What is the utility of learning new languages?

I mean languages as in Russian, Japanese, English, etc.. Not programming languages. I mean also programming languages, totally also programming languages!!! plz don't lock

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what language would be the most fun to learn and/or the most useful to learn. I've searched on youtube for an answer how long roughly it would take to learn Russian for example:

Spoiler

And he said about 1100 hours to get to a level where you're still far from perfect but have a good grasp of the language and can actually use it. At the 2 minute mark of the video he has a chart where different languages are grouped by how difficult they are. Those numbers sound somewhat optimistic to me or maybe they expect less proficiency from people to pass as "speaking a language" than I would. I'm probably close to the number of hours listed for French because I had to learn it in School for a few years but I certainly don't feel capable of expressing myself with it or watching a movie in French without subtitles. And seeing German only in group 2 of that list with Russian in group 4 and Japanese in group 5 was really disheartening for me because I'm a native German speaker and I find English to be rather easy by comparison. I never liked French and found it "too hard", but I also never had anything specific that was French and that I wanted to read or listen to in French (my apologies to the French), English had a ton of that for me. E.g. nowadays I'm watching 100% of stuff on Netflix in English and find it a lot more enjoyable than watching anything dubbed in German.
My personal opinion is, if your native language isn't English, then learning it is hands down the best skill investment you can make. But what about those that already speak English? What is the next best language to learn? Or rather what language would open up a door to the most fun stuff that is currently inaccessible to us? I would like to hear from people who speak other languages than English or German what possibilities they think learning their language would open up to others. I'm also interested to hear thoughts on whether there's any point in developing a predominantly passive understanding of a language, especially those that use different alphabets, because personally I have very little desire to travel and/or talk/write to people in other languages. But I could see watching movies or listening to podcasts in other languages be fun. I dunno... just curious to hear your thoughts on this. Top 3 languages I'd like to hear about are Swedish, Russian, and Japanese. But my intention is that this is a general thread not focused on my personal interests. If it inspires someone else to learn a new language that would be pretty cool!

Also what languages do you think it's worth translating games into? I've read some stats where certain languages being added only gives spikes in piracy from those countries but barely in sales. Translating things to German or French probably is a good choice for many games. Iirc those where some of the strongest sales increases from the stats but I don't remember the exact details.

 

You also mean programming languages and game translations so this thread doesn't get locked (we would have no choice)

 

I guess now I do...

 

Lots of time and effort. If I don't have a specific, practical need, why bother?

Even if you do have a specific, practical need, its still an awful lot of trouble and few people have the discipline to just straight learn a language by studying.

Better to learn as a kid. Makes your brain smarter. But as an adult with many things to do, I just don't see the benefit.

 

I think it'd be nice in an abstract sense. I took German in school, as well as college, but didn't keep up with it at all so I recall very little. And reading visual novels, I find myself wanting to learn Japanese a bit so I can understand what's being said, and read the original text, without the veneer of an English localization over it (especially when I do hear a word or phrase I recognize, but it has a totally different translation in the text than what I've seen in other VNs).

And speaking of which, I actually have learned a few words and phrases here and there, simple things like "thank you" or "I'm sorry" or "thank goodness" or "I understand" and so on. Nothing significant, but enough that every few sentences I can pick up a phrase or two.

Edit: also, I read a couple VNs that showed both English and kana (sometimes kanji, mostly the kanas). My desktop background is basically all the hiragana, and I have two monitors, so by hearing the sounds and matching them to their location in the VN sentence and comparing to my reference I fairly quickly found myself identifying the sound of each kana. This is nothing special I know, but it's a little gain for all but no effort.

Can't really think of a real reason to learn any others, however, unless I were a travelling businessman, and I am not that. I may find a reason in the future, but I don't see one now.

As far as programming languages are concerned, it's probably a good idea to have a bit of working knowledge of a more normal C language like C++ in addition to C#. And probably others but I don't really know anything else (except some Java which is basically C# (or is C# basically Java?) in my limited experience).

I recall seeing an article, I think on Gamasutra, that mentioned Chinese as a big one to localize for.

Additionally, I've noticed a growing number of visual novels on Steam in Chinese only, not even English.

Along similar lines, I know that China has become an enormous portion of Steam's userbase.

 

Yeah, I agree. However I'm curious if there are such needs that I just don't know about yet.

