I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.
I know it comes off weird to me because I’m a Westerner, but I wonder what cultural and cognitive benefits can be directly linked to having your language innately require the listener to actually wait, listen, and then respond.
Or maybe I’m assuming it works that way, but when you actually live in that culture and language, you are more likely to predict what is gonna be said so the same kind of foot in mouth moments can happen.
The word order doesn’t really make you wait longer or listen more carefully-- you’re just getting the information in different places. Like if you looked at a sentence without the last word, in English you have “Give the ball to X” and in Japanese you have “Ball to John X”. In English you’re waiting to see who receives the ball and in Japanese you’re waiting to hear what to do with it.
The more confusing aspect of Japanese is that it’s a high context language, meaning that once things like subjects and objects are understood between speakers, those things get dropped from sentences. A sort of analogous thing in English would be use of pronouns-- once both speakers understand who or what is being talked about, we stop using the name for the person or object and use s/he or it. In Japanese, those pronouns would get dropped entirely.
Because of that, Japanese can be really frustrating for a language learner because you’re already maybe missing some parts of sentences, and so if you miss the one crucial thing that’s being talked about, moving forward you don’t even have a pronoun clue to give you a hint.