The only thing I find more annoying is how after you humbly respond, “no i am not jouzu” they will often respond "日本語は難しいですね～” (Japanese sure is difficult eh?) UGH. Yeah it’s not an easy language, but Japanese people are somehow all brainwashed into thinking that their language requires superhuman effort to learn, and that the mere fact a gaijin has some type of proficiency is astounding. I know they usually mean well, but it comes off as condescending and trite when you hear it for the 1000th time.
But yes, as I’m sure you know, the way you know your Japanese is good is when you stop receiving the ‘nihongo jouzu’ comment.
With all due disclaimers re anecdotes/data out of the way… I lived in Japan as a kid from '67-'70, had no experience speaking a language other than English before we moved there, we lived out in the thick of Kanagawa-ken with nary another gaijin in miles and I never had a problem making myself understood. I know my ear is good, good enough to know that my parents had atrocious pronunciation, but even so they were well understood too, at a time when not nearly as many Japanese learned English as a second language or heard English spoken at all.
I suspect much of the misunderstanding has to do with many years of dealing with gaijin and getting resentful over it–we were treated like celebrities when we travelled (ask me about attending Expo '70 some day!) but from what I hear that’s unlikely to happen these days. I’ve seen similar lapses in comprehension from Americans who suddenly “forget” how to understand people with accents if said people are of an ethnic group they dislike. We had some problems of that nature from call center agents…
Quick question about written and spoken Japanese. Can you look at a written symbol that you don’t know and be able to pronounce it the way you can english and other languages that are more or less phonetically translated to paper?
Or do you have to simply be aware of what it means until someone actually says it?
Plus, there are a couple of kanji that have only one pronunciation. I think. But there aren’t too many of 'em. It’s one of the things that’s supposed to make Japanese harder to learn than Chinese, actually. Chinese doesn’t use an alphabet, and they’ve got tones (4 or 9 or more, depending on dialect), but by god, you see something written and there’s only one way that character’s supposed to come outta your mouth.
Let’s say you were making a code with someone. You decided the code was going to have 100 symbols that were pronounced exactly the same way every time. However, there were only going to be 50 sounds, so you have duplicates for each sound. These 100 sounds would be put together like words in English, ie each sound is meaningless on its own. Then you were going to use 2000 main symbols to represent other things, but you could also use another 3000+ more that weren’t going to be very common. These particular symbols sometimes meant something by themselves, and were to be said a particular way. Other times, they were going to be pronounced one way if they had certain other symbols next to them, and a different way with different other symbols. Some of the symbols could in fact have 6 or more different pronunciations and meanings.
At this point, the person you’ve been making the code with has long since thought you were an idiot and left the room.