Japanese...

[rainwaterspark]

I used to not believe those people who said that Japanese was totally weird and unlike almost every other language on the planet.

While I still concede that this is hyperbole, though, I'm starting to believe it myself.

Example: If you want to say someone is smart, you literally have to say "[person]'s head is good." As for tall, that's "[person]'s spine is high."

It gets even weirder if you want to say "[person] is a smart student." Broken down literally (and with the particles removed), the sentence is:

"[person] head good student is."

My English-wired brain keeps instinctively thinking that "good" is modifying "student," not "head."

And I keep getting confused in regard to phrases like, say, "long-legged animal"--after all the particle madness that is Japanese, it's stupefying when suddenly there's no attributive/possessive/modifying particle between "long legs" and "animal."

Rargh. D:


I'm starting to want to study some non-Romance/Germanic language (i.e. Russian) just to see if I'm overreacting about all these differences. Then again, I'm also realizing how simple and somewhat similar to English Chinese grammar is, and it looks more and more attractive to me by the day. (But is it unfair, seeing as I have something of an idiomatic foundation in Chinese already? Hm.)

Also, it's the two-weeks-before-spring-break crunch and I've been bombarded with work. D:

Comments

[yuanfang.livejournal.com]

Not going to lie, I giggled a little at "[person]'s spine is high." It kind of sounds like they're trying very hard to be poetic.