10 Things About Japanese That Make NO Sense

[00:00:03]Welcome to Riotto Japan. I'm sure you know that Japanese language is one of the hardest in the whole world because we have three alphabets. Hiragana, katakana, and kanji. And kanji means Chinese characters. There are more than 1,000, even 2,000s to memorize. I I don't even know what 2,000 anyway. And dialects [music] because Japan is a long country, north to south, right? So therefore, there are various various different dialects that they don't even understand or [music] understand each other. And I'm here to tell you, don't worry, there are some things that even Japanese people don't get. There are things that just simply don't make sense. Um, that doesn't really help you to learn the language, does it? But good luck, I guess. Number one, yongo. Do you know what silence would sound like in [music] Japanese? [bell] like this. Nope. It's What about sound of excitement? What if it doesn't make sense? It is doky doi or waku waku. Even this is what we call gyongo. In English, it might be called as onomatotopia or Japanese we call it sound effects, but in Japanese it works on a whole different level. Japan loves making sound effects. Of course, there is stuff that you'd expect from any language. animal noises. For example, a dog goes w a cat goes, a pig goes goo.

[00:01:31]That's simple basic beginner stuff.

[00:01:33]Where Japan really excels is that we have gongo for things that don't even make any sound. [music] We call this gigo technically, but they work much the same way. When someone's smiling, it's na. When someone's staring, it's jirro.

[00:01:51]When something is clean, it's [laughter] pika pika. And no, that's not the same as that little yellow rat thing from Pokemon. If you've been moving around all morning, you're ba butter until you're which means rushing until you're tired. How can you have a sound effect for just being tired? I think a lot of these sound effects actually started being used more heavily because of manga. And it's easy way to show what's happening or how someone's feeling without spelling it out. But be careful when you come to Japan, you may be met with a wave of words that for most part are just sounds that don't make sense.

[00:02:26]So if you remember all these sound fact in Japanese, you can become parapa and that means fluent in Japanese [music] and also it means a thin piece of paper but it doesn't make sense at all does it? Number two.

[00:02:53]Oh, sorry. I was just talking to myself.

[00:02:56]What was that? You understood? Oh, you must be fluent already. This is something that surprises a lot of people when they first come to Japan. We use a lot of English. Maybe you've even tried learning Japanese or Dualingo and be greeted by words like na and fu and you maybe go to a restaurant for lunch or ask for a menu. When you see all of these katakana English words, you might start feeling like learning Japanese is really easy. But sometimes katakana ego has a dark side. What do you think this is in Japanese?

[00:03:32]Wrong. This is what about this?

[00:03:38]Nope, idiot. This is obviously a consento. The more you spend time in Japan, you begin to realize a lot of words have been taken from English and well, Japanified. Take for example the word for all you can eat perfect. In Japanese, we call this biking. Why?

[00:03:55]Because the word smog sport would be too hard to say. So, we just decide to choose another vaguely Scandinavian word. And then sometimes we take words and shorten them down to be easier to say which can be unfortunate for English speakers like the word brainstorming in Japanese. We decided to take the B and so and now.

[00:04:19]So basically lot of Japanese [music] is English that you understand but at the same time there are a lot of Japanese is English that doesn't make any sense that you never understand. So, this might be the first video that you know less about the Japanese language after watching number three. How do you read that kanji again? Pop quiz time. Here's the kanji for number one. We say ichi and ni [music] is for number two. And s is for number three. [music] And how you pronounce this one?

[00:04:52]Ichi.

[00:04:54]Wrong. Youing idiot. You mor you never get good at Japanese. So why do I bother teaching you anything? I mean, it's pronounced hi. Yeah, let's talk about how even Japanese people have a hard time reading kanji out loud. So this is a major source of difficulty if you're ever learning Japanese. You may have heard Japanese is so hard because they are hiragana, katakana, kanji, etc. But what people often don't talk about is that for kanji we have onomi for the Chinese reading and kyomi for the Japanese reading. So say for example you have the word tabu for eating. That's how you say it with Japanese reading.

[00:05:34]But if you take this kanji and stick to another kanji onto it like this [music] it becomes shoku. So basically you just have to learn two different readings for each character. Right. Right.

[00:05:45]Unfortunately that's not that simple.

