Have you ever found Japanese counter words too difficult? Most people probably feel that there are too many types to remember and that they are inefficient.
I found a video that seems to offer a very new discovery for such people. Even I as a Japanese person, I gained a new discovery from watching this video. It is intended for advanced learners, as it requires following Japanese subtitles, but I highly recommend it for those who are interested.
by YamYukky
3 comments
Quite a curious video. It’s quite sizeable, so as tl;dr I’d like to mention that it compares Japanese counter words to data clusters in machine learning, which provide additional information about the object’s size, function, the way it’s used and its cultural significance. Casual knowledge of data science would help one to appreciate it.
Also you don’t really need to be an advanced learner to understand it, my N3 was more than enough for comprehension.
This was really good. When I was learning counters, I kind of had an inkling that in a language with as much ambiguity as Japanese, having such a clear and precise counting system is probably helpful. But after seeing this video, I’ve changed my thinking completely.
Even as a learner, the idea of “一匹” and “one small animal” both produce similar meaning in my mind, but they have different sensations and imagery attached. It’s different when a counter attaches to the number to form a singular grammatical unit than when a number is used as an adjective to describe a noun and has to invoke all sorts of other syntactic complexities.
I still didn’t finish the video, but how I see counter words is quite similar to how I see genders in language.
My native language has three genders (feminine, masculine and neutral) which in 99% of cases has nothing to do with physical gender (normal word for girl is feminine, but for example poetic word for “girl” is neutral, computer is masculine etc). The gender of counters/numbers and adjectives needs to agree with the gender of the noun, otherwise it sounds wrong.
In my native language, the gender is mostly defined by its ending (nouns ending in -a are feminine, -o or -e neutral and the remainder usually masculine), but in German for example, there you mostly need to learn them together with the noun (there are few rules though).
But why all this hassle? There are language that don’t have genders, like Hungarian, English or Japanese. What is the benefit?
I had a class in linguistics where few studies were mentioned that did research on topic. By having noun categories (genders) speakers are faster and more precise at predicting the following word – if an adjective is in feminine form, the noun has to be too and if helped by context you can pretty much guess what the word is gonna be. It helps in understanding even when people mispronounce words or someone didn’t hear it well enough.
Also imagine a situation where you have few objects on a table. You wanna your friend who is next to the table to fetch you a certain thing. You say a pronoun in feminine pronoun (her) instead of the noun because you’re concentrating on your task at the hand and its faster to say it or you just cannot remember what the word was for the object (but you know its category/gender) – give me “her” (pencil). Your friend looks at the table sees few objects on it and notices that only one object agrees with that gender, lifts her up and asks you “this (feminine demonstrative pronoun) pencil”?
At the end all this effort of learning the gender and agreeing genders of nouns and adjectives is just for easing the flow of information, for redundancies that helps the understanding of what was said.
This is also how I see counters in Japanese.