Language and Cultural Values

[grandmasterkim]

I was thinking about language and how it affects a person. I'm certain that the grammatical, lexical, and semantic properties of a language influence how those that use it view and process the world around them. After all - they have to. Language is a part of your daily life

Comments

[ronin001]

...absolutely facinating stuff about the classifiers. Back in the day when I was trying to study japanese, classifiers were stressed with high importance. My teacher, Dr. Kim, loved to illustrate that classifiers were what made Japanese so simple when compared to English, to which I completely agree with him. He always spoke about how sentence structure in Japanese is much simpler, as were verb tenses, with contextual reference used to drive the language, while classifiers were an important part to understand that context.

As much as I could remember, Japanese classifiers were used to contextually dictate as to what was being talked about, determining importance, validity, state of existence, perception, familiarity (or lack thereof), proximity, even usage at points (held in hand vs sitting on the table). The ultimate facination to it all was by understanding the classifiers, you ultimately understood Japanese perception not only of the objects in the sentence, but the perception of the entire situation being spoken about.

I wish I kept up with Japanese, supposedly those classifiers followed a pretty simple set of rules, but I could never stick with the studies or find enough people that wanted to learn japanese beyond watching anime/hentai/porn.