Search Results

Aha! I understand what you mean. I suppose it depends on how one looks at it. Beauty is a subjective thing, after all.
Phonetically, I find a great deal of languages much more pleasing to the ear if that is what you are going for. Italian especially.

English is a mutant beast of the world's languages rolled into a giant Frankenstein monster-esque package. But out of this is something rich and sophisticated, as Shadowjak said.

If all of the languages of the world conducted an enormous party of a fairly sexual nature, and collectively bore a child, the child would be English.

The ugliness is probably the mind-bending orthography that makes little logical sense to speakers of other languages generally (and to English speakers as well at times), though personally I find the orthography of the Gaelic languages to be even more mind-bending for people used to English.

Yes! Just a side note regarding both languages: Russian is typically more flexible in word order than Japanese, in retrospect. Namely because Russian's case system allows you to have virtually any order and one can still be understood because the case system changes or inflects the various words in the sentence, meaning that the word is assigned a grammatical role (subject, object, possessive, etc.) not from its sentence position but from something inherent in the word's case inflection itself.

Apologies Kites.

and to Keyblade Spirit's point, his despair example is generally a good example of how the versatility of kanji allows for an extremely large amount of puns in Japanese, more so than English. Much more so than English.

Kanji would perhaps be the most common characters in use and also the most complicated for English-speakers to learn and understand. They are typically used to denote a large amount of words in Japan. The other two systems are hiragana and katakana, which are the syllabic characters. The more loopy hiragana you are prone to see involved with Japanese grammar and morphology constructions, and katakana is typically used with words of foreign origin such as wasei-eigo and gairago (English loan words and general loan words respectively, I believe).

Kanji is a very interesting system because it is logographic - that is, like Keyblade Spirit said earlier, the characters represent ideas and are independent from pronunciation. Now, this means two things:

1. Kanji can have multiple meanings for the same logograph, noted as different readings of kanji
2. These logographic systems are pronounced differently among different languages that use them, e.g. Kites' example of the eggroll. Namely because various mainland Chinese languages/dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan) all have varying pronunciations for these same ideas which are represented equally.

However, Japanese orthography and phonology are typically approachable by English speakers. The current romanization system in use, Hepburn, known as the standard style or simply now just rōmaji, easily breaks things down - not only so, but Japanese phonology in general is again, fairly approachable (barring accent development, because you will still probably sound like a gaijin).
There are a few exceptions of course. the "u" is not pronounced like the rounded but is unrounded [ɯ], along with the fact that in certain instances the "u" appears to be silent altogether since it is not a very strong vowel (contrast the French "e"). The "fu" is pronounced more akin to being between that and "hu" [hɯ] and the most challenging phonetic sound would probably be the "r", which is between an "r" and "l". Of course, there are variations in regards to dialect and internal Japanese regional accents. Personally I find Japanese phonology much easier to pick up than a mainland Chinese language or even Korean (the Korean Revised Romanization is a deal more ... complicated than Japanese Hepburn, but it is fitting considering how Korean is a CVC language and Japanese is more a CV(C) language). Not only that but tying into the aforementioned kanji usage, it would be easier to pick up.

Japanese grammar is funky but okay. It is at its roots an SOV language (subject-object-verb) but besides that word order is extremely varying, more so than German and perhaps equal to Russian, and context has a much greater basis in Japanese. If I understand correctly, the context is what drives most casual Japanese conversations - one does not have to be so specific and overly-careful with "complete sentences" because the idea is generally understood from context, and over-filled sentences would make them sound redundant and unnecessarily verbose (like this post). Nouns typically have few inflections (changes), adjectives are inflected based on two general types if I recall correctly, grammatical particles exist through postpositions (see, watashi wa, where "wa" is the subject particle suffix). Verbs are actually equal in complication of conjugation to a number of Romance languages in my opinion, if not slightly more complicated due to the variation and difference in why the verbs are complicated.

Due to cultural and historical development, along with Chinese influence, Japan, like Korea, has a greater base on well, social position and hierarchies. The result of this is a fairly complicated honourific system that also shows up quite a bit in how one conjugates verbs. Understanding the totality of the honourifics is key to getting one's head around verbal constructions and the like, along with not looking like a disrespectful person I suppose. Japanese grammar has a number of other interesting peculiarities which I suppose you can look into on your own time, like the pronoun variations which are also tied into honourifics.

That being said, the kanji remembrance is most likely the greatest challenge of Japanese, besides getting used to the grammar. If I recall correctly, 7000 or so kanji are required to be remembered in order to pass high school? But that is very slippery and someone please correct me on that if I am incorrect.

All of this being said, Japanese is a beautiful language, and the kanji and grammar combine to make a language that is extremely rich and vivid. It is no wonder that both Japanese aesthetic taste and literary works have been commended for being beautifully elegant.

Please, anyone correct me with any inaccuracies in the above (looking at you, Kites-sama).


tl;dr - What? splurges about Japanese like a linguistics nerd

Going from the simplest mathematical question to an interesting debate in regards to the equivalence of a value using a large number of mathematical proofs.

This thread is why I love the Spam Zone.

Be careful if you kiss her in the future. She may just be flung into the center of the Earth and you would have to go rescue her before she burns out and the series loses a character and thus ratings.

My favourite Final Fantasy game of all time is Nintendogs.

Do you have any preference for setting, sir?

Male sibling this thread contains a very extensive amount of the quantity known as swagger and thus I shall be shutting down this baby crib straight up the in the various suburban neighbourhoods twice-baked biscuit barbecue jerking your thangs like thangs were actually a word in the English language's various vernacular systems

(No but this must be closed due to reaching 20 posts actually and posting because this has been the shortest time for a thread reaching 20 posts ever).

Enjoy the forum! Perhaps you may bring more swag and chill to the forum,


yo.

(Did I use that correctly?)

​

Curse you, American imperialism! Another victim, et cetera.

Offering services!

EDIT: Oop, too late, but this offer will always be present for the future.

It is not necessarily pure posting that will get your reputation up, my good sir.
Reputation is a very random and chance event, to be honest, for it is up to the others to rep your posts. And the likelihood of such is virtually hard to predict.
My recommendation is that you continue to be a pleasant and helpful presence on the forum with a good sense of humour that you are to exhibit quite a bit.

That being said, reputation is not necessarily a standard for anything!

Spoiler

[video=youtube;-MkIQon-g2g]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MkIQon-g2g[/video]

No, but my serious request:

Spoiler

[video=youtube;UY8zK4R9oE8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY8zK4R9oE8[/video]

Well, I would presume it is how you would take the show!
Like Reptar stated earlier, the early seasons were very clever and witty. Not only that, but it was actually a fun way to learn things about marine biology indirectly. So you may in fact be becoming smarter from it!