Why is Korean the only one he didn't pronounce? The Korean text is roughly "an-nyeong, meong-cheong-i" (meaning "hi/bye, dummy"). Non-native here, but I think the 'o' sounds he's doing would be spelled 오 (the first few) and 우 (the last couple), which weren't actually in that text. Kind of ironic 😅
I had a blast in junior high school while learning French because the word for seal (the marine mammal) is phoque, and sounds just like fuck. So any time seals came up in class, we were cursing up a storm.
I remember hearing years ago about some poetry that was written in Gao, which was a pre-colonial Vietnamese writing system. No idea what it even looks like; if it’s more Chinese or Indic (like Thai, Lao, and Cambodian)
The Korean O isn't an O though. It's silent at the start of a syllable and pronounced "ng" at the end of a syllable. A circle can also be part of an H, which looks like ㅎ. Also, there are a bunch of different fonts (typefaces) and the ones that imitate brush strokes can look more like Chinese or Japanese to the untrained eye.
And my point was that the letter doesn't always look like a proper full circle. The Korean equivalent of a modern sans-serif typeface is very geometric, but calligraphic hangul can look like this ↓. Which, if you're not particularly familiar with any of the East Asian writing systems, doesn't look fundamentally different from, say, calligraphic katakana.
Besides, not every short text in hangul contains ㅇ or ㅎ. If you only have a store sign or a street food menu to go by, you might not spot any circular letters.
I usually get by with Korean being like comic sans. it's curly or 'fun' looking softer. Chinese is aggressive and close together and elaborate. Japanese is like a more serious looking Korean and much less serious looking Chinese, when confused if it has comfy spacing and isn't aggressive stroke wise it's Japanese. But I also never had difficulty telling those three apart.
You're right, it's completely different. He says "please look at this " and the writing says "lots of curves lines" Not sure what りくねった is, can't find anything in my dictionary.
I mean netta would be sleep if you separate it but not sure what riku would be then. I'm guessing sleep also wouldn't make sense in that sentence though. Lol
To me Korean is quite distinct it's so angular it's very obvious. Chinese tends to look so crammed with characters. Japanese is because I played a lot of video games in the 80s. Vietnamese is like WTF Latin letters in Asia? Thai is long and droopy characters.
Vietnamese writing used to be modified Chinese characters. Now it's modified French. Sadly, their writing system has been the outward manifestation of their history of colonization.
Spanish, now that's my comfort zone. I've learned German and Latin, Latin gets you really far with everything in the West. Can't speak Spanish but as a line cook once joked to me, "I speak kitchen Spanish" meaning, if you're talking about food, I get it. Past that es muy malo. But Spanish is very routine which i like, not much bullshit in Español
Spanish. Regardless of Duolingo. Though they don't really seem to get that Korean doesn't have articles. "Dog ran across the yard" is more correct than "The dog ran across the yard" because there is no "The" (closest is "that") but Duolingo kept dinging me points on it. I'm sitting there like "I know more than you, asshole."
Yeah, Duolingo doesn't handle non-Germanic languages well. On that note, Spanish is a Romance language. The kid who picked that gets the writing system for free, but that's not a major advantage over the kid who picked Korean since Hangul can conceivably be learnt in a day (granted, with Duolingo it's more like 6 months). In both cases they'll mainly have to deal with grammar (which Duolingo gets wrong and actively avoids teaching) and vocabulary (which is limited in Duolingo).
You can learn the alphabet in a couple of hours, but Korean grammar is like a drunk Yoda got cerebral palsy. The vocabulary is about as weird as anything else though.
Actually, he showed the hiragana alphabet and kanji, but did not show katakana. So you have the chinese characters, and the smoother of the two alphabets (mainly used for grammatical markers and to spell out unfamiliar words), but not the jagged alphabet, known as katakana, which is usually limited to being used for foreign words and exclamations.
While Japan imported Chinese character, over time they have modified some and come up with new ones (kokuji). They also never simplified the characters like they did on the mainland (but not in HK and on TW before someone feels the need to point that out) in the 1950s. As a result of these subtle (and not so subtle) differences, you can't really mistake Japanese text, even in kanji, for Chinese.
