Do Japanese Kids Get Particles Wrong?

[00:00:00]So, when I made this video about how Japanese kids speak Japanese, I noticed that some of them don't quite speak Japanese correctly all the time. For example, listen to this 5-year-old girl.

[00:00:11]She's making her stuffed toys eat ice cream.

[00:00:23]Means beautiful weather. She said, "You came to eat ice cream on this beautiful day." But this n doesn't quite make sense at the first segment doesn't quite connect well with if you say I would expect to hear something like so it turn to be such beautiful weather something like that. So, her speech is not very adultlike. She could say something like, "Because the weather is good, you came to eat ice cream." Or you can use hot and say, "Because it's hot, you came to eat ice cream." But this made me think, well, maybe Japanese kids don't quite use particles correctly. So I looked up some research and it turned out yes they do make particle mistakes. For example, this experiment gave particle quizzes to 3 to 5 year olds and a lot of them got them wrong.

[00:01:31]And there's another paper that shows young kids don't always use W correctly.

[00:01:36]And that made me quite curious. I want to hear more Japanese kids speak Japanese to see if they make particle mistakes so that Anna won't feel bad about making Japanese mistakes. And I collected some footage. So, let me show you some of it. We're going to start with this boy. He's four and he's playing a doctor and his mom is playing a patient.

[00:02:08]He said body already fever. Now is a contraction of so a formal version would be your body has already become feverish or something like that. And this is not very adultlike.

[00:02:32]here doesn't make a lot of sense here because if you want to use it's going to be something like my body is feverish but this is mostly how we talk about our own body so doctors they probably wouldn't say this if there's something that doctors would say it would be something like you have a fever so that didn't sound quite right although it's understandable now let me show you another example This is a 5-year-old boy and he's telling his mom about his morning. A lot of people say he looks like a girl, but he's actually a boy.

[00:03:30]So is like a end of term ceremony uniformal clothes. So he's saying that you have to wear a uniform instead of normal clothes to go to the end of term ceremony. Now this is interesting because he started saying using then he paused and he said what.

[00:03:56]So it sounds like he's correcting his own particle because in the context of this conversation ga actually wouldn't make sense but what does. So you can tell that he understands how we use got and what differently and he corrected himself. And he's also a bit older than the other kids in this video and that could be why. Now next example. This boy is four years old and he's talking about Sakura cherry blossoms.

[00:04:39]Now, he said, "I like cherry blossoms, but I like cherry blossoms." So, it's not technically incorrect, but it doesn't make a lot of sense because when we hear I like cherry blossoms, we would expect to hear something different such as I like them, but I've never seen them.

[00:05:05]Something like that. But he he continued with I like them. And his mom noticed it and she was amused. Now I have another interesting example or from this boy.

[00:05:27]Now he mispronounced April as and his mom corrected it because he apparently hasn't seen your lie in April. He should watch it when he's old enough to appreciate sadness. Now, let me show you yet another example. This boy is four years old and he's making a pancake.

[00:06:04]>> [laughter] [screaming] >> Now, did you spot any mistakes? I didn't. His Japanese was perfectly fine.

[00:06:20]Now, I'm not sure if he actually said to spread butter or without, but either way, it's fine. So, he didn't make any mistakes. Although his pancake was done suspicially fast, so I'm not sure if it's fully cooked.

[00:06:38]But yeah, kids around his age, even though they don't always make mistakes, they do sometimes. But their mistakes are not just about particles. Sometimes their sentences are not technically incorrect, but they sound weird and non-native like just like this green owl. But I would say don't worry, Anna, other kids make mistakes, too. And I kind of want to do a follow-up experiment where I ask them to interpret particles correctly because in this video, we let them speak freely. So, if they are not comfortable with some particles, maybe they can avoid using them. So, that's an idea. But if you want to learn Japanese with me, I will teach you how to use particles properly, like in the native way, because I will help you acquire Japanese with natural but easy and properly contextualized examples. So, click on the link in the description or on the screen and subscribe to my email group, Japanese with Yuza.