One of the things that is most difficult about speaking Japanese is knowing when to insert your subject, and when to drop it. Most native speakers of Japanese drop the subject of a sentence when they are reasonably sure their speaking partner knows what the subject is. This happens in English as well, but not nearly as often. There are a lot of jokes in both English and Japanese derived from one person not knowing exactly what the subject is while having a conversation.<\/p>\n
Frequently English speakers learning Japanese have trouble with this, and start their sentences with “watashi wa…” which sounds in Japanese like “As for me, …” This is a common mistake, but even after figuring that out there are lots more gotchas waiting for the beginning speaker.<\/p>\n
The other day I went to my local barbershop for a haircut, and the conversations with the older guy who cuts my hair are definitely the most difficult Japanese conversations that I deal with. A lot of the questions he asks me are heavily situation-dependent – something as simple as “oikutsu?” (How much?) means he wants to know how old I am if it is asked early in the conversation, but it could mean how much do I make in salary for a particular job, or even how much money I have on my person at that time. <\/p>\n
It’s hard to learn the nuances of a language, and knowing the situation in which expressions are considered appropriate is mostly a matter of building experience through trial and error. Watching other conversations is a big help – I’ve found that at the level of Japanese that I speak the television has become my most valuable learning tool, where it was pretty useless my first two years in Japan.<\/p>\n
Hopefully I’ll have more opportunities to speak Japanese in the future – teaching English is one of the worst jobs for learning Japanese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things that is most difficult about speaking Japanese is knowing when to insert your subject, and when to drop it. Most native speakers of Japanese drop the subject of a sentence when they are reasonably sure their speaking partner knows what the subject is. This happens in English as well, but not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-nO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}