They often have kanji from Chinese characters, hiragana for words in their own language, katakana for words they adapt from other languages. And the Roman alphabet thrown in for funzees
A phonetic writing system is easier to teach and write so children are taught with it. It's also useful to inflect words, something that Chinese doesn't really do; e.g. nomu/nonda/nomi are "drink" (v), "drank", "drink" (n). But it's ambiguous for meaning because for example "kami" can mean "hair" or "paper". So you keep the kanji for the "concept" part and the phonetic characters to modify it: nomu 飲む・nonda 飲んだ・nomi 飲み, and to tell homophones apart: hair 髪・paper 紙.
I'm only 50% through learning hiragana and after learning just how many kanji there are alongside both the hiragana and katakana it's feeling like I chose the wrong language to learn in my free time. Lol
Kanji is a symbol-based (logographic) language taken from Chinese b/c China started writing before Japan. It’s kinda the base of the language in a structural sense. Hiragana was created in Japan for words of Japanese origin. Katana is a phonetic alphabet to sound out foreign words which don’t have their own characters.
Partly because phonetic writing is simpler, and it's useful to show the different ending of Japanese words: 買う ka-u = buy・買った ka-tta = bought ・買い ka-i = puchase. So you write the "suffix" simply. And you keep kanji because there's similar sounding but unrelated words like 飼う kau = keep an animal. Katakana is equivalent to hiragana, and it's used for distinguishing loanwords like ナイフ naifu = knife, names of some species like クマ kuma = bear, and sometimes just to make a word look different.
Cuz Japan gunsa Japan. The first two are phonetic, hiragana being the primary modern alphabet and the bulk of their modern language. Katakana is used for words they incorporated from other languages. If that word was taken from English for example this is where a lot of the engrish sounding things you hear in anime might come from. That's the actual way they say some things, they adapted it to their vowels and such. Kanji are old school, a whole idea or thing in one Chinese style symbol.
This sounds complicated... cuz it is. It's partially tradition, cuz again Japan is going to Japan, but once a person gets over the hump of internalizing the first two and the most common entries from the 3rd (learning all of the 3rd is like a masters degree level pursuit, not everybody does it. Think an English professor) you can be rather efficient. There's a reason video game speed runners use Japanese games. With some exceptions they can typically pack more meaning into less space.
Hiragana and Katakana were originally made to replace Kanji for those who had less education. Kanji is not an alphabet, but a set of symbols that express full words. Hiragana and Katakana are alphabets, Hiragana is used for Japanese words, Katakana is used for foreign words.
katakana is also used sometimes for emphasis or as a stylistic choice, and hiragana can be used instead of katakana to create a softer (less angular) look
Not quite true. So the thing is that Japanese originally had manyougana, which was basically Chinese characters that were used for their phonetics rather than their meaning, and was used alongside normal kanji. Manyougana was however very inconsistent, which resulted in the quirk of hiragana and katakana being developed separately. Katakana was more popular with Buddhist monks for annotating religious texts. Hiragana was more popular with women, who had less access to higher education.
With frequent use of Roman lettered English words thrown in. You effectively need to know at least 2000 kanji characters as well as three other alphabets to read a magazine in Japan. With that said, I learned Japanese faster than I've learned Brazilian Portuguese.
But it's not exactly unusual to encounter situations in the wild where text isn't formatted as a full sentence. For instance you will probably not find a sign saying anything along the lines of "hello good citizen, if you go in this direction you will your way out of this building", but you might find a sign saying 出口, and that only uses the Chinese looking character set.
But you can get the jist of almost every sentence in Japanese if you know how to read Chinese. I could read Japanese news papers, never learned Japanese. My Chinese is also shit. But good enough to read Japanese.
It's hilarious. There's just different degrees of borrowing! I know enough Spanish to understand Italian but definitely can't speak a fluent sentence you know?
Japanese just is so heavily borrowed from Chinese it's easy
It's mostly signs and compound words that can have only kanji, mostly for brevity. This says "emergency traffic route - during earthquake disaster, general vehicle passage prohibicion - Tokyo metropolitan police department", no conjugation
That's Oo-Namazu (big catfish); it lives underground and causes earthquakes. Relatively recent as their folklore goes; it comes from the belief that fish can predict earthquakes.
