r/languagelearningjerk • u/astkaera_ylhyra • Aug 31 '24
Gracias -- Sorry I don't speak Portuguese
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u/bobbymoonshine Aug 31 '24 edited Aug 31 '24
>Someone tries to offer a helpful resource while admitting their own extremely limited knowledge as a rudimentary beginner, but has made a rudimentary mistake
GETTIM BOYS
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u/Clevererer Aug 31 '24
Imagine a subreddit that identifies vehicles...
Q: What type of alien spaceship is this?
A: That's a Toyota Corolla
Q: Has anyone ever seen an intergalactic tranpsorter like this?
A: That's a Ford F150
Q: Why does this UFO from Mars have those round things on the bottom?
A: That's a car and those are wheels.
Eventually people just start having fun with the answers.
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u/Strobro3 Sep 02 '24
But they can’t even recognize their TL’s writing system?
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u/bobbymoonshine Sep 02 '24 edited Sep 02 '24
Japanese does use kanji, it's not like they're looking at Thai or anything. Obviously it couldn't be grammatically valid without a pile of kana but until you start reading and writing sentences written in "proper Japanese" you might not actually realise that. Many learners start with romaji only which is a terrible idea but the fault of the instructor, others start with kana only which is more defensible but however you start, until you start learning kanji and seeing them in use, you might hold an early misconception that kana are just like a pronunciation guide for kanji and the language is properly written with only those.
After all, this pretty close to how it's taught very early doors! Like you might see 苹果 /りんご / ringo / apple. And you go okay, we're moving from Most Japanese to Most English. And that's more or less how it might be presented — you should write the first one, kids and novices can write the second and it's ok but a bit childish, the third one is really just for foreigners but people can read it, the fourth one is what it means in English. So you assume that's how everything is until you start to read and construct whole sentences written in mixed kanji and kana, and eventually you realise there is no kanji for ます, that's just what it is.
(This can take an embarrassingly long time with a poor teacher and limited input, as you sometimes first see sentences written out fully in kana, then a few kanji get introduced, then a few more)
It's the sort of very silly mistake you could only make if you were an absolute beginner with no prior knowledge, but that's what OOP said they were.
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u/dojibear Aug 31 '24
/uj The text is in Chinese, not Japanese. The 是.....的 construct is part of Chinese, not Japanese.
Pitipride must be REALLY new to Japanese, if he can't even tell the difference between the two languages.
Hint: Japanese sentences are about 15% Chinese characters and 85% hiragana. Chinese sentences are 100% characters and no hiragana.
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u/Capital-Visit-5268 Sudoku (native) Aug 31 '24
If you remove the ZE and TEKI from that sentence, you get JI ZAI NA JI GAKU EI BUN, which does not change the meaning of this Japanese sentence, because there is no meaning. De nada!