Japanese as international language?

Original: https colon slash slash news dot gamme dot com dot tw slash 1386619
The article in question is unfortunately slightly long when translated, so in order to avoid exceeding the character limit I have put it on pastebin. I apologize also for breaking up the link to the original like I did, but it was triggering the spam filter otherwise. In any case here's the pastebin:
pastebin.com/tku883jv

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2ei7e6aAs
kombu.de/twain-2.htm
zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_alphabet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language#Writing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY
youtube.com/watch?v=G-st3LPU1pw
youtube.com/watch?v=1RzVKCWXrRA
youtube.com/watch?v=aeGBpTFZhh4
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I'd like to learn Japanese for my Chinese cartoons, but even I know that Japanese isn't going to benefit me business wise

>a language with three different alphabets, including Chinese characters, should be used for international communication

I mean seriously that's as bad as suggesting that German should be a international language. It would be better to encourage countries to tech at least two secondary languages instead.

Besides, Esperanto already exists.
youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2ei7e6aAs

>Esperanto
Yuk

If we are going to use an artificial language, it should be developed with phonoaesthetics in mind, as well as grammatical simplicity.

Fuck no
I aint speakin' no fuckin' neet moonspeak shit. Next time pick something that has letters and can fit on a keyboard.

German already is a fairly international language, although not to the extent that English or French are. Honestly, if there's going to be a truly international language, it's going to be English or French. Nobody speaks fucking Esperanto, and nobody wants to. Look at international sports, and you'll see: it's English or French. Possibly Spanish, although let's be realistic here: it has very little play outside Latin America.

Japanese as an international language is a horrible, horrible idea.

>Esperanto
Excellent idea.
Though, the three alphabets aren't an inherent part of the language; script-reformed Japanese would still be Japanese.

...

Why, in particular?

It's estimated there's something like a million Esperanto speakers, and some 400 thousand learning it on Duolingo. That's not exactly no one.

Because the two basic alphabets between them contain more than 300 characters and while Japanese is an exceptional language for communicating Japanese concepts it is extremely limited when it comes to more exotic concepts and words.

German is a terrible, autistic language only suited to technical manuals.

kombu.de/twain-2.htm

Extremely limited when it comes to more exotic concepts and words? You do know the entire Bible (just to give one example) has been translated into Japanese, right? Plus, if they don't have a word for something, they generally just borrow it.

Not until they get rid of that fucking Kanji

Fuck off weeaboo.
And I say that as someone who's learning Japanese from 2010 and now lives in Japan.

Stop being a whiny weak-minded faggot and you'll overcome it.

That article literally compiles everything annoying about German without mentioning all the things that are easy for an Anglophone because of it being such a close relative to English that if they were people it would be illegal for them to marry in some states.

Hey man, I didn't write the article, I just translated it.

Hey, Chinese is written in kanji too, or hanzi as they call them (entirely in hanzi, in fact) and yet for a long time Classical Chinese was the de facto international language of East Asia (well, except for the areas where it was Sanskrit, though that was more in South and Southeast Asia, and there was some overlap).

They all used kanji for their native languages anyway so they didn't have to memorize thousands of new characters

>Esperanto

For some reason Esperanto just strikes me as the Reddit of language. I remember meeting this one Esperanto enthusiast and he was the typical neckbeard atheist. He even supported Bernie Sanders.

It's much easier to bring the international to Japan then making Japanese international. Everyone should move to Japan and find a Japanese waifu.

>Extremely limited when it comes to more exotic concepts and words? You do know the entire Bible (just to give one example) has been translated into Japanese, right?
Of course I know that. That doesn't mean that it survived intact. The bible has also been translated into African languages that barely even possess abstract thought.

>Plus, if they don't have a word for something, they generally just borrow it.
Yeah, and absolutely mangle it in transliteration.

De facto WRITTEN language. The interesting thing about classical Chinese is that the rulers of China, Vietnam and Japan knew those characters mainly in their own language. In fact, you learn to read classical Chinese texts by learning the characters alone without actually being able to speak the language.

You
I like you

There already is an international language, it's English. End bracket.

Hanzi were used as the international language in East Asia because China was an economic and military GIANT. Logographic systems are inefficient as fuck once writing stops being basic record keeping. It's also even more efficient for less analytic languages. It BARELY works in Japanese, and even then they had to radically alter the Hanzi into Kanji and use two separate alphabets.

zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

>It's estimated there's something like a million Esperanto speakers
That is exactly no one. By comparison there are over twice as many speakers of Slovene. There are far more speakers of Zulu, Hmong, Tsonga, Central Atlas Tamazight, Banjar, Haitian, and fucking Pig Latin.

You are delusional.

Only Japanese natives and weebs speak Japanese, not nearly enough to make it an international language.

Japan needs more foreigners/immigrants as well to boost their birth rates and allow it to compete in an increasingly globalized society and economy.