I tried to read the Tale of the Heike once. Even translated into English i just couldn't keep track of everybody's names. That's not specifically an alphabet thing just... I'm so bad with Asian names. Idk why. Cheers to everybody diving into Ghost of Yotei, Tsushima was epic. Love Japanese culture, I just don't think I could hack it in Japan
I've seen Yojimbo i get the gist... Genji v Heike let's fight! I said in another comment, samurai movies and western movies are like... the same. This is one of my "I'm gonna pick this hill and already dug the grave" moments; there is no difference between kurosawa and leone
Those two games really piqued my interest for Japanese history and culture. Sadly, Ghost of Yotei collectable items are a bit lacking. In Tsushima you found plenty that taught bits and pieces about both Mongolian and Japanese history and culture. In Yotei there are way fewer, not as informative and are all specifically about the Ainu indigenous people.
I have long had a fascination with samurai because there is a direct correlation between samurai in Japanese media and cowboys in American media, it's like a 1:1 on themes, pacing, and film productions. It's like uncanny. And I love both.
Oh that's cool! I have a thing for cowboys and the wild west as well. When I was a kid, I remember staying up late to watch reruns of Shōgun. I always like samurai, ronin etc in games, but never really explored movies or series beyond Shōgun. Think it's about time that I do :) What would you recommend I start with?
Toughie, where you from? (I'm stalling because I'm trying to think) because I think Japan has a fascination with the West same as we have a fascination with the East. Samurai Jack is kid friendly. The Seven Samurai is a very long but very worth it movie. Blue-Eye Samurai is a recent incredible series. Afro Samurai, another very western take. Yojimbo. Samurai Champloo, same studio that did Cowboy Bebop. The Sword of Doom for a deep cut (pun intended)
Which is true. Particularly when it comes to languages that use different tones (I'm so sorry I'm really not versed in Eastern languages) like Chinese where you go high or low and it means different stuff. Which AFAIK isn't a naming convention just in their language. And I don't get that? I'm so western, like look, I know Latin and my seven trench-coated language and enough German to know what they're saying in movies and Spanish food words and... I feel like that's good enough right?
Do you often know the meanings of people’s names? Most people just recognize the specific sound attached to a person, not the actual meaning of the sound.
I think they're kinda trying to say like western people have last names like Smith and Baker, there's a really obvious meaning and pronunciation. But also I understand Asian characters have really specific phonetic attachments that can vary, like Latin words have different endings too. It's cool as fuck. I'm just not in the know
I think what they're asking is how not knowing someone's name means "brushwood rice patty" in Japanese is different from not knowing that someone's name means "brown" in English.
Granted, Shibata and Bronson are both simple examples of this (and Brown itself is a surname), but still. And Shibata is 2 symbols in Kanji vs 7 in Arabic. I'm no linguist, so I don't know the answer either, but I would imagine in terms of names, Asians don't exactly find "Jennifer Arlington" easy to remember either.
Salticido
Why is Korean the only one he didn't pronounce? The Korean text is roughly "an-nyeong, meong-cheong-i" (meaning "hi/bye, dummy"). Non-native here, but I think the 'o' sounds he's doing would be spelled 오 (the first few) and 우 (the last couple), which weren't actually in that text. Kind of ironic 😅
alienstomper
Feel like vietnamese should be described as french with accessories
nowlookwhatyoumademedo
The Korean says, "Hi, idiot."
DrKonrad
Blackfinity
BillyM00n
I had a blast in junior high school while learning French because the word for seal (the marine mammal) is phoque, and sounds just like fuck. So any time seals came up in class, we were cursing up a storm.
jerusalemspider
Thai looks exactly what I expect a language from a country the is between China and India look like.
CheeseborgarSoop
CrabbyBlueberry
Those accessories in Vietnamese are called diacritical marks.
CommunCreator
I remember hearing years ago about some poetry that was written in Gao, which was a pre-colonial Vietnamese writing system. No idea what it even looks like; if it’s more Chinese or Indic (like Thai, Lao, and Cambodian)
Lynne22
And Bangla is full of triangles!
FiftyShadesOfMascarpone
The Korean O isn't an O though. It's silent at the start of a syllable and pronounced "ng" at the end of a syllable. A circle can also be part of an H, which looks like ㅎ. Also, there are a bunch of different fonts (typefaces) and the ones that imitate brush strokes can look more like Chinese or Japanese to the untrained eye.
sochilln
https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1MnZqcTE2YnZwbDJyeXFvZzRxbTBzYnB5ZmExaWhmMGppYjM0anp2eCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/WfBZwNA6XSjphkYkzN/200w.webp
PhailRaptor
The critical point, though, is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use full circles. They can both use angles and curves, but not circles.
