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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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One thing I love doing is to learn to say "I don't speak " as well as possible in a language I don't speak. If you're good enough at it, people will assume it's a joke and try to speak to you in that language you don't actually know. Apparently I'm pretty good at saying it in Portuguese, but I wouldn't know.
Most of what I got out of a Japanese class I took was how to say that I don't understand Japanese.
Watashi wa nihonjo ga wakarimasen.
The use of watashi wa would give it away. Japanese people basically never say I at all
I don't know much Japanese, but the bits I do know suggest it's a very different language than English. Not just different sounds, but also just a different approach to expressing things. Like, I think instead of saying "I'm hungry", they just say "hungry!" Presumably though, they do use "I" when it's needed for disambiguation.
For, example, if you're with a friend and someone asks "are you guys college students?" The response would probably be something like "He is but I'm not", right?
As a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, sometime I can pick out Japanese words because these languages all have the same roots, so I guess some words decended from a common word in the past, but now sounds different because of geography and separation.
I remember when I watched Steins;Gate and when the word [第三次世界大戰/Dai san ji se kai tai sen/World War 3] (Cantonese would be like: Dai Saam Ci Sai Gaai Dai Zin) was uttered, I was like: Holy shit, why is it so similar to Cantonese. Like the impact of the line being devlivered actually felt more intense, I felt the emotions of the soon to be billions of fictional deaths was being described
Also: [電話/Denwa/Telephone] sounds very close to Mandarin's Dian Hua
I also remember hearing how the Japanese word "ramen" is comes from a pretty different Chinese word.
It's cool though that a tonal language like Mandarin / Cantonese is strongly related to a non-tonal one. I wonder what happened there historically.
Not as much as you might hope but yeah