At the moment I watch one episode of an anime show each day while excercising and I've started to experience the same where I recognize words that were translated differently elsewhere. But I wonder if I even would enjoy them more when I actually understand all they say. Until you can watch entirely without subtitles you're probably going to be a whole lot more irritated by weird translations. We touched on the voiceover topic regarding MGS V and I think @chingwa said something about not understanding the language that helps make it not sound cheesy and overexaggerated in some cases of japanese dialog. I quite enjoy the japanese voiceovers with subtitles as it is already, I'm not 100% sure that experience is gonna be greatly enhanced by investing hundreds or thousands of hours into learning one of the harder languages. But at least that would be a specific goal.

Maybe @JoeStrout has some thoughts to share on this - if I remember correctly he was working on a Kanji learning game once.

Interesting! I wonder if the Chinese games industry has things to offer that would do well on western markets if they just were translated, and if so I wonder why they aren't. With Japanese media I'm aware of quite a lot that is being translated for us but I'm not aware of any AAA games for example coming straight from China. Although there's probably a considerable chunk of art assets for western AAA games being produced in China already, and Epic Games was bought by a Chinese Company if I recall correctly.




Edit: According to this article:
https://www.cryptoambit.com/blog/2018/1/21/south-korea-and-the-crypto-craze
South Korea seems to "spends the 3rd most of any country on purchases in the Google Play app store.", so translating to Korean might be a good idea.

 

If I were to pick one language to do game localization for it would be Mandarin Chinese, simply for the huge increased market potential. There are aspects of a game apart from translation that may need to be considered when doing localization though, such as changes to conform to local laws or even altering plot concepts to be more in tune with a foreign audience.

When speaking the other way around (Chinese games being localized for English) I think you see much less of this because the effort of doing so just does not seem worthwhile in most cases. They likely see the English language market for their games as being quite small and they are almost certainly correct. Despite the multi-culturalism of the U.S., It is quite a hard sell to get American audiences to pick up foreign games (speaking in a general sense of course). Their efforts are much better spent localizing for other Asian countries first to see how much life a game has, before bringing it to Western audiences.

As for language study, I do believe there is utility in setting and achieving difficult goals, quite apart from the actual usefulness of those goals. They can be stepping stones to accomplishing or discovering other things along the way. And besides, the utility of doing something isn't always the overriding reason to choose to do something.

I took German in High School and felt it was far more difficult than English (of course being a native English speaker I would think that). I did not think about it much for a couple decades after, but recently traveled to Germany for the first time. While there was huge amounts that I did not understand, I did understand enough to get myself around, and enough that it enhanced the enjoyment of my travels. Apart from that, I've found it very interesting how similar English and German are to each other, and even how much German has infiltrated into daily English usage.

Now speaking of Japanese in particular, I do not really agree that it is a difficult language in general. The grammar and pronunciation rules are surprisingly consistent, and exceptions are pretty easy to remember. Once you get a handle on it I think it's relatively easy compared to German. However, I do think it is a very difficult language for Westerners to learn, and this is mainly due to the impenetrability of the writing system. Unless you are actually surrounded by the Japanese language on a daily basis, you won't get very far learning Japanese if you avoid kanji. Learning kanji, despite what anyone says, simply requires hours and hours and hours of memorization and practice and repetition. That is the hard truth. It is a hard thing to stay committed to if you're doing it "just for kicks".

Still there is much that you can enjoy from dipping your toes into Japanese. People's commitment level varies, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Following your interests in life is something that should be highly encouraged, and I personally have found great reward and utility out of following my interests... that has led me down roads that I could not even see from the beginning when I started. So I would say if you are interested in Japanese, then don't analyze too much, and just go for it. Put some effort into learning the basics and see how you like it. Even if you derive no utility from your efforts at all, there are still rewards to be had.

To quote the late great Alan Watts, the only true reason to do something is... "because I dig it."

 

What a waste of time. All Russians, Japanese and even Chinese people are learning more and more english. As an ESL, I just need to improve my English and start communicate.

 

I would say most Russians are comfortable with Russian. English is sometimes useful but not needed.

Spoiler: How many people in Russia know English (Russian Census, 2010)

I'm also afraid that saying that you know English and be comfortable to play games in English are not the same thing. I don't know anyone in person who would play a text-heavy game in English.

