Comments by "MusicalRaichu" (@MusicalRaichu) on "NativLang" channel.

How naughty naughty*! NativLang is a *handy dandy*, *super-duper channel but he does make willy-nilly comments sometimes. What a silly billy to make such a boo-boo*! He's no *nitwit*, but he publishes video *pell-mell after video without checking all the mistakes scattered helter-skelter*. Bet *Humpty Dumpty would have been upset. Please apologize chop-chop before more people poo-poo you! And don't claim it's teeny weeny*. Yeah, *yadda yadda I know this is long, so I better say bye-bye now.
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In my experience, stroke order is useful in several respects. It helps you write the characters so that they look as expected, it lets you read other people's handwriting, and (believe it or not) it lets you write characters in the air (without ink) and people know what you've written. I think there's even a word for that (Japanese seem to have a word for everything).
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No, no, you explored the possible directions in general terms in an entertaining way. Admittedly, you left me feeling unsatisfied but I think that's the nature of predicting the future. You didn't look at any specific details. While details can hint at what might happen in the next few years, however, I wouldn't think they can help with centuries ahead because so much is unpredictable. Perhaps, in a future video, you can examine on trends over the last 50 years or so and see where they might lead if they continue. For example, has anyone researched what the impact of the wave of new technologies (newspaper, radio, TV, internet) has been on English (or languages generally)?
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@nameless actually ... かわいい [it/he/she/they] is cute かわいいね isn't [it] cute? かわいいの is [it] cute? かわいいよね [it]'s really cute, isn't it? だ is incorrect here since かわいい is a verb, and the combination だか sounds very strange.
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I don't think this video is as well thought out as the previous videos of yours that I've seen. I agree that you don't write a character correctly unless you've written it in the correct order, but I disagree that that's different to other scripts. I've been taught stroke order when learning english and greek too. It's just that because kanji are so complex that stroke order becomes more complex too and that there is an order of magnitude more memorization involved. I think you could have made a more entertaining video by focusing on apparent inconsistencies such as the differences between for example first two strokes of 左 and 右 or 成 and 原.
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i don't think it's helpful to think of japanese as having a null subject. it just doesn't have subjects the way european languages do. these particles have specific informational roles. ga is not just a subject marker, it means, "here's some new information or something you need to know". sometimes it marks the object, e.g. niku o taberu vs niku ga tabetai wa has the function "i'm talking about ..." which can have a further connotations of change of focus "i'm talking about this as opposed to what i was before" or comparison with "i'm talking about this as opposed to something else". ikimasu - an unspecified person is going, normally assumed to be the speaker unless context dictates otherwise. complete sentence, no nulls watashi ga ikimasu - i'm giving you additional information. you might be wondering who's going, well it's me watashi wa ikimasu - i'm giving you additional information - i'm talking about myself - i'm going, perhaps because someone else isn't, or perhaps because i'm going as opposed to not going. watashi ga wa ikimasu doesn't make sense. wa is assuming we know watashi, waiting to hear something new about them. ga assumes someone's going, waiting to here who.
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@OsakaJoe01 I think you're confusing syntax with semantics. In terms of semantics, you are correct - most verbs require a doer. But different languages have different syntax, some requiring a subject for a statement to be syntactically correct and some not. I'm not saying that the doer does not exist. It's just not part of the syntax. Semantically, "it's raining" has a null subject. The verb is the entirety of the meaning. Syntactically, "it's raining" has a subject, even though it's meaningless. Semantically, "ikimasu" has a subject, only understood from context, but it's there. Syntactically, "ikimasu" has no subject. The doer is implied but the syntax does not require it. That it's not a null subject can be seen because adding one changes the semantics.
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so basically your'e saying, it will take a very long time? recently i saw a picture of a greek plaque about 3-4000 years old ... i could actually recognise some of the words! but i wonder what it sounded like?
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What does the word "language" even mean? Tell me that definition first, then I'll tell you whether programming languages are really languages or not. You're saying that because people using linguistic skills to read/write code, that makes programming languages a language. Have you looked to see what other tasks involve linguistic skills, such as decoding the icons at the bottom of a YouTube video? You're inconspicuously setting up a definition of language that might not agree with mine or someone else's. It's like asking whether a virus is a living thing or not. Is it just a bunch of complex molecules that can react with its surrounding and self-replicate, or is it an organism that can assimilate matter and reproduce? It's all a matter of definition.
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Hollus Elsfik I agree. this video was not very well thought through.
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FiveADay Kanji This time I agree with you. This video was not very well researched. While he makes a couple of probably valid points, I think a lot of it is just shock value. I had to learn correct stroke order when learning Greek and English too--Chinese characters are more complex so stroke order is more important to make them looking good. Hey, there's a Japanese word for writing kanji in the air. Do you know what it is?
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Permafrost - one of my classmates at uni started learning french. his way of putting it was, they stop pronouncing words half way through!
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***** oh yeah i've seen people do that.
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Thanks for the explanation. I always wondered about what Altaic was supposed to be. Can you make a video about the opposite, like how the link in language families such as indo-european has been accepted?
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Greek is flexible, so OSV occurs even if it's not common. Japanese also. It depends on what the new information you're trying to add is. Even English in poetry and flowery prose.
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LittleImpaler If you handwrote a character with the wrong stroke order, there will be subtle differences in how it looks. The character for mouth is a square 口 but subtle changes in angles of strokes and presence or absence of lead lines and what stroke is connected to what would all differ depending on the order and direction you drew each of the four lines.
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LittleImpaler sorry double post look at this example http://fav.me/d20m31d the 口 at the bottom of each of the first two characters does not actually look like a square. the angles of the lines and which lines are connected/disjoint shows that it was written correctly.
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@nameless かわいいか is grammatically correct, but not かわいいだか. (Although one would typically ask かわいいの？ in casual speech and かわいいですか in polite speech.)
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so this isn't about sweet nothings in your ear ...
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@OsakaJoe01 The issue is not whether or not there is a doer. It's about what questions you have to answer to form a grammatical sentence. English grammatically requires a subject even if there isn't one, e.g. "it is raining". Conversely, Japanese does not require an explicit subject to form a grammatical sentence even when there is one. Thus ikimasu is a grammatically complete sentence, even though the subject is implied. There's no null. When you include "watashi wa" or "watashi ga", you are not merely identifying the subject, you are making statements with different meaning. ikimasu - I'm going watashi wa ikimasu - I'm going as opposed to someone else, or as opposed to doing something else watashi ga ikimasu - I'm the one who's going Different languages require you to answer different questions in order to grammatically form a sentence. English requires stating a subject unless you are giving a 2nd person command. Greek, Italian, Japanese and no doubt other languages do not. In Greek and Italian you have to indