112
votes
Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
Several reasons:
English pronunciation isn't easy
Don't think that, just because you find it easy, most people in the world will; English pronunciation is actually quite complex by any measure. ...
- 4,960
21
votes
Accepted
Why is Korean considered a language isolate?
Remember "isolate" doesn't mean "shown to be unrelated to any other language". It means "not shown to be related to any other language" (in a sufficiently convincing manner to establish a consensus).
...
- 17.8k
21
votes
Which of 可爱/可愛い was exported to the other between Chinese and Japanese?
It must be remembered that in the Japanese language system, the lexeme's sound and the lexeme's spelling are much less correlated with each other than even in Chinese; the phenomenon of 訓読み kun'yomi ...
- 7,271
19
votes
Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
Here's an answer from developmental psychology:
When a baby is born they can natively pronounce phonemes of every language, but as they develop, their brains are constantly calculating and keeping ...
- 307
16
votes
Is use of sorting expected and used in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)?
Yes, all of these cultures expect and use sorting pretty much just like alphabet-using cultures do.
Japanese has a set of some 46 phonetic characters called kana. They're arranged by phonetics in a ...
- 4,960
15
votes
Accepted
Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
Besides prestige reasons, there is also the fact that the Old Japanese numeral systems can be seen as inconvenient, especially for higher numbers. Disadvantages compared to the Chinese system are:
...
- 391
12
votes
Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
The reason is similar to the reason why English has borrowed (French) words for beef, pork, mutton even though there are Germanic words for cows, swine and sheep. There is a tendency to borrow words ...
- 82k
11
votes
In what way is Japanese related to Sanskrit?
Due to the study of Buddhism and its scriptures in the source language (either Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit or Pali) Japanese scholars were aware of the structure of the Indic scripts finally coming from ...
- 29.8k
11
votes
Accepted
The difference between the phonemes /p/ and /b/ in Japanese
I assume you mean "what is the difference in pronunciation between Japanese /p/ and /b/?". English and French also have /p,b/ but the physical realization of that contrast differs. French ...
- 82k
10
votes
Japanese kun'yomi with final N?
Kun-readings are an orthographic notation for the native lexical stratum (Yamato-kotoba). So the underlying question is, are there native morphemes with closed syllables (that is, with a consonant at ...
- 4,960
10
votes
Why Korean transcriptions of Japanese words uses the letters ㄱ,ㄷ,ㅈ for initial /k/, /t/, /tɕ/ while using ㅋ,ㅌ,ㅊ for other languages?
As you may know, "single" stops in Korean are weakly aspirated in initial position only (audio example), so Japanese stops in the unvoiced series (such as た) correspond to Korean "...
- 5,065
9
votes
Accepted
Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
The similarity in sound is the result of two factors: overlapping phonetic inventories, and word length (which affects syllable duration). If you wanted to quantify the similarity, those would be the ...
- 82k
8
votes
Why is transliteration of japanese always done English-style while transliteration from other non-latin script languges doesn't?
The goal of the Hepburn system is to provide a more or less regular, unified system for writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet. Though superficially similar to English, it doesn't have to follow ...
- 456
8
votes
Accepted
Etymology of ぐるぐる
Chinese gūlu < *kʰaːroːɡ is probably not onomatopoeic, especially if it came from (PIE) *kʷékʷlos "wheel" (related to English "circle") as Bauer suggests.
Japanese guruguru &...
- 4,960
7
votes
Does Japanese have pronouns?
The OP focused on one peculiarity of Japanese pronouns: they can be qualified. One can note that in English 'me' rather than 'I' would be qualified and if there is any conjugation it will be in the ...
- 497
7
votes
Why do Korean and Japanese share similar borrowed Chinese characters and is different from Chinese language?
TL;DR: language contact between Japanese and Korean has been particularly strong due to historical factors. There have been some papers that break down the different paths of divergence between them ...
- 7,271
6
votes
What languages lack personal pronouns, and why?
According to WALS, Wichita and Wari' lacks any personal pronoun. Since they're polysynthetic languages, they probably used personal affixes to convey the same meaning instead.
(And this is not just ...
- 221
6
votes
Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
Part of a theory of foreign pronunciation proceeds straightforwardly from David Stampe's theory Natural Phonology. Every natural language is phonetically difficult for a child, because many sounds ...
- 12.4k
6
votes
What exactly is the Japanese 'u' sound?
The labelling of phonemes is fairly arbitrary: we say English has an /d/ phoneme, for example, but it may not ever be realized as a true perfect IPA [d]. Reconstructed languages often have phonemes ...
- 64k
6
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between the nominative case and the subject?
"Multiple Nominative Constructions in Japanese and Their Theoretical Implications", by Masahiro AKIYAMA, indicates that in at least some Japanese sentences with multiple noun phrases marked by ga, ...
- 17.8k
6
votes
Accepted
Pronunciation and spelling of English loanwords in Japanese
Many of the 外来語 gairaigo loanwords in Japanese are indeed from German, many of which date from the very late 19th century / early 20th century.
アレルギー arerugī (note the long i at the end!!!) is ...
- 7,271
6
votes
Accepted
Japanese is in its own lingustic family, but it sure seems to have a lot in common with Turkish
Japanese and Turkish are structurally similar, if you compare them to English, Spanish, Vietnamese or Arabic. They are somewhat more like Arabic, but I am guessing that you don't speak Arabic so you ...
- 82k
5
votes
What are arguments for and against a common origin of Korean and Japanese?
A common origin for two languages is a concept that has been proposed and theoretically grounded within the comparative method invented at the beginning of the 19th cent. by Rask, Bopp and Grimm. Two ...
- 2,549
5
votes
Why was korea able to remove kanji but japan wasn't when both languages use homophones?
I am Korean not fluent in English, but I will try to answer.
I am not a linguist or social scientist, but I think the main reason is not political or cultural.
It's due to the capability, nature of ...
- 51
5
votes
What gave rise to the manual alphabet for Latin characters in Japanese Sign Language?
Atypically for a sign language, many JSL morphemes are derived in some way from the writing of the society's spoken language (I could suggest that's because Japanese has quite an unusual way of ...
- 4,440
5
votes
To what extent can Japanese Kana be adapted to the Spanish language and be intelligible?
The phonology of Spanish might be vaguely similar to that of Japanese but the differences are also relevant. There are many consonantal clusters in Spanish and also word final consonants, and this ...
- 2,549
5
votes
Accepted
Can the voiceless velar fricative, [x], be represented in Japanese?
I will assume that by "translate" you mean which syllables in words loaned by Japanese correspond to [x] in their source language.
The answer is that words containing [x] which come directly from ...
- 5,065
5
votes
Is use of sorting expected and used in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)?
It's an old question, but no one gave an answer that covers Korean.
Korean is written in Hangul, which combines "initial", "middle", and (an optional) "final" letters in a single syllable block. For ...
- 357
5
votes
Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
Extremely similar phonemic systems. In particular, both languages tightly limit syllable-ending consonants, unlike English which permits almost any consonant to end a syllable.
Large numbers of loan ...
- 117
5
votes
Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
Besides what others mentioned here, there's also the fact that as foreigners, we are more likely to hear the similarities (especially when we know a few words) than the differences.
For me, after I ...
- 322
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