Indeed. That’s something that’s been drilled into my head by previous teachers: unless it’s unclear who/what the topic is, just drop it. Of course textbooks and lessons seem to over-pivot on these things making it easy to build bad habits. Thanks for reminding me of this.
Also thanks for confirming that I’m not losing my mind with my translation.
Omg, yes, that makes so much more sense. Thank you.
If I were asked to speak/write that, it would be my first instinct to do it that way. “(As for) this room, don’t turn off the light” just feels better to me than “(As for) this room’s light, don’t turn off” but that could also be English biases creeping in.
Japanese speakers often choose these things on the fly, and there are always multiple ways of saying anything. In casual speech, people are much more fast and loose with the rules, and a lot of particles get dropped entirely or replaced with 「って」 as kind of a catchall particle for everything. Almost like how we use like so much in, like, English.
The rules are much more rigid and complex in written Japanese, where you’ll find particles and verb conjugations that are almost never spoken outside of formal speeches.
But this is also all very polite. I rarely hear people talk this way outside of things like business or professional settings. (There’s even more formal speech levels with ever-increasing verbosity.)
(ETA: There’s also other conjugations but these are the basic and essential ones.)
Japanese Boomers are often complaining that the kids these days just don’t know how to use the higher order speech levels. My company has people do an e-learning course on it as part of their induction training. It is still essential when interacting with customers.
re: verbosity. yeah, that part’s probably true of english as well i think.
i once read an interesting take on email for instance which said - in english - status tends to be conveyed by shorter, terser sentences, and by leaving out pronouns: especially “i” statements.
i can’t not see it, now that i know it’s there.
dear sir and or madam, we respectfully request your attendance at our formal language training conference. please rsvp at your earliest convenience.
i get the sense it’s much more complicated in japanese, or at least more formalized
I noticed that this is one of the things that German TV really struggles with - translating interpersonal relationships from English to German speech.
You get odd situations where people who in the English version are quite close and interact informally speak to each other relatively formally in German translation and vice versa.
I get the impression that the translators really struggle to parse the interactions where in German contexts you’d expect formality but in English you have a lot less openly expressed formality, so for example, I have always been on first name terms with my bosses in the UK but in Germany, you might go years working with peer level colleagues but still use last names and formal registers, never mind
with superiors.
The assumption then would be that if you’re on first name terms, the rest of your interactions must be relatively informal but that is of course not true. We’re all just pretending to be egalitarian but your boss still requires “appropriate” levels of respect just expressed in ways that German has no easy analogue to - because the default method to express those relationships is through formality registers.
It’s a really interestingly difficult thing to translate.
Yes, the same guy who wrote Gödel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid. Only where that was about mathematics and regression, Le ton beau is about linguistics and translation, and how something which is trivial to express in one language might be difficult or impossible to succinctly translate into another.
Formality is one of those. English doesn’t directly do tutoyer and vouvoyer, much less the intricate dance of pronouns and honorifics of Japanese. Hofstadter makes the point that with a poem in French where it changes halfway through from vouvoyant to tutoyant, there’s no simple way to easily express that formality shift in English. And that’s just one of the aspects which you have to pick and chose between when you’re translating.
I love that. It’s kind of like the comparison between left-wing and right-wing memes:
Speaking of which, I’m reminded of the amazing comedy series “The Japanese Tradition”. The first time I saw one (about sushi etiquette), I initially thought it was serious. Ah, so there’s a hyper-specific way to open noren? Okay… that tracks.
Thanks for the link! I learned a couple things from that, but I’m also glad that I actually got most of the jokes. The whole series is pretty brilliant satire because as the video notes they do a really good job mixing truths, half-truths, and outright lies to something that may seem believable if you don’t know any better.
As a complete aside, slow clap to Duolingo for this one I got today:
1600 is one of the most important years in Japanese history. The Battle of Sekigahara brought a close to the Warring States Period and consolidated the Tokugawa Clan’s control over the country, which would last until 1868.
In today’s installment of “what the fuck, Duolingo” a change went out to some that changes how legendary challenges work… again.
Now you have to redo every lesson in a section (which may or may not be relevant to the section) and there’s no more hearts so you can’t make any mistakes. If you make a single mistake you have to spend 50 gems to keep going. Make a mistake before being halfway through? Spend gems or get 0 XP. Get an autocorrect typo? Fuck you. Don’t have enough drip-fed gems saved up? Pay up or GTFO.
The timed challenges were already a pretty transparent money grab. Getting three stars in later timed challenges seems nearly impossible without buying timer boosts with real money or by spending an outrageous 450 gems. I don’t even bother with them past one or two stars because they get so frustrating. Now requiring 50 gems just to not fail a legendary challenge after a single mistake really tells me that gambling and micro transactions are being prioritized over learning.
Hmm, my ipad still is on the version where the eight challenges correspond to the eight tiles of a unit. So I did a story at legendary level, (no auditory or oral skills were tested) and gilded that story. I’m way behind on legendaries, btw, so they were very easy. Still, I got three hearts.
Anyway the for all the hate about the new path, the new legendary experience seems to be even more reviled. I don’t know what they are thinking with some of these changes.
