanon, kanyoon, etc all being different. this journey has set me down a path of trying to find literature related to how middle chinese evolved to modern chinese putonghua and also how those same middle chineses were adapted for the japanese language ahah but as you could imagine a lot of the resources on this are pretty obtuse and there aren't too many that are useful for this specific use case.

[@1000Tomatoes]

I've always thought of deciphering homophones in Japanese as a combination of context clues and pitch accent. There may be more though idk.

[@mitori]

great reference in the example at 2:31 😂

[@t.fakename-4421]

ayy this was really well done

[@seisveintiocho-x9e]

Now I understand why some radicals look a lot like some Katakana characters.

[@Royce133c]

This video was amazing, you gotta make more about the Japanese language

[@Dealanach]

おかころがすげえ 実はころねのサムネイルはa non insignificant part of me clicking the video.

[@Xx早瀬ユウカxX]

めちゃくちゃ面白い動画だった。

[@Akat3]

❌ Native ✅ Miko

[@jyuukenxrasengan]

99% of this video is in an American broadcast accent, but when "character" is said, it sounds like I slipped into Jersey and kept tripping me up. Love it though.

[@Isaakmedextraa]

I've never heard anyone pronounce 'Characters' as 'Kackters' until now.

[@dracog0322]

As a japanese learner, whenever I find these types of particularities I just go "well that's a thing that happens" and just accept it, otherwise I would've gone crazy

[@danielantony1882]

3:38 Maybe you already know, but here’s the different pronunciation reconstructions from different reconstructors for the character 中: Zhengzhang Shangfang: /ʈɨuŋ/ Pan Wuyun: /ʈiuŋ/ Shao Rongfen: /ȶiuŋ/ Edwin Pulleyblank: /ʈuwŋ/ Li Rong: /ȶiuŋ/ Wang Li: /ȶĭuŋ/ Bernard Karlgren: /ȶi̯uŋ/ It pretty much seems to be a debate between /ʈiuŋ/ and /ȶiuŋ/ so I was kinda confused when I saw trjuwng-which seemed like Old Chinese to me, since I saw a reconstruction video that had a pronunciation closer to /ȶiuŋ/-but yeah, I guess it’s debatable.

[@mochisuii]

i dont know i think this guy likes hololive but i might be crazy

[@therealhussein]

for 6:55 from my experience i noticed it's usually always jin when talking about a group of people Japanese people = nihonjin black people = kokujin chinese people = chūgokujin and so on

[@southestst]

7:49 Spoken Japanese has pitch accents to differentiate words with the same pronunciation

[@junovzla]

YAY YOURE MAKING MORE VIDEOS

[@raleraly2599]

1:44 what in the greater albania is this map 💀

[@NotNot-d9b]

日本人として，人名の読みを初見で当てるのは日本人にも無理だと認めます．

[@Dmayrion2]

I once translated a paper my tribology professor was interested in to see how well a lubricant worked compared with another. The kanji they used could be read as either 20%, 1/2, or 200% as effective. There were no context clues or graphs I could make sense of to help.

[@austinyun]

Water in the fire, why?

[@SpacedogD]

7:55 spoken has intonations which when combined with context and pacing of speech, can often avoid these issues.

[@Double-Negative]

8:53 生意気 is my favorite example

[@Jumpoable]

Amazing work. You covered ALL the points! ご苦労様でした。 My only gripe is that you kept using the term "spelling" for kanji as well. I think spelling only applies to alphabets or syllabary, not for logographs. Linguist & polyglot here who mastered Japanese & am extremely proud of this feat due to the Japanese language's complex orthography as well as its nuanced & sophisticated sociolinguistic syntax & lexicon.