The way people talk in Japanese is absolutely disgusting. No intonation at all, it's like they have no emotions.

Also Japanese women scream like dying pigs during sex.

You do realize that nearly anything can be expressed in any language if you stretch it enough, right? Hell, people have translated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into Toki Pona, and that's an invented language with only 120 words!

No intonation? Have you ever even heard of, say, Norio Wakamoto?

And that's where efficiency comes into play.

Lets all pretend English doesn't have a shit ton of borrowed vocabulary.

>Yeah, and absolutely mangle it in transliteration.
Like we don't do the same in English? "Carry-oh-key", anyone?

Toki Pona is an extreme case, being a language constructed to be absolutely minimal.

I admit, it's not a whole lot yet, but just realize: There is more written in Esperanto on the Internet than there is written in Basque. Crazy, right?

Have you heard normal Japanese people talk, and not voice actors intentionally trying to make their voice sound unique for a character?

>African languages that barely even possess abstract thought.

Lol really? Let me guess, you think African languages have no concept of time too?

I didn't say they didn't possess it.

>African languages have no notion of abstract thought

Holy crap! This entire time I've been 100% literal and materialistic when talking to my family & friends?!

Chineke!

Thanks for teaching me about my language

Grammatical simplicity? Esperanto has 16 basic rules and no exceptions! 6 basic conjugated forms for verbs, which follow the exact same pattern for every verb! What could be simpler?

Can we at least all agree that Hangul is the best writing system?

This. Hangul should the new international writing system.

Some island in bumfuck pacific even independently adopt it.

Language with honorific system should rightly fuck off though. Classist fuck.

>million Esperanto speakers
>in a world of 7 billion people

How are logographic systems more inefficient? The only good argument i've heard is that you need to memorize the pronounciation for each logo, but that argument doesn't extend to written language. Give me serious replies, i'm genuinely interested in learning.

>read this pic a few times

>still can't read Hangul for shit

How

Hangul was a great concept but I'm sure it could have been done better.

English is already the international language. It could do with being more democratic, but it's here to stay for a while.

A big flaw with Japanese being an international language is the inability to properly transcribe other languages using its writing system(s).

eg.
>Romanization of Japanese
外国人がこの文を読めば正しく発音します。

Gaikokujin ga kono bun wo yomeba tadashiku hatsuon shimasu.

I know my Japanese is shit but you get the point.

>Japanification of English
This sentence when read using only katakana is completely unintelligible and incorrectly pronounced.

ジスセンテンスウェンレドユージングオウンリーカタカナイズコンプリートリーアンインテリジャブルアンドインコレクトリープロナウンスド。

>bahasa cia-cia
I'm kind of disapointed less and less Malayo-Polynesian ethnic groups are using the Persian-Arabic script.

Persian-Arabic script wasn't the original script of Insular Southeast Asia anyway.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawi_alphabet

>tfw no islamic state of greater indonesia

Cringeworthy.

Parolu por via mem, homo

The problem with that is that it's specifically designed for the sound system of Korean, and doesn't work very well for, say, Englishー it's missing a lot of necessary consonant sounds (v, f, th, dh, z, r/l distinction) and isn't set up to write consonant clusters. To write English practicably in Hangul we would need a rather modified version of Hangul. And don't get me started on, say, Mandarinー how would you write the tones? Again, you'd need a modified version of Hangul. So you wouldn't end up with a single universal script, you'd end up with many related scripts based on the same basis, just out of necessity for recording different languages.

The thing is, katakana transcriptions of foreign languages are generally written for the benefit of native Japanese speakers anyway, and it's difficult to produce a phonemic distinction that doesn't exist in your native language anyway, so the thinking is, why bother? For actually writing other languages in kana for the benefit of people who speak that language, there have been various modifications, e.g.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_language#Writing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana

>正しく
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Just based on that transcription, a foreigner who didn't know Japanese would be likely to pronounce the 'w' in 'wo' and the 'u' in 'shimasu', neither of which is actually pronounced in Japanese.

You need practice to read any script.

Abugidas are pretty easy and nice to use.

So are you saying Hangul is an abugida, and that's why it's nice and easy to use, or it's not an abugida and that's why it could be nicer and easier to use? I mean, it's kind of hard to classify since it could plausibly be classed as either an alphabet or an abugida.

I should have put "too" at the end of the sentence.

Oh, I see. (Though I don't really see what advantage an abugida gives over an alphabet, exactly.)

Who the fuck even thought of this?
Go watch your Chinese cartoons and stop pestering people with your bullshit.

Not him, but yes. They don't speak in a deadpan if that's what you think.

Yes him, and why are you assuming I'm a guy? Not saying you're wrong, but why are you assuming?

Clarification after posting because I realized my phrasing could be a little unclear: By "Yes him" I meant "I am in fact the person in question (whom you denied being by saying "not him")"

Japs wants to export their culture the same way Americans do.