 

Something that I think holds true for almost all groups is that everyone wants to consume their own stuff, and this applies to everything from food, to entertainment, to firearms. Hollywood forcefully exports all it can to the rest of the world, but then the Japanese are amazed that anyone outside their prison island would be interested in their cartoons. French films meanwhile are never discussed much outside France or really hardcore film studies. Some of it is the language barrier, but a lot of it is cultural sensibilities. So when looking at the market potential of China, it's easy to see a massive number that won't even a percentage of what you really have.

 

If you start Chinese (mandarin), expect spending some time just distinguishing the various sound, I have started and now I have made a conscious choice to stick to that level for the next 6 month until I can perfectly distinguish all of theml.

 

There IS one Chinese series that is basically AAA, and does have at least one entry translated.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/427030/The_Gate_of_Firmament/

From what little I've heard, this series is China's equivalent to Final Fantasy, so basically the largest JRPG (CRPG?) the country makes.

There haven't been any more translations in the series however, at least that I know of. (Edit: Just checked the forums and apparently they're releasing that game on the X1 soon globally, so maybe they're still trying to make the series global)

It's quite possible that there's not a great market for Chinese experiences, but it would be foolish to just assume that it's always going to be that way. The very fact that so many Japanese games are popular in the west, and even that some Eurojank games like those by Spiders (Mars War Logs, Bound By Flame, The Technomancer) or Mount and Blade and such can be popular in America would imply that there's more overlap than we sometimes think.

Edit: and actually the fact that so many western games like esports type stuff or PUBG (I know it's not made in the west, but it grew popular in the west and might be argued to have western sensibilities) are big in China implies that some stuff there could be big here.

 

The language groupings are normally made by a native English speaker. So they won't always reflect learning difficulty for others. A better system would be to set up a phylogeny chart. Languages far away would be difficult to jump between. Close languages would be easier to jump between.

A lot of this depends on geography. In the pacific, where I am based, Japanese is the best language to learn, followed closely by Mandarin. These are the two languages we do the most trade and tourism with. I've got to travel halfway around the world to meet a native French or Spanish speaker, so those languages are not super useful to me.

In the US, I would recommend Spanish. In Canada, French. In Europe, I would go with German and/or French. All for the same reason.

 

I've learned Spanish by accident . The most fun part was the process of learning. The first day you know only "adiós" and "hasta la vista, baby", the next day you know 20x more, in a week you know 200x more than in the first day, in a month the progress is enormous, like a snowball. It's very encouraging when you can feel the progress. When the snowball starts to slow down, you already know enough to switch from learning to practicing.

At this point I realized that I can roughly understand texts in Portugese and get the general idea of texts in Italian and sometimes even French. Now when I google for something and get an answer in either of these languages, I no longer close the page immedietely.

Spanish is a very neat language that doesn't hate its learners, and I think it's a perfect bridge to other Romance languages. If I started with French with no real need to learn French, I would give up in a week.

 

English is the most popular language, people can easily play with English, let's try to use normal words, it is fine. Don't waste your time with it .

 

Also a tips that was given to me by polyglot is to master 200 base words per languages, due to pareto law, it will allows to maintain casual discussion in most settings and improvise, yay for quantity vs quality, but very useful for traveling since you don't need to have deep philosophical discussion most of the time. But it's a nice tip if you want to have many languages in a practical fashion. Then you can deepen just a few to various degree of mastery.

 

Now, how many Russians play games in Russia?

 

We can take SteamSpy statistics (total active users) as the lower bound:

 

@Martin_H
I can say that I'm a bit lucky living in a SEA (South-east Asia) country. I'm Chinese. My family talk Cantonese and Chinese and some of my friends know Hokkien, Hakka and Hainanese (Dialect of Chinese) as well. We started learning Chinese, English and Malay since kindergarten to secondary high school (This is a must native language subjects) so we already have over 12 years experiences on talking, writing and speaking on these 3 languages when graduated from high school. In total, basically we know 4 languages.

So when I look that the difficulty chart on the video and see that Chinese is one of the hardest language. I'm a bit shocked. Really? Maybe because I already know Chinese since very young so I didn't feel anything on it. And thanks for my main language so it brings a big help for learning Japanese later on since they are actually quite similar in writing and some verbal. Thanks for your video, I decided to make a Chinese learning games for mobile in future with my personal special teaching method to proof that Chinese is not the hardest language and is actually very fun to learn.

Spoiler: My Personal Chinese Teaching Method (Understanding Foundation in a Fun Way)

The Born of Chinese:
Chinese are come from the actual thing and slowly evolve into current words.