[00:05:47]Take this kanji here. It means life and just by itself it's ikiru as a verb to live. Simple, right? Except if you change it to be born is suddenly. Or stick it with another kanji like this.

[00:06:01]Now it's say or if it's just by itself it's nama which means wrong. But also if you say nama to a lot of people they think of beer because we call it draft beer. Nama. All super simple. Right.

[00:06:16]Right. And that's not even without mentioning names. There's so many different readings for how to pronounce names in Japanese that a lot of people just get it wrong if it's just not common reading. So how do we get around this? We cheat a lot of times and just write the phonetic reading verb in hiragana like this. So if you ever feel bad about not being able to read a kanji in Japanese, don't because sometimes we can't read them either. So even after years of learning thousands of thousands of characters, you may not even be able to read them correctly. So um good luck with that. Number four, counters for everything. As we learned about one, two, three, let's talk about another aspect of Japanese that makes no sense.

[00:07:01][music] How to count things. Okay, so time for a little bit of easy Japanese from Riotaro Sensei. If you're counting things in Japanese, we don't usually use it.

[00:07:12]Instead, we say this shows that it's a number of things, not just a number. So, if you go into a family and you ask for that's the easy mode where it gets complicated [music] is when you change how we count things based on the shape of an object. So, if you're counting small things, it's usually big things like cars. [music] flat objects like paper or plates, we use my cylinders, tubes, small animals, well [snorts] that's hiki. Big animals.

[00:07:54]The list goes on and on. Heck, there's even specific counting words for things like palms or souls. But at least you're in luck. If you're lazy, you can often get away with just using or like I mentioned before. So remember for birds and um rabbits. Yeah, more I think about the language, uh the less it makes sense. Number five, Japanese isn't the tonal language until it is. Hey, we've spoke a lot about how some things in Japanese don't make sense, but at least it's not as complicated as Chinese with all the tones. Japanese doesn't have tones, right? Right. Oh, no. A lot of people will tell you Japanese doesn't have tones, which in a way correct because we don't really think about how we [music] say words like in languages like Chinese, but actually we kind of do. Take for example this word hashi.

[00:08:55]When I say it's hashi, it's about chopsticks. But when I say hashi, it's about bridge or for corner and a for and a for candy. You can see that where I put stress on the word changes the meaning. And even though this is an example how you can tell which words I mean, a lot of words have tone in them for where you need to put the stress to sound natural. And what's probably more confusing than any of these explanation is if you ask Japanese person about it, then it will probably tell you they have no idea what you're talking about because we don't even think about it. It just feels right. But do you want to know what's even more confusing? If you say these words to like hashi or a in kai accent from the west like Osaka or Kyoto, they suddenly becomes backwards.

[00:09:46]just to make it more difficult for you guys, I guess. But good thing is a lot of times you can figure out what someone means by context. Unless they're eating with chopsticks on the bridge, on the corner of the bridge, and then they're eating sweets or it begins to rain, then um I just going to push them off. That seems easier. Number six, some sentences never end.

[00:10:11]Oh, what's up, Chris? You want to meet up and be featured on Basty Spar Japan YouTube channel? Ah, what? Whatever. [ __ ] you.

[00:10:24]So this guy, he's been in [ __ ] country for [ __ ] 10 years. Still doesn't know that you don't have to finish your sentences when you speak Japanese. That's right. Maybe this will make studying Japanese a little bit easier for you, but sometimes we just don't bother finishing with our sentences. We mostly do this when we're declining someone. [music] You want to go out drinking tomorrow? I'll tell you.

[00:10:49]Literally, tomorrow is a little We never specify what tomorrow is. Maybe tomorrow will never come. But it just feels politer in Japanese to leave someone hanging as opposed to outright telling them no. Say you will decline a coffee because you hate coffee.

[00:11:09]That just means coffee isn't. But coffee isn't what? Just tell me. There's a lot of being indirect in Japanese like this.

[00:11:18]And sometimes we don't even need words.

[00:11:20]So we just use hand gestures. Want to walk through a group of people? Use this one. Or if you want someone to leave or get over something.

[00:11:33]Number seven, Japanese [music] that even Japanese people get wrong. I know we've gone over a lot of Japanese that you're never going to understand. But don't worry, there are some Japanese that even all Japanese people get wrong. Now, I'm pretty sure that you have examples of this in English, like could care less.

