#crafty.nerd

Latin and Japanese both like to have the verb at the end of the sentence, which I think is interesting, but after that there’s a lot of opposites I’m picking up

For instance, Latin is such a hard language for folks to pick up because the verb, adjective, noun etc changes depending on the gender case and number of the word. If you wanted to write, like idk Maria approaches the dog you have to write “Maria canem appropinquat.” But if you want two people had approached the verb becomes “appropinquaverant”. It gets worse in longer sentences when you have to denote what is being given to who and what things belong to who. Latin also has individual letters that need to be put together to make sounds and that doesn’t really ever change

In Japanese (at least where I’m at in it) in general, a lot of verbs and nouns have the same form regardless of the number and gender of the folks using it. It’s very contextual. You have words like に that indicate the role of the word in the sentence, instead of the word itself telling you what its role is in Latin (where Latin is like a giant matching game)

Like the questions “Where is your pet?” And “where are your pets?” Looks identical in Japanese, meanwhile in latin it would be going through tons of changes depending on gender case and number. The other side is that Japanese uses characters to represent syllables (in hiragana and katakana) and uses Kanji to represent ideas. That also means that a character could be used in one sentence sounding like “ha” and another like “wa”, and the same Kanji character could be pronounced in two different ways. Like 外 by itself is “so-to” (meaning outside) but in the word 外国 it is pronounced “gai” (i think) but the word means foreigner and they used the character for outside as the first character???