FiftyShadesOfMascarpone
And my point was that the letter doesn't always look like a proper full circle. The Korean equivalent of a modern sans-serif typeface is very geometric, but calligraphic hangul can look like this ↓. Which, if you're not particularly familiar with any of the East Asian writing systems, doesn't look fundamentally different from, say, calligraphic katakana.
FiftyShadesOfMascarpone
Besides, not every short text in hangul contains ㅇ or ㅎ. If you only have a store sign or a street food menu to go by, you might not spot any circular letters.
architectidonna
He is charming
viva93
I usually get by with Korean being like comic sans. it's curly or 'fun' looking softer. Chinese is aggressive and close together and elaborate. Japanese is like a more serious looking Korean and much less serious looking Chinese, when confused if it has comfy spacing and isn't aggressive stroke wise it's Japanese. But I also never had difficulty telling those three apart.
JPeterman2
Domo arigato
Omicron416
Mister Roboto! (Yeah, I'm old.)
GravyEducation
https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1eDIxNWt1dG16aWRjN3FmeWFxNzgydDljc2hxeGRyd2E0cm82ZHU1bCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/urvsFBDfR6N32/200w.webp
SJBSavageInk
Am I crazy or did what he said and what was written in Japanese not match up?
brazzy42
You're right, it's completely different. He says "please look at this " and the writing says "lots of curves lines" Not sure what りくねった is, can't find anything in my dictionary.
SJBSavageInk
I mean netta would be sleep if you separate it but not sure what riku would be then. I'm guessing sleep also wouldn't make sense in that sentence though. Lol
manveti
"Lots of twisting and turning lines". "曲がりくねった" is a single adjectival unit meaning "winding", "twisting and turning", "tortuous", or the like.
zer0vector
Remembering this for geoguesser
dghughes
To me Korean is quite distinct it's so angular it's very obvious. Chinese tends to look so crammed with characters. Japanese is because I played a lot of video games in the 80s. Vietnamese is like WTF Latin letters in Asia? Thai is long and droopy characters.
SquirtVonnegut
Vietnamese writing used to be modified Chinese characters. Now it's modified French. Sadly, their writing system has been the outward manifestation of their history of colonization.
thegarts
What does English look like?
ParallelParkingInABurka
Like naked Vietnamese.
AvsFreak
I know this because all my kids are doing duolingo. One is learning Japanese, one is learning Korean and the other is learning Spanish.
Elsuave
Say hola from me to one of your kids
GravyEducation
Spanish, now that's my comfort zone. I've learned German and Latin, Latin gets you really far with everything in the West. Can't speak Spanish but as a line cook once joked to me, "I speak kitchen Spanish" meaning, if you're talking about food, I get it. Past that es muy malo. But Spanish is very routine which i like, not much bullshit in Español
TankTrain
As an Australian, I'd like to learn English one day.
TheSecondPiewackit
I can tell you which one is going to be best at their target language.
Colopty
Whichever one moves on to a different resource than Duolingo, I suppose.
TheSecondPiewackit
Spanish. Regardless of Duolingo. Though they don't really seem to get that Korean doesn't have articles. "Dog ran across the yard" is more correct than "The dog ran across the yard" because there is no "The" (closest is "that") but Duolingo kept dinging me points on it. I'm sitting there like "I know more than you, asshole."
Colopty
Yeah, Duolingo doesn't handle non-Germanic languages well. On that note, Spanish is a Romance language. The kid who picked that gets the writing system for free, but that's not a major advantage over the kid who picked Korean since Hangul can conceivably be learnt in a day (granted, with Duolingo it's more like 6 months). In both cases they'll mainly have to deal with grammar (which Duolingo gets wrong and actively avoids teaching) and vocabulary (which is limited in Duolingo).
TheSecondPiewackit
You can learn the alphabet in a couple of hours, but Korean grammar is like a drunk Yoda got cerebral palsy. The vocabulary is about as weird as anything else though.
BadPunsAplenty
That sounds like tres lingo...and is totally awesome.
