When asked what the most difficult thing about learning the language, most people studying Japanese will probably say kanji––that was generally my answer too, at least until recently. Half way through my fourth year of study, it’s really starting to sink in just how troublesome the “simple” grammar can be. Er, okay I give up on trying to make this sound like a moderately more formal post. Anyway, I’m still shit with kanji and vocabulary, but the nice thing about kanji and vocabulary is that, on the whole, they’re really fucking easy to look up. Quirks of the grammar on the other hand, not so much. These are largely translation related frustrations as I’m in a translation class now, but I didn’t really notice a lot of this stuff until I had to translate it. Some things are more this-is-easy-in-Japanese-but-doesn’t-English-well, others are more of the this-causes-serious-issues-in-comprehension variety. (inb4 I make ignorant and egregious errors because I’m a shit student)

RELATIVE CLAUSES

Okay, so I actually think the way relative clauses work in Japanese is pretty cool (basically a whole sentence just works like an adjective–yeah I realize that’s effectively what a relative clause is, but the way RCs are used in a sentence in Japanese is almost *exactly* like an adjective). The annoying thing about relative clauses in Japanese is that they’re heavily abused and it’s not uncommon to see like 4+ embedded within each other.

So, if you were diagraming a sentence (idk if anyone else does this, I do all the time because linguistics and it makes sense to me) in which you put parenthesis around clauses, you might end up with something like four open/close-parenthesis in a row. This gets annoying because it can become very difficult to first, disentangle all of the relative clauses and figure out where they all go, and second, figure out how to put it into English. On some level, it reminds me of how we’d often end up with sentences that looked something like this in Latin class: “Caecilius, having been doing something or other, verb-ed.”

A sentence with no subject and no verb is a perfectly ‘legal’ sentence in Japanese.

Yes. You can have sentences with no subjects and no verbs in Japanese. Really, this isn’t so much of a problem in Japanese as it is in attempting to translate Japanese into English. It’s not so bad when you have a sentence with assumed subjects and verbs (as is often the case), since you can just fill in the missing information from context BUT it is far from uncommon to have sentences like this where the subject and/or verb are intentionally left ambiguous–and that doesn’t English well.

A relative clause + it’s head on it’s own is a totally reasonable sentence.

Essentially, this as a standalone sentence: “Bob, who was sleeping.” (it’s even worse when it’s attributes and not verbs, or really really long relative clauses)

I guess this could probably be thrown in under sentences-with-no-subject-or-verb, but I see this structure all the time and I hate hate hate hate it because it is so easy to understand in Japanese but so fucking hard to put into not horrible English sometimes.

It is possible to switch subjects mid-sentence with no explicit indication that this has happened.

This is one of those things you’re only likely to discover 3 sentences/a paragraph later when you realize the last chunk of text you translated makes absolutely no sense. I think this aspect is an annoyance mainly because this is totally illegal in English. For me at least, as a native English speaker, it’s really easy to forget that a mid-sentence subject switch is even possible. I’m kind of curious about the precise rules on this in Japanese, might have to dig around my linguistics textbooks to see what I can find.

On a side note, they really should teach some of this stuff with linguistics in language classes–like the devoicing of certain vowels for example, language teachers will inevitably say “you kind of just have to know, you’ll figure it out as we go along,” but the linguistic rule is so simple: い and う are devoiced after unvoiced consonants (which is *super* easy in Japanese since voiced consonants have a dakuten on them!)

Narration in fiction is fucking weird.

Okay, so outside of the story we’re translating in class I’ve only read a few bits of Japanese fiction in other classes and parts of the 00 novels (most of the stuff we read in 3rd year was news articles and the like). But, assuming that there is but an incredibly minute possibility that Enchi Fumiko’s 猫の草子 and the Gundam 00 novels have anything in common stylistically beyond general conventions of Japanese fiction, the way narration works in Japanese is fucking weird. Basically, if you have a third person, presumably omniscient, narrator there is often little to nothing to distinguish between the narrator and the character’s/s’ thoughts. Again, this is totally not cool in English (well, far from not cool it’s not really even possible considering how subjects work in English).

This is a lot like the last one in that it’s really easy to not notice when the narrator switches off into a character’s internal thoughts until a ways later when you realize either a) wait a minute, why is the third person omniscient narrator displaying strong emotions/giving opinions about things? b) shit, was that a personal pronoun not in a quote or in a sentence ending in と思った? c) something else doesn’t make sense. The same kind of problem occurs when coming out of a character’s internal thoughts and going back into narration (I usually miss it until there’s an explicit 3rd person reference and then I have to backtrack and guess the transition).

 

Hm, I know I had some other things to add to this, but I think five whines is good enough for now. I’ll probably go back and put in more proper examples when I’m more awake (assuming my cold actually lets me get some sleep today).