St. Harry's Letter to the Osakans

Caution: The following post contains graphic linguistic content and should not be read while operating heavy machinery.

As someone who has earned two degrees in English and studied English for 18 years (I'm distinctly remember reading a book or two in 1st grade), I have ample opportunity to be pissed off about language, even in my own country: misplaced apostrophes, stupid puns, the word "irregardless," pretty much any use of the term "irony"...for more completely original examples that I came up with all by myself, see Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Still, I'm (soon to be) employed teaching English to other people, so I guess I must know a thing or two, anyway. Hell, technically I'm a "master" of English, a point that I do enjoy bringing up whenever disputed in a matter of grammar. That's really one of my reasons for moving to Japan: having "mastered" (chuckle, derisive snort) English, living in another language and having to learn all-new means of communication provides me with...well, let's say "challenges."

I think I'm doing all right, too, all said. Three years of university Japanese has served me well enough to buy train tickets and avoid starving to death (so far). Sure, I'm still basically illiterate: there are over 3500 kanzi in the Japanese language, of which I know maybe...less than 100, which leads to ordering the same thing in restaurants over and over (anything with a picture next to it or anything written in katakana, such as "hanbaaga" or "sandoiichi"). See my earlier post on the "three alphabets" business, for instance; "I bought a television today" would be transcribed:

今日はﾃﾚﾋﾞを買いましたよ。

Yes, that's a mix of "hiragana" (46 characters used for native words) "katakana" (46-ish characters used for foreign-borrowed words) and "kanzi" (Chinese pictographic characters used for pretty much either). These alphabets are used interchangeably (some might say "arbitrarily"), meaning someone has to be able to read hundreds of characters to be able to do things like, say, read maps, take trains, or order in a restaurant. Compared to 26 characters used in English. Not that I'm bitter, mind you.

But this post isn't about written Japanese (sort of), it's about spoken Japanese. Though it might seem a little presumptuous to pass judgment on a whole language like this (especially one that I don't really speak), Japanese seems far less literary and far more straightforward than English. This has actually made it much easier to become conversational in Japanese; though there are certainly idioms and expressions to learn, simple sentences are used far more in real life than they are in English. Basically, everyone sounds like they're reading lines from introductory language textbooks.

Example: on a hot day, you'll frequently hear people say to each other (on the train, in restaurants, wherever) "Atsui desu." Meaning "It is hot." And that's the end of the exchange; maybe the other person will nod and smile, or give a simple agreement, but there's nothing more to say about how hot it is. This isn't meant as judgment (play along), but if you were in a waiting room with somebody in America, be they stranger or friend, and just said "It's hot," they would assume that you were no stranger to the short bus. No, you'd usually expect something nice and poetic like "It's a hot one, huh?" or "Hot enough for ya?" or even just a little more info, like "It's hot today."

Maybe this is why English seems to have such a more extensively-developed literary tradition than Japanese...I mean, if we're going to go on about triple redundancy, English frequently has three words for one concept with the same basic meaning originating from Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon. I keep hearing about how context-driven Japanese is, but if that's the case, why would you even bother saying to somebody that "It is hot"?

OK, that's quite enough of all that for now. How about a nice picture to round out all this text:

We got this in the mail. And here I thought American Pizza Hut was gross. Blaaaaarrrrffffff.

Hey, you! Do you have anything to say about the intricacies of the Japanese language? How about something about English? Misusing words? Pizza Hut? Health care reform? Kanyegate? Great, then leave a comment, please!