If you find a better link for the methodology please let me know.
But simplified it's maybe exactly this from the UN reports glossary:
> Cities: According to the Degree of Urbanization methodology, contiguous geographic areas with a high population density (at least 1,500 people per km2) and a total population of at least 50,000 inhabitants.
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.
Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.
The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.
Why is this downvoted? This is a nice addition to the conversation. I see the same with Cantonese speakers. If you ask native speakers from Hongkong, Macao, and Guangdong, all of them will say "the other sounds weird"... but they work it out. And all three groups are happy to listen to a foreigner speak Canto (yes, there are a few). All will probably say: "Weird accent, but I understand what they are saying." Plus, Canto language communities probably exist in over 50 countries in the world. All of them will have slight tonal differences.
As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that it's not ethnocentrism, but that Japan is for the most part quite xenophobic, and racist. It's common to hear Japanese folks make fun of other people's accents in what should be obviously extremely inappropriate settings, like at work, for example. The fact that you consider this ethnocentrism furthers the point that xenophobia and racism is commonplace, and that you feel that it's on foreigners to accept it.
If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Yes, I also find it hilarious (in any culture) when someone is critical of a foreign speaker. Then when that person speaks a foreign language, usually their accent and style is so predictably awful that people are hiding under their desks. That is why I made the joke about asking natives: "So, how is your Thai... or German?" Those two languages are pretty rare to hear in Japan, especially for non-native speakers. It acts as the perfect monkeywrench in their gears.
> My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.
> Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.
I disagree with this. I never want a stranger to give me a correction on my language skills. Unless they've been asked to help, they're being rude, even if they don't mean to be rude and even if they aren't being derogatory.
I go back to the point about "how would you feel if someone corrected your english pronunciation". Maybe they're doing it to be helpful. Maybe the rest of your pronunciation is pretty spot on, and they're helping you correct a single word. It's still embarrassing (and embarrassing someone is rude!). Maybe it isn't for you, but it is for most people.
I already have a teacher, and I've asked friends and family to correct me, but I don't want a stranger correcting me.
I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.
This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan.
Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
I speak Japanese and am fully aware of the dynamic you describe, having experienced it many times, first hand. I’ve also been truly misunderstood as a result of the wrong use of accent, difference in dialect, etc.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors).
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate.
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.
Looks very interesting and should solve a pretty common use case for me - am often trying to debug some issue over many log files. I will for sure test this next week.
For the comparison parent post is making - leisure travel - I think there's a big difference in that flying enables much larger distances, thus much more emissions.
You can easily fly 1000 miles each way for a weekend trip. Not as easily with a car, the travel tends to be much shorter.
And also doesn't take into account economy of scale, a family of 4 has 4x the emissions in the plane example, same as 1 person in the car example. So if you do the math as a family of 4 it really changes things.
OP here. Thanks! Will be testing with my 6 year old later. He actually hasn't seen it yet. Yeah, I agree. I wanted something that everyone can read and where the physical size of the number on the screen gives a great idea of the size (in terms of order of magnitude). Alignment is a great idea. I'll have a think about that one.
> The UN figures include a mixture of city proper, metropolitan area, and urban area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
I haven't looked into the details of that definition.
But there is a somewhat standard definition to "metropolitan area" derived from something like "area where there is at least X per square km"
So it's not related a somewhat random definition of a "city" and its borders.