AvsFreak
And I'm doing Ukrainian/Russian. Привiт! Привет!
GravyEducation
Tres lingo is my favorite cake
BadPunsAplenty
Yeah, it really speaks to me, too
GravyEducation
Fuck off, coming in with an infinitely better joke than mine. This is the definition of "I set em up you knock em down" lol
CaptValdiaBlack
¿Tres lingo? ¿En esta economia?
AvsFreak
Omnislash9
That's one of my top 10 favorite episodes
GravyEducation
Bumblebee Man couldn't have said it better himself
yqpqfrdp625772
There’s a problem here: Japanese has two alphabets that look like the one he showed, but also have a third that looks like Chinese.
QuartzPoker
They also use the Latin alphabet when it suits them
IndianJoe
People talking about the English language : "It's 3 different languages in a trench coat !" Japanese people : "Hold my beer..."
cosonfused
wait until you learn Japanese also has cursive writing.
captainfuzzbutt
It's a video. Not a problem
shinoharaliz
Actually, he showed the hiragana alphabet and kanji, but did not show katakana. So you have the chinese characters, and the smoother of the two alphabets (mainly used for grammatical markers and to spell out unfamiliar words), but not the jagged alphabet, known as katakana, which is usually limited to being used for foreign words and exclamations.
jodu
While Japan imported Chinese character, over time they have modified some and come up with new ones (kokuji). They also never simplified the characters like they did on the mainland (but not in HK and on TW before someone feels the need to point that out) in the 1950s. As a result of these subtle (and not so subtle) differences, you can't really mistake Japanese text, even in kanji, for Chinese.
brazzy42
Japan did in fact simplify some characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai
jodu
Thanks for your addition. My point was that they didn't follow the Chinese way of simplification.
Marsupialmessiah
And they use them interchangeably lol
Mithi
What's the problem? Coz that is exactly what his example shows, hiragana and kanji.
Junktrunkjunkie
They often have kanji from Chinese characters, hiragana for words in their own language, katakana for words they adapt from other languages. And the Roman alphabet thrown in for funzees
AboutasSnappyasaZipper
I could be wrong but I think there are at least like 3 other Asian languages that didn’t make the bit also.
TheSecondPiewackit
Korean also frequently uses chinese as shorthand since about half the language is derived from it.
jeke212
Not just that, but the Chinese he showed is traditional, which is not common. Most places in China use a simplified version.
PetricusGaming
hiragana is more curvy, katakana is more angular, and kanji is more complex. modern sentences often mix all 3 in one go.
unluckyandbored
That sounds like a monumental pain in the ass to learn.
incendras
ProjectDA
TLDR; hiragana = japanese alphabet. katakana = alphabet for foreign words. kanji = replaces hiragana to form easy to recognize words/ideas
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
A phonetic writing system is easier to teach and write so children are taught with it. It's also useful to inflect words, something that Chinese doesn't really do; e.g. nomu/nonda/nomi are "drink" (v), "drank", "drink" (n). But it's ambiguous for meaning because for example "kami" can mean "hair" or "paper". So you keep the kanji for the "concept" part and the phonetic characters to modify it: nomu 飲む・nonda 飲んだ・nomi 飲み, and to tell homophones apart: hair 髪・paper 紙.
StArkyn
I'm only 50% through learning hiragana and after learning just how many kanji there are alongside both the hiragana and katakana it's feeling like I chose the wrong language to learn in my free time. Lol
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
the official list of kanji you should know by the end of high school has 2,136; then you forget some, and learn some more
the good news is there's a lot of cues to remember them
dabeliking
Why do they need to mix them?
DarkwingDuc
Kanji is a symbol-based (logographic) language taken from Chinese b/c China started writing before Japan. It’s kinda the base of the language in a structural sense. Hiragana was created in Japan for words of Japanese origin. Katana is a phonetic alphabet to sound out foreign words which don’t have their own characters.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
Partly because phonetic writing is simpler, and it's useful to show the different ending of Japanese words: 買う ka-u = buy・買った ka-tta = bought ・買い ka-i = puchase. So you write the "suffix" simply. And you keep kanji because there's similar sounding but unrelated words like 飼う kau = keep an animal.
