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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong "why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick" vibes. Articles? Don't exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you'll change the meaning of the sentence.
"Went" is a complete sentence in Japanese.
My friend told me that a whole lot of Japanese sentences are literally just exclamations of an adjective or adverb and apparently that's enough for most Japanese folks to intuit an entire sentence of meaning.
That's a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn't say "that cat is cute!" or "what a cute cat!" like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like "that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats," because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?
I think about how some languages like Japanese are like this, and then I think about how stereotypical “caveman” grammar in English is kind of structured like those languages, and I get a little uncomfortable at the implications…
We do that in English as well in some cases.
q: "Where's the beer?" a: "fridge".
Sure, but "fridge" is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った ("went") is a complete sentence. You don't need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. "He went")