[00:11:50]Even I know that's wrong. But we also have phrases that are wrong if you learn Japanese. But actually, everyone uses them anyway. Take for example the word.

[00:12:00]It means at all, but you use it with negative phrases like not tasty at all.

[00:12:08]Not funny at all. Just like it brought in Japan video. Technically, this is just a word to be used with things that are ending negative. So, not at all. But for some reason, it becomes common in Japan to say things [music] like, which means totally fine or totally okay. So, while your grandma may look at you as if you've just murdered the Japanese language, it's actually pretty commonly used. But don't worry, even if you get these things wrong, wait, is that correct? Japanese. Number eight, Japanese land. In recent years, one word has become incredibly popular among young people in Japan. Emoi. The word is believed [music] to come from the English word emotional. But in Japanese, it has taken on a meaning of its own. It's that moment when you're cycling through a small Japanese town at sunset, hearing nothing but the wind and distant [music] temple bells or sitting alone at a tiny train station in a countryside or listening to cicadas on a warm summer evening as the sky turns orange. Nothing extraordinary is happening. Nothing dramatic. And yet [music] years later, these are the moments you remember. That's emoy. The funny thing is, [music] if you ask 10 Japanese people what emoy means, you'll probably get 10 different answers. Your Japanese teacher might try to explain it. Your grandpa might tell you it's not a real Japanese word at all. But maybe that's the point. Some feelings are [music] too complicated to fit neatly into words. So instead of trying to define emoi, it's probably easier to just experience it.

[00:13:49]Number nine, making words polite. Okay.

[00:13:53]So, say you've mastered all the things that we've talked about until now. The next step on your journey to become a Japanese master is to make things polite. [music] And how do you do that?

[00:14:04]So, in a previous video, I explain a little bit about how we have different levels of politeness in Japanese.

[00:14:10]Basically, you can break it down to two categories when you want to be super polite. The first is you make yourself seem more humble by lowering your position compared to the person you're talking to. Someone who has higher status than you like your boss. We call this like I'm sure you know the word that people say before eating. It literally means I humbly receive. That's an example of or say you want to ask a question to your boss. You don't use a regular old Kikimasu. Instead, you use masu. You don't deserve to use kikimasu.

[00:14:50]That is way above your pay grade, lower yourself, present. And then we also have a way to make the person you're talking to higher. So you're lifting them up to sound more polite. We call this sono. So when you want to ask your bossacho what he wants to eat for lunch, you don't ask why would you ask him something so rude?

[00:15:12]You ask him instead.

[00:15:15]Now you are polite because you've lifted his ego. Yay, capitalism. But here's an easy tip for making the words polite.

[00:15:22][music] Just stick an O in front of nouns. Want to ask someone their name?

[00:15:28]Just say super polite. Want to drink a water?

[00:15:33]Don't ask someone if they want misu. Ask if they want. There are some exceptions to this rule of course, but I'm too lazy to tell you everything. You got to study some more things yourself, man. So remember, it's not, "My god, your Japanese so bad." It should be, "Oh my god, your Japanese so bad." See that?

[00:15:53]Oh, makes you polite. Number 10.

[00:15:56]Sometimes it's rude to be polite. Now you've mastered being polite in Japanese. But guess what? That's rude.

[00:16:04]That's right. Probably the most confusing thing about Japanese is even after all that studying, something being over polite is rude. Say for example, a wife and husband are having a fight. If suddenly the wife makes her Japanese super polite, "Oh no, buddy, you [ __ ] up." Overly polite Japanese can be seen a way of distancing yourself from someone in a sort of passive aggressive way. Kind of like saying, "We are not on friendly terms." Or maybe you say to your work colleague when you show up to the morning meeting, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule for coming. That is super polite, but it's so polite that they may think, is this guy being sarcastic? Is he taking a piss? So a lot of times using polite Japanese is balancing act based on who you're talking to. You be the mayor of your town. Best to go with pride Japanese. the sweet Obasan who says carrots on the side of the road.

[00:17:02]It's okay for a Japanese to be a little rougher, but she probably has problem hearing you anyway. So, there we have it. 10 things about Japanese that make no sense. Which one did you think that made least sense? Let me know in the comments. Wait, should that be which made most sense or which made the least most sense?

[00:17:25]See you in next video.

[00:17:33]>> [laughter]