About parts: (Element)
Any words which have this「氵」part are mostly related to water element.
- 海 (Sea), 海浪 (Sea waves), 淚 (Tears), 流 (Water flow), 潑 (Splash), 溢 (Spill), 河 (River) and so on.

Any words which have this「火」part are mostly related to fire element. (Hot)
- 燒 (Burn), 燒烤 (Barbecue), 烤 (Grill), 烘 (Bake), 火 (Fire), 燴 (Braise), 烤爐 (Oven), 爐灶 (Stove) and so on.

Other elements including「金」gold (Metal), 「木」wood, 「刀」knife (Something sharp) and so on.

Different Languages:
Chinese and Japanese are actually very similar.
This word「櫻」means cherry blossom as well as Sakura in Japanese.
This is Chinese (Simplified) : 「樱」
This is Chinese (Traditional) : 「櫻」
This is Japanese : 「桜」

Same goals apply to my another secondary language - English. My English is not perfect but at least it completely deliver the message then is OK but I'm still keep learning it. I have Google Translate extension always installed in my Chrome and phone which I can easily highlight the words and learn new vocabulary anytime including internet language like IMHO, ASAP, LOL, TBH and so on.

One of the interesting thing in Japanese is that if you know all pronunciation of Katagana. Basically you can understand half of Japanese words already because they are just mimic the sounds of English words. For example: ゲーム / ゲー (Ge) ム (Mu) basically means "Game" in English. オプション / オ (O) プ (Pu) シ (Shi) ョン (On) basically means "Option" in English. You will see these Katagana a lots when you play Japanese games.

Alright, here is your main question: What is the utility (Purpose) of learning new languages. My answer is pretty straight forward: If you need to use it or just learn for fun, go ahead. It's nothing wrong to learn anything new in your life. Most important thing is, you are actually not learning their languages but cultures. How it get started using by people. For Chinese as example, you just look at the image in the spoiler and you will understand. You can easily talk to more people if you know their language and they will feel more friendly with you. In my country, we always switch between the 3 languages anytime during conversation and we already get used to it without a problem. Also good for business, improving your brain's memory skill and may found out some interesting ideas for game development too.

For game industry, I suggest to learn English, Chinese and Japanese since those countries hold the biggest games economy system. Unity Asset Store also provide these 3 languages plus Korean as the package meta hence you can feel how important it is. You can start from either Chinese or Japanese first. Once you get into one of them. You will realize learning the other one is actually easy because they share some similarity on pronunciation and writing hence you have a high chances guess it right what is that means.

For programming language. I prefer just stick to C# with understanding the OOP concept and using Visual Studio to code. Perfect for Unity game development.

Hope my words got inspired you something.

 

Learning a new language when you are a native English speaker is completely pointless unless you have a specific need, want or desire to engage in a particular culture.

 

Glad to hear it! That method looks like a very good way to memorize these.

I talked about this with a friend a few days ago and he said learning difficulty of languages depends a lot on the languages you are already familiar with. For Germans learning English seems to be a lot easier than for someone from Japan or China. Makes a lot of sense to me that for you Japanese is easier to learn than it would be for me.

I always wondered about these when watching anime. It seemed unlikely they all would mispronounce English words so consistently in the same way. But if I understand you correctly then they don't really see them as even using English words, right? Like how us Germans would use "e-mail" or "download" in a sentence without feeling like we've switched to English for a single word mid-sentence.

 

Language Difficulty Rankings for English Speakers

Not surprisingly, Asian languages are exceptionally difficult for English natives. Not surprising that we don’t see much translation crossover in games.

 

Yeah, this is weird. I was thinking about that when I saw a video by Hajime Tabata where he said "Final Fantasy." Even in their own language, it's basically speaking English.

 

They're basically loanwords. We have loads of them in English too.

 

I know 2 and a half of those.

The utility is that language is a result of a culture, and by learning the language you learn its culture and new way of thinking.

English language is obsessed with time and precision. "You did it", "you have done it", "It has been done", etc. Russian doesn't have it - it only has something like three tenses. Japanese technically doesn't have future tense for verbs. "I go tomorrow".

Russian is synthetic language with powerful word building facilities. Basically, at native speaker level, you can take one swear word, build entire sentences out of that swear word, express complex concepts with it, and you'll be understood. You can also make up crap on the fly by jamming words together and you'll ALSO be understood.

