School Jane To Went Monkey Apple Carburetor
Tokyo Tower from Roppongi Hills
Roppongi, Tokyo
I found this hilarious site the other day on the perils of learning Japanese. One of my favorite parts is about grammar:
Grammatical Structure
The Japanese have what could be called an "interesting" grammatical structure, but could also be called "confusing", "random", "bogus" or "evil". To truly understand this, let's examine the differences between Japanese and English grammar.
English Sentence:
Jane went to the school.
Same Sentence In Japanese:
School Jane To Went Monkey Apple Carburetor.
Japanese grammar is not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. What's more, the Japanese also do not have any words for "me", "them", "him, or "her" that anyone could use without being incredibly insulting (the Japanese word for "you", for example, when written in kanji, translates to"I hope a monkey scratches your face off"). Because of this, the sentence "He just killed her!" and "I just killed her!" sound exactly the same, meaning that most people in Japan have no idea what is going on around them at any given moment. You are supposed to figure these things out from the "context", which is a German word meaning "you're screwed".
Yah, Japanese grammar is going to kill me. I'm doing OK so far learning the alphabet...apparently one can master all of the hiragana in three weeks. We'll see, lol. Next comes the second alphabet, katakana. I hope to learn both alphabets well enough so that when classes start in a few weeks, I can devote more of my brain to speaking the language (I'll deal with kanji later!)
This is a bit off the topic of Japan (boooo!), but related to the controversy over the call for the US military to ban waterboarding as a form of torture: This guy decided to try the technique on himself to see if all the fuss is warranted. It's worth reading. Chilling.