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Journal mercedo's Journal: If I Were Asked 9

Journal by mercedo
If I were asked why I don't write Japanese any more, I would replay. They(Japanese people) don't understand my Japanese, while English speakers understand my English.
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If I Were Asked More

If I Were Asked

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  • And I most certainly would not be able to understand your Japanese.

    I did read some Japanese recently, tough. Okay, it was translated in German. Have you ever heard of the manga "hadashi no gen". During *the* anniversary I read some articles about the event and I saw there was a manga. A praised manga. I bought all of them. I did not regret it...

    I know, this is not the kind of reply you expected. I'm sorry about that. My replies do confirm that you are read tough...

    • People didn't understand my Japanese because my way of use Japanese was too diffucult. Japanese is as a language not cut out for expressing logics, theoretical thinking, yet if I use it I had to make a tower of Babel in Japanese - I mean my Japanese was too difficult for them to understand.

      In my lifetime I never read any manga (except for tabloid version of pornography). I think that the book of title you mentioned are related to the aftermath of atomic bomb atrocity in Hiroshima. Manga limits the range of

  • I've been bilingual in my past too. I attended Israeli public school for fourth grade and seventh grade. Toward the end of seventh grade I was pretty close to bilingual in Hebrew as well as English. In some ways I found that speaking Hebrew was easier, and in some things I spoke English easier.

    It was mostly a matter of where my vocabulary was. With subjects relating to school I spoke Hebrew better. However if the subject was electronics, I tended to speak English.

    Just because a language is one's mother
    • As a matter of fact I was reading almost all valuable reading stuffs or classics in Japanese in my freshman and sophomore year. My reading stuff had been gradually changed from sophomore year to junior. When I started majoring in economics in junior year(3rd grade), my entire reading stuff changed almost drastically. I started reading English articles earnestly at age 23, but till that time I had already completed reading almost all classics of general education in Japanese. (I mean I started reading books
    • That's an interesting observation about Hebrew. I'm learning Hebrew, and I'd like to become better at it because I think it's a powerful engine for expressing emotion and experience -- very good for a writer who wants to climb into the peak seat and drive.

      Mercedo, do you think that Japanese's radical change in the last half-century or so might be contributing to your becoming distant from the linguistic mainstream? I thought of this because I was discussing (and we're back to Hebrew again) how present-d
      • I should mention that modern Hebrew is very nearly a different language from biblical Hebrew. Reading Biblical Hebrew is like an English speaker reading Beowulf.

        Language morphs. Even modern english changes. New words are added. There even some ethnic additions. The "Ebonics" craze may have been good for a laugh here and there, but the reality is that many phrases from it made it to mainstream culture of North American English speakers.
      • Mercedo, do you think that Japanese's radical change in the last half-century or so might be contributing to your becoming distant from the linguistic mainstream?

        Uhm...difficult question. But I must say No. My key to success was not to concern around me.

        Japanese language as an official language in our daily use, hasn't changed at all from what it was 50 years ago. Grammar is exactly the same. Vocabulary..I think you are talking about vocabulary. Vocabulary we use in our daily conversation may be very diff

        • I think the vocabulary and the orthography is changing, and, speaking as someone who speaks some Japanese (and no Chinese) but who has been around a lot of fluent and/or native Chinese speakers, I think your contention that Japanese contains Chinese words is somewhat inaccurate. It's true that some kanji retain the original Chinese meanings, but a lot of even the basic words aren't the same anymore; otherwise someone with an understanding of Japanese would be able to understand more spoken Chinese than the
          • I think the vocabulary and the orthography is changing,

            Before the end of World War II we were using exactly the same number and kinds of Chinese character as Chinese people had done, I mean we didn't have limitation to use Chinese character. Chinese people use 5000 Chinese characters, and we were using the same number, only after the World War II, the number of Chinese character we use in our daily life was limited to 1850. We called them the list of Chinese characters in our daily use (toh'yoh' kanji).

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