Katakana is equivalent to hiragana, and it's used for distinguishing loanwords like ナイフ naifu = knife, names of some species like クマ kuma = bear, and sometimes just to make a word look different.
Lichelf
Why do we mix CAPITAL letters and small letters?
Gerthquake
Cuz Japan gunsa Japan. The first two are phonetic, hiragana being the primary modern alphabet and the bulk of their modern language. Katakana is used for words they incorporated from other languages. If that word was taken from English for example this is where a lot of the engrish sounding things you hear in anime might come from. That's the actual way they say some things, they adapted it to their vowels and such. Kanji are old school, a whole idea or thing in one Chinese style symbol.
Gerthquake
This sounds complicated... cuz it is. It's partially tradition, cuz again Japan is going to Japan, but once a person gets over the hump of internalizing the first two and the most common entries from the 3rd (learning all of the 3rd is like a masters degree level pursuit, not everybody does it. Think an English professor) you can be rather efficient. There's a reason video game speed runners use Japanese games. With some exceptions they can typically pack more meaning into less space.
NeverShaveYourDuck
And, there's a fourth alphabet that Japanese students have to learn: romaji. Ours.
And don't even get me started about ancient written Japanese...
vilhjalmr26
Hiragana and Katakana were originally made to replace Kanji for those who had less education. Kanji is not an alphabet, but a set of symbols that express full words. Hiragana and Katakana are alphabets, Hiragana is used for Japanese words, Katakana is used for foreign words.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
katakana is also used sometimes for emphasis or as a stylistic choice, and hiragana can be used instead of katakana to create a softer (less angular) look
GhostMutGaming
Katakana is also used mainly for borrowed words that don't exist historically in Japanese.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
yes, that's what vilhjalmr26 said: "foreign words"
GhostMutGaming
I may, or may not, have missed the last sentence.
Colopty
Not quite true. So the thing is that Japanese originally had manyougana, which was basically Chinese characters that were used for their phonetics rather than their meaning, and was used alongside normal kanji. Manyougana was however very inconsistent, which resulted in the quirk of hiragana and katakana being developed separately. Katakana was more popular with Buddhist monks for annotating religious texts. Hiragana was more popular with women, who had less access to higher education.
Stinkybuttpants
Thanks, I will never know when to reference that.
Snooj
Squiggles, squiggles with harder edges, and Chinese.
UWAGAGABLAGABLAGABA
Japanese usually combines the three. So, you'll usually never have a sentence that looks Chinese.
NinjaCongo
With frequent use of Roman lettered English words thrown in. You effectively need to know at least 2000 kanji characters as well as three other alphabets to read a magazine in Japan. With that said, I learned Japanese faster than I've learned Brazilian Portuguese.
Colopty
But it's not exactly unusual to encounter situations in the wild where text isn't formatted as a full sentence. For instance you will probably not find a sign saying anything along the lines of "hello good citizen, if you go in this direction you will your way out of this building", but you might find a sign saying 出口, and that only uses the Chinese looking character set.
drcookieninja
But you can get the jist of almost every sentence in Japanese if you know how to read Chinese. I could read Japanese news papers, never learned Japanese. My Chinese is also shit. But good enough to read Japanese.
TheOGPooner
Ok… that statement read hilariously
drcookieninja
It's hilarious. There's just different degrees of borrowing! I know enough Spanish to understand Italian but definitely can't speak a fluent sentence you know?
Japanese just is so heavily borrowed from Chinese it's easy
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
It's mostly signs and compound words that can have only kanji, mostly for brevity.
This says "emergency traffic route - during earthquake disaster, general vehicle passage prohibicion - Tokyo metropolitan police department", no conjugation
StillNotYouTube
...and a picture of a fish.
Imademyselfsquirtle
I'd rather than get shot by an AR15 because I honked at someone.
ByThePowerOfSCIENCE
That's Oo-Namazu (big catfish); it lives underground and causes earthquakes. Relatively recent as their folklore goes; it comes from the belief that fish can predict earthquakes.
