Japanese Grammar - Blog Posts
The Japanese language is one of the most indirect languages in the world. There are the obvious examples of this, such as when some customers try to enter a busy restaurant without a reservation and the staff say 難しいですね (”this is tricky…”) instead of simply telling them that there are no seats. However, I've noticed that Japanese’s indirectness may go much deeper than simple euphemism.
Japanese seems to come built-in with ways of avoiding directly addressing your conversation partner.
The Japanese way of expressing things often involves voicing your internal monologue, which means people will say things ostensibly to themselves, even though what they really want is to communicate to the other person. When I first noticed it, I thought it was a bit similar to how some (western) cartoons occasionally handle exposition by having a character mutter something to themselves so that the audience can hear. This can be seen in the following extremely common forms of expression:
Using adjectives as an exclamation
うま！Literal translation: “Delicious!” Semantic translation: “Wow, this is really good”
怖い！Literal translation: “Scary!” Semantic translation: “I’m scared!” or “This place is giving me the creeps”
It could be argued that these single word exclamations may not always be “talking to yourself”. But imo more often than not, they are spoken with the vibe of “I felt this adjective so strongly that the word just slipped straight through my internal monologue and out of my mouth”.
Wondering aloud (かな)
雨降るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will it rain or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if it’s gonna rain.”
今夜来るかな？ Literal translation: “Hmm, will [they] come tonight or not?” Semantic translation: “I wonder if they’ll come tonight.”
Compared to the adjective examples, this is less ambiguous. There’s no direct translation for the verb “to wonder” in Japanese - you just wonder aloud! The literal translations sound funny because they only make sense if the speaker is talking to themself.
Explaining stuff to yourself (んだ)
あそこにあったんだ！(context: the listener has just shown the speaker something they were looking for) Literal translation: “There it is!” Semantic translation: “There it is!”
In this example, the literal and semantic translations are the same, because this is a case of talking to yourself in English! If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to say “there it is” when the person you’re talking to clearly already knows that’s where “it” is. Instead, the phrase serves to convey satisfaction and surprise.
まだ20歳なんだ！(context: the speaker has just found out from the listener that a friend of theirs is younger than they expected) Literal translation: “[She’s] only 20!” Semantic translation: “She’s only 20? That explains so much!”
In this example, んだ is used to mark the sentence as an explanation of something. The listener already knew the friend was only 20, so the aim of the sentence is not to convey new information, it’s to show that some sort of internal reasoning is happening within the speaker’s mind.
In the immortal words of Carly Rae Jepsen:
🎶 Do you talk to me, when you're talking to yourself? 🎶
For every Japanese speaker, the answer is yes!
