Kevin's Bacon on Nostr: Yeah there are tradeoffs. You see so much stuff that just makes sense that Westerners ...

Yeah there are tradeoffs. You see so much stuff that just makes sense that Westerners are too insane or stupid to think of, but Japanese people are insane in their own ways, falling for fallacies and stupid shit that westerners would never fall for. It takes a special kind of person to deduce or draw from the best of each cultural thread, and discard the crap.

I'm trying to think of some good examples.

Let's see... Japanese doesn't require singular vs. plural, using instead optional numbers to specify how many. Easier to work with on that front, while maintaining the ability to specify. Nor must you specify a gender when talking about people: in fact pronouns are virtually not even a thing, you just use normal ass nouns and identifiers, like say "konohito" ("this person") or just using their name, which you usually will do if it's not obvious who you're talking about. Many aspects of Japanese are aspects that lend themselves to simplicity and composability of the language.

Japanese culture and therefore language is also, however, wayyyy too hung up on niceness, subservience to others, protocol, etc. You have to be extremely careful how you craft sentences and whether what you're saying will be taken the right way, even if you're not the type to do it, because the very meaning of things is often tied into connotation and reading between the lines. "A little" is usually what is used to say "no" to an invitation, in order to be polite. For "Would you like to come with me to the movies?", "Chotto" ("a little bit") would be taken as a polite no, whereas "iie" ("no") would easily be taken by at least some individuals as "hell no!" I consider this decidedly illogical and a major detriment.

Tradeoffs.