Affray
They did a little Dragonball GT villain arc about it kinda. https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Zoonama
UWAGAGABLAGABLAGABA
They put cute pictures on everything! It's pretty great.
sundaymondayhippyday
Maybe make Westerners happy by doing the same! https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTY1YjkxZmJlZXBtdjNzM3o0NHVrb2YweHZ5d2VubGltYmxiMGM1NzdiNHM1ZDNsayZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/xT0xemaMYnb6pobtXW/giphy.mp4
GravyEducation
I tried to read the Tale of the Heike once. Even translated into English i just couldn't keep track of everybody's names. That's not specifically an alphabet thing just... I'm so bad with Asian names. Idk why. Cheers to everybody diving into Ghost of Yotei, Tsushima was epic. Love Japanese culture, I just don't think I could hack it in Japan
ChazzK
Congratulations, you just described me trying to keep all the Elves and Dwarves straight in most of Tolkien's works...!
SixSixxtySix
Like trying to read Ulysses. Joyce introduces a new character every third page.
GravyEducation
Yeeeeeeeep
NSFWfrontpage2
There is a Tale of Heike anime that is very well done. Cannot speak to how faithful it is to the source though
GravyEducation
I've seen Yojimbo i get the gist... Genji v Heike let's fight! I said in another comment, samurai movies and western movies are like... the same. This is one of my "I'm gonna pick this hill and already dug the grave" moments; there is no difference between kurosawa and leone
ChiLLeCheeze
It might have something to do with your education. I'd recommend degree switching.
GravyEducation
To Japanese studies? I mean if it's free, teach me sensei
ChiLLeCheeze
I can't teach you, but Cirno sensei can help you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNeyqFfXf7k
GravyEducation
Very chibi, much whatever the opposite of demure is
IdRatherNotChooseAUserName
Those two games really piqued my interest for Japanese history and culture. Sadly, Ghost of Yotei collectable items are a bit lacking. In Tsushima you found plenty that taught bits and pieces about both Mongolian and Japanese history and culture. In Yotei there are way fewer, not as informative and are all specifically about the Ainu indigenous people.
GravyEducation
I have long had a fascination with samurai because there is a direct correlation between samurai in Japanese media and cowboys in American media, it's like a 1:1 on themes, pacing, and film productions. It's like uncanny. And I love both.
IdRatherNotChooseAUserName
Oh that's cool! I have a thing for cowboys and the wild west as well. When I was a kid, I remember staying up late to watch reruns of Shōgun. I always like samurai, ronin etc in games, but never really explored movies or series beyond Shōgun. Think it's about time that I do :) What would you recommend I start with?
GravyEducation
Toughie, where you from? (I'm stalling because I'm trying to think) because I think Japan has a fascination with the West same as we have a fascination with the East. Samurai Jack is kid friendly. The Seven Samurai is a very long but very worth it movie. Blue-Eye Samurai is a recent incredible series. Afro Samurai, another very western take. Yojimbo. Samurai Champloo, same studio that did Cowboy Bebop. The Sword of Doom for a deep cut (pun intended)
GravyEducation
And for Westerns I've literally got posts to give ya https://imgur.com/galle">/mvIij4G">https://imgur.com/gallery/mvIij4G /gallery/CQSSUDu
PetricusGaming
That's because you don't know the meaning of their names, it's just random sounds to you.
GravyEducation
Which is true. Particularly when it comes to languages that use different tones (I'm so sorry I'm really not versed in Eastern languages) like Chinese where you go high or low and it means different stuff. Which AFAIK isn't a naming convention just in their language. And I don't get that? I'm so western, like look, I know Latin and my seven trench-coated language and enough German to know what they're saying in movies and Spanish food words and... I feel like that's good enough right?
Dagordae
Do you often know the meanings of people’s names? Most people just recognize the specific sound attached to a person, not the actual meaning of the sound.
GravyEducation
I think they're kinda trying to say like western people have last names like Smith and Baker, there's a really obvious meaning and pronunciation. But also I understand Asian characters have really specific phonetic attachments that can vary, like Latin words have different endings too. It's cool as fuck. I'm just not in the know
PetricusGaming
In Chinese and Japanese? Yes.
Wolvenlight
I think what they're asking is how not knowing someone's name means "brushwood rice patty" in Japanese is different from not knowing that someone's name means "brown" in English.
Granted, Shibata and Bronson are both simple examples of this (and Brown itself is a surname), but still. And Shibata is 2 symbols in Kanji vs 7 in Arabic. I'm no linguist, so I don't know the answer either, but I would imagine in terms of names, Asians don't exactly find "Jennifer Arlington" easy to remember either.