Japanese is concerned with social standing. It has several dozens way to say "I" which immediately denote who you are and what you are trying to act as. "Watashi", "Washi", "Atashi", "ore", "Boku", or even "Sessha" or "Yo"( Please don't use those to in modern japanese speech). Then there are three forms of speech -polite, informal and rude. On top of that it has powerful "onomatopoeia" sounds for silent actions like staring. Or sparking. Pikachu is a sparkling mouse. Because "pika-pika" is a "sound" of sparkling. Then there's fun part where adding ONE particle at the end of the sentence turns it into a question. Meaning you need to pay attention to it.

Then there are interesting differences in detail. English has no "formal speech" (as in "polite version" or "formal way" of saying "you"), Russian has one. Japanese has its ingrained to the point where it affects verb formation.

Russian words are affected by their gender. You say "I go" or "I arrived", and the sentence signals your gender through grammatic rules. English has no such thing. Japanese doesn't have this either, but there's more - most words have no plural form. "Saru mo ki kara ochiru" (Even monkeys fall from trees). How many monkeys? one or several? This is . not specified in the sentence.

And then there's a whole separate semantic layer in form of kanji. Which is #1 reason for people failing to learn japanese.

Basically... the reason for learning other languages is that translations are impossible. They're lossy and lose information when you go from one language to another. In some case it can be like a cake that has already been eaten once. Translated work is frequently a retelling of a materail and a different work.

As for translations of games... just figure out what you're trying to do and localize for that market, while providing an option to have original language. One of the most horrible things a developer could do is locking out language the game originally used to have. This heavily encourages piracy, especially in situation where the game is region-locked on top of that.

 

Or a more compact summary regarding game localization:

If the game is not story heavy and it is some sort of platformer, then language is not that important and it is hard to mess up translation, when you only need to explain which button is "jump". Basically with low amount of spoken language, "informational loss" doens't really occur.

However, when we're talking about visual novels, or narrative heavy games (Dragonfall, Witcher 3, Planescape Torment), then it is in the territory where tehre will be significant loss of "subtleties" during translation, and the best idea would be to play the game in original language. Now.... not all people know the original language, and for those other people you provide translation, that is not quite the same thing as original but similar enough. It is basically a crutch.

However the original language shoudl be available. Localizations can be quite bad, and artists for secondary languages can be of different quality. Meaning any player should have an access to the version which is "that's how it was meant to be". They also should have a way to chose separate language for voice and text.

Right now several companies have fairly retarded localization policies, for example, ubisoft removes english content from region-locked games. Meaning people from a wrong region have to pirate the game if they can't stand localization and want english. This is something a gamedev shouldn't do.

 

@neginfinity: Thanks a lot for the detailed examples! Very interesting to hear where some of the differences between the three languages lie. Did learning some Japanese help you enjoy animes like Ajin or Food Wars more? Or do you just get distracted by translation errors in the subtitles more often?

I fully agree about the options for localizations in games. For a long time I've imported all games from the UK to make sure I have English audio instead of a botched German dub. Unfortunately today with region locks and IP checks I can only play games like Wolfenstein in German, no matter what I do. And ironically even the parts that are supposed to be German in the English version of the game have been redubbed for the German version due to dialog censorship and now sound far worse.

 

Russian strikes back with perfective and imperfective verbs and determinate and indeterminate imperfective forms for verbs of motion. I'm sure they drive native English speakers crazy.

 

True I remeber that someone told that they heard an russian-fluent american say that Russian is obsessed with direction of movement. I.e. "who goes where, why, and how". There's probably truth in this.

 

Learning japanese allows you to watch while paying less attention to subtitles. You definitely recognize what sort of speech (keigo (formal) or informal) character uses, understand all the things like "sound of staring at someone", plus you pick subtleties when addressing someone or introduces themselves - things like ore/watashi, honorific or no honorific, first name basis or last name bases, and which for of address is used (For example, oniisan, onissaa, aniki, etc).

At some point you'll be able to watch some material unassisted meaning subtitles off. That's probably when you'll have 50...70% understanding of spoken japanese by ear.

 

Cool right? I'm designing the document for this game now and discuss with my team. One of the game-play is calligraphy where player learn the correct way of writing a word step by step like this mini game in Shin Sangokumusou NEXT. (PSVita)

Excluding the beginning part where player need to guess what is that word. I will directly display the word and let player write on it but I'm no idea how to code this and what special shader to use and so on. Is there a Unity tutorial about making this kind of game-play? So far I can't find one. Or do you know something about this? Thanks in advance.

