A Very Short Study in Modern Japanese

As each year goes by, we see more and more English being adopted into the language, and true Japanese disappearing. It's a sad fact of life. Besides tackling the grammar, vocabulary, and writing systems, students of Japanese must become familiar with the ways foreign words, especially wasei eigo (Japanized English), are used, because they really are used a lot. An excellent example of this is a label I found recently on a bread product.

This is from a small bread roll, a "Milk France" bread roll. I wouldn't call it french bread, because it doesn't look, feel, or taste like french bread. In fact, it's a cream-filled snack roll — pretty good, but definitely not like any french bread I've ever tasted.

Anyway, take a look at the writing at the bottom of the label. Directly under FRANCE it simply says, in white katakana¹, the same thing that's written above: MILK FRANCE.² And under that is the following sentence:

The amazing thing about this sentence is that there's very little Japanese in it. To illustrate this I have colored the English or English-based words blue, the Japanese red, and the one word which is neither green. In Roman letters this sentence would look like this:

Sofuto na furansu pan ni, miruku fuumi no kuriimu o sando shimashita.

Though the English words in blue are probably unrecognizable to beginners, they are soft, france, milk, cream, and sandwich, but are written in romaji ³, which show pretty much how they are pronounced in Japanese or by the Japanese.⁴ The Japanese have the tendency to shorten longer English words to suit their fancy, which is why "sandwich" becomes sando.⁵ The only Japanese word here is fuumi, which means "flavor," and the overall structure is Japanese, making necessary the use of particles na, ni, no, and o, which indicate adjectives and objects.⁶ Shimashita at the end simply indicates past tense. The word pan means "bread," which Japan borrowed from the Portuguese.

Now, if we convert all this to English while keeping the Japanese order and colored elements, it would look like this:

Soft france bread in, milk flavor cream sandwiched.

A very interesting and often convenient point about the Japanese language is that a sentence can have its subject omitted and still be correct. This sentence is a good example. Finally, starting with the implied subject we, let's now complete the translation into English while retaining the color coding:

We sandwiched milk-flavored cream inside soft french bread.

We sandwiched milk-flavored cream inside soft french bread. Sentences like this on food packages are very common here — lots of "katakana English" and very wordy.

I believe this is a great example of how Japanese works. Though a simple sentence, it shows concisely and accurately the roles and association of kanji, hiragana, and katakana, the three Japanese writing systems. Kanji are used to write the core words, when they are not replaced with English or other foreign vocabulary; katakana are used to write those foreign words when they are used; and hiragana act as "grammatical cement," indicating the role of the core words and giving verbs their conjugations.⁷

As we can see, six of the seven core words here are not Japanese, which is why there are many more katakana than kanji. But this is the direction that Japanese is going, for better or worse. You used to hear that one needs to know around 2,200 kanji in order to read a Japanese newspaper, but if the popularity of foreign words continues to increase, we may see that number shrink.

Students of the language need to not only learn the writing systems, words, and how to put them together, they also have to re-learn their own language in order to successfully make it work as a vital element of modern Japanese.

Notes

1. Katakana is the Japanese alphabet used mainly to write foreign words and names. For more click here.
   
   
2. Almost all consumer goods in Japan have the product name written in both English and Japanese on the package. The English shows that they are making some effort towards "internationalization," and since most people ignore or can't read the English, Japanese is necessary in order to maintain product identity.
   
   
3. Roman letters. For more click here.
   
   
4. Sadly, too many Japanese think that this is how English is really pronounced, creating problems when attempting conversation with native speakers. For more on this please see English Education in Japan. To be fair, though, this is a two-way problem: most native English speakers don't pronounce Pokemon or karaoke correctly, either.
   
   
5. For more examples click here.
   
   
6. For more see my Japanese Particles.
   
   
7. Please see Alphabets for a more in-depth look.

© 2000 - 2008 Tim R. Matheson

Top