Maybe you are just stupid, it worked for me. Not trying to start anything just saying

You understand there is literally no reason why English is the major language of the world except for the fact that most of the people who had the money in the world spoke English?

Essentially if you want to make money on the international market, business is conversed in English.

If you take a course on how to teach English you find it's actually THE hardest language in the world to pick up AS A SECOND LANGUAGE.
>inb4 people who never picked up English past their childhood they can't remember say it's not hard at all
Literally fact.

True, english has so much inconsistancies and rules of exceptions in grammar, spelling, and pronounceation that it can only be learned by practice.

Really not an easily picked up second/third language you learn past childhood

>Literally fact
It isn't. There are far harder languages to learn as secondaries. Russian, Mandarin, some of the Bantu languages. You think grammar rules in English are bad? Try picking up Russian. Everything is a massive contradictory clusterfuck.

>open thread
>unwarranted german hatred

Every fucking time on Veeky Forums.

Both of you are forgetting something: What language is easier to learn depends often on your native language. For a Dutch speaker, English is easier to learn than Russian because they're interrelated. For a Polish speaker, Russian is easier to learn than English because they're interrelated.

Hangul is not an abiguda.

>Though I don't really see what advantage an abugida gives over an alphabet
The only advantage it can possibly give is saving you from writing one vowel, but this is countered by the fact that you also have to have a symbol for zero-vowel (assuming your language has closed syllables).

Well, it would seem to me in that case to be a question of what is the most common thing to follow a consonant sound, whether it be some vowel or nothing. If a consonant is most likely to not be followed by a vowel (you'd have to have quite a lot of consonant clusters for that, eh?) then it would make sense for zero vowel to be the default one. If a is the most likely vowel to follow a consonant, then a should be the default vowel. And so on.

Joseph Conrad didn't learn English until he was in his twenties. Clearly, not only can it be done, it can be done well.

This is how English sounds like to non-English speakers, apparently.

youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY

Shit, I wonder if this is how foreigners feel when they get poked fun at. I feel like I should understand this but it's just gobbledy gook and it is frustrating the fuck out of me. Is it autism?

Dutch is the same for me. Sounds like a drunk English speaker trying to speak German, or vice-versa.

If that's how English sounds like to foreigners, I feel sorry for them.

It's all slurry and mushy.

Is it really that ugly sounding?

Shit senpai, I'm American and even I can tell you our language sounds awful no matter who is speaking it. Aussies, canucks, Kiwis, Brits, us, Africans, it doesn't matter. It sounds like shit. It's not the worst sounding language by any means, but it sounds awful.

In Received Pronunciation it's not quite so awful. 'Course, a lot of it has to do with your intonation and whatnot anyway; even German can sound darn nice if done right, e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=G-st3LPU1pw

Some Japanese dialects pronounce the u on the end verbs, though, and it would be easy to change all wos into os.

Bullshit:
youtube.com/watch?v=1RzVKCWXrRA

youtube.com/watch?v=aeGBpTFZhh4

they do? what happened to the "Most Xenophobic country in the world" thing I was told about?

DIdn't they use this for the Warcraft Movie?

Only brilliant bit of cinematography in that film.

The only reasonable and realistic choice would be English in how widespread it already is. That or either a latin based language.

Seriously Japanese is one of the only major language being learnt on passion

The language itself is fine for an international language, but the writing system makes Japanese totally unsuitable for international use. Literally nobody is going to want to wade through that mess of kanji and katakana and hiragana

Return to latin as lingua franca WHEN?
for fuck's sake 'lingua franca' is a latin term

What's the best method for learning a language? I'd like to get the basics down on german (enough to read a book or have a basic convo with a kraut)

It's weird, because they're xenophobic and yet at the same time xenophilic (i.e. are obsessed with foreign, especially American stuff, and think it's cool). But like just about every country they have a certain sense of "our country is the best, so let's spread all the things that are great about our country!"

This might sound a bit old-fashioned, but I would advise picking up a "Teach Yourself" book (you can check one out at the library for free). Although considering how closely related English and German are, if you're feeling brave you could just get something simple written in German and start going over it with a German-English dictionary.

Duolingo is the best free resource for learning words and some grammar. The best method for learning, period, is immersion, though.

It sounds bad. I don't know why you posted upper class/middle class southern accent as proof that it doesn't. It might sound better than the average American english, but it still doesn't sound very good.

t. Alabama

>Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution
Fucking this. At least in Russian you can tell the gender of a word just by a quick glance.

Though it's fucked up in some other aspects, I tell you that as a native speaker (participles vs adjectives that got formed from verbs because that shit suddenly matters in the spelling; the entire matter of punctuation; ordinals et cetera)

>It's all slurry and mushy.
Exactly. When I first started watching movies in English the speech definitely felt that way. I couldn't discern anything.
Hell, I still don't get about 10% of Monty Python.

>ジ

Japanese only has 20 to 25 phonemes so a decent alphabet is less of a problem than, say, in English.