Spoiler: Postscript

This game actually quite painful for non-native Chinese / Japanese players even the developer localized the game into English because the calligraphy must be in Japanese Kanji (Actually in Chinese better since this is a war history of China but nevermind) to deliver the message correctly in culture based. I saw a lots of reviews said that they stuck in this part over a week because they don't know Chinese nor Japanese at all hence can't go thru the story. I think this was the biggest mistake the developer made in this game. They should not include this mini game in the main game. Although it's absolutely no problem for me but I can really feel the pain for non-Chinese / Japanese players.

In my country actually there has one kind of people where they are Chinese but they totally don't know about Chinese due to family background and international school education. One of my friend is like this and he interested in Chinese too hence I teach him only speaking and listening. Now at least he know how to speak and listen to some basic sentences.

Ya. Translating between Asian languages and Western languages are always challenging for me especially in story driven games. Sometimes it will took me about several days just to think about translating one sentences. How to completely deliver the message from this culture to another culture. You know, for example a joke based on culture A won't has any effects on culture B so how do I tell the other culture players about this joke. Challenging, at the same time, quite fun actually.

Yes. Those 12 tenses, simple present tense, past participle, future perfect, past continuous, future perfect continuous and so on always driving me crazy + dizzy even now. You can clearly see my English always missed the timeline but I will slowly learning them. Chinese don't has such timeline thingy, it also don't have singular and plural form too. It's totally freestyle, up to your imagination.

(P/S: Sometimes we will create some local jokes by putting "ed" "ize" "ization" "ing" "ment" "s" and so on behind Chinese. Haha.)

Interesting. I wish I could feel that. Are there any example?

Interesting too. I think you are not talking about "He" and "She" right. Are there any simple example?

Ya. A lots of games like Android mobile games for example, there have so many great mobile games but only available on Japan after my friend who living in Japan told me. Sadly I can't download them so I need to manually finding the APK and install. But it end up I give up on that market because it's lots of works to do since it's not downloaded from official Google Play Store hence you need to update yourself manually if updates are available.

Ya. I also not understand why some developers did this too. Would it earn more money? Marketing strategy? Not sure. But for me, I will just release a single game with all languages available for global. Slowly add in more languages. That's it. Simple.

Interesting. Do you have any example for this. I'm not native English speaker but Chinese. See what I will feel. Haha.

==================== I am a line separator ====================

In additional. This is about Unity C# programming. I watched these 2 video yesterday. Are those the future of Unity C# programming method although I'm not quite understand what he is talking about but I'm a bit interested into this. Feels like the whole structure is changed. He also mention that forget about OOP concept which it costing performance on virtual override functions etc.

What do you think?
Oh ya. I need to mention that I'm a 3D artist but has only normal knowledge of C#.

 

This is a funny illustration of the problem of translating AND localisation

 

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes#Taboo_vocabulary

 

Old Russian language (~800..1000 years ago) had two ways to describe the past. In modern English they would look like
1. I wrote. He wrote. They wrote. (using a verb in the past tense)
2. I am written. He is written. They are written. (to be + ancient form of a past participle).

Then over the centuries the first form disappears and the second one simplifies loosing the "to be" part. As a result, modern Russian verbs in the past tense are actually ancient past participles, and, like any other participle or adjective, they must agree with their subject in gender and number using the corresponding endings:

Masculine form: I wrote / You wrote / He wrote: Я написал / Ты написал / Он написал (no ending)
Feminine form: I wrote / You wrote / She wrote: Я написала / Ты написала / Она написала (feminine ending)
Neutral form: I wrote / You wrote / ??? wrote: Я написало / Ты написало / Оно написало (neutral ending)
Plural form: We wrote / You wrote / They wrote: Мы написали / Вы написали / Они написали (plural ending)

So, when you are talking about yourself or anyone else in the past tense in Russian, you immediately reveal the information about your or their gender.

Aspects of Russian Verbs – Imperfective and Perfective
Determinate/Unidirectional vs Indeterminate/Multidirectional forms of verbs of motion

Verbs of Motion with prefixes

 

Damn, I totally overlooked it only works in past tense.

However, adjectives also reveal gender information, when present.

Nice one. I can see this being a major headache for a native english speaker.

 

Do you happen to know the reasoning behind calling random people Onii-san or Onee-san? See this one a lot. Mostly it's kids, but sometimes I see an adult using some form (I recall hearing it in Root Letter, though I think it was "uncle").

 

Oneesan = Older Sister. It would be used as a form of address, as inter-family would not typically use given names in reference to each other.

It can also be used as a form of slang when speaking to those that are older, or in a higher position than yourself, who are not part of your family.

 

Yeah I know what it means, it just seemed weird to me to use it for people who are clearly not related. As I said I mostly see it for child characters so it makes a kind of sense, but then I've heard some of these family-related terms used by people who aren't children, so it seemed particularly strange there.

 

There could be a "senpai" type of thing going on... as in someone who is assisting you, outside of a formal peer structure. Or just a informal way of talking to a stranger... similar to using Ojisan for an older unfamiliar man, which could be considered as saying "Hey Mister...", but of course it is emphasizing the age difference between you, which English does not do.

 

I actually had a proper high quality explanation written by an actual japanese, but the PoS website where it was written ate it and now I can't find it.

It is a way to address a young-ish woman, especially by younger person, less formal one.
If my memory serves me right, the age progression goes like this...Ojou-san (young girl), onee-san (young woman), oba-san(older woman).
Likewise onii-san is used for young men (or boys (up to <= 25 y/o, I think)), and ojii-san for older men (45+ or 55+, I thknk).
Anime has a lot of jokes revolving around people getting angry at being called obaa-san, and ojii-san, because it implies that they're old. Women get angry/irritated, men usually go "but... i"m not old? yet? I think?" It is frequently sued to portray (male) characters who are in denial about thir age.

Russian has similar age progression. Basically, in russian it is "devochka" (young girl --- 0..12...13 y/o) --> "devushka" (girl, or "maiden" -- 14...20+) --> zhenschina (woman 30+...35+) --> babushka (grandmother ??+ - looks old enough). Kids can use "tyota" (auntie) and "dyadya" (uncle) for strangers that are not children. For men it is less strict defined, and you'll get "malchik" (young boy - <= 12 y/o), "paren'" (dude/man/guy -- 14+.... <= 25? ) "patsan" (dude, slang - anything from kid and teenager), "molodoi chelovek" (young man, official sounding - 18+.. 20+), "muzhchina" (man, 30+? ) "dedushka" (60+?).

So. If you use older age category when addressing someone they may end up being either ticked off or royally annoyed.
For example, calling a "girl" a "woman" is very likely to be mildly irritating, because it'll imply she looks old. Same goes if you call a "woman" a "grandmother". This applies to both japanese and russian, although the main joke in japanese material is calling someoen who thinks they're at the age of "onee-san" "obaa-san". Typically done by a little kid.

This actually has consequences (for russian speakers) when speaking an english, because calling a young girl a "woman" may feel like an insult. Because she is supposed to be a "girl"/"maiden". However, in english speaking countries some people will take offense being called a girl, because for them it implies "little girl", meaning a kid and it implies they are not being taken seriously.

That's the rough idea of it.

 

I've been thinking a while about what I find to be the most entertaining thing to come out of German media, and I think it's satire. I've watched Kalkofes Mattscheibe Rekalked with my girlfriend yesterday and I love how he makes fun of the lowest quality German trash-TV, some stuff that I think is so dumb, it shouldn't even be broadcasted. But you'd need such a high level of understanding of the German Language to get all the nuances in his jokes (or even understand what he means), and it requires such a deep knowledge of German TV culture and history to get all the references that I think it wouldn't really be that funny to people from other countries.

But today I've stumbled over something else, that I think is less "lost-in-translation", and I thought I should share with you. It's subtitled with proper english translations and has another youtuber guy "reacting" to it (just ignore him).
The background knowledge that you should have is: the "ZDF" is a TV station financed by a special kind of tax that everyone has to pay who owns a device capable of accessing TV, radio, or internet in Germany, so it's government financed and subject to certain guidelines and regulations. "RTL" is a privately run TV station, financed by airing TV commercials, and it's one of the TV stations well known for producing tons of lowest quality trash TV "reality shows", that are exploiting borderline mentally handicapped people (real people, not actors) in fully scripted show formats, where they tell them what to say, and do everything to make them look even worse, so that even the biggest idiot watching the show can feel somehow superior when watching it. The show aired on ZDF and I don't want to spoil the twist:

The original video (without the annoying "reaction") is here, but I didn't check if the translations are the same, but I assume they are:

P.S.: another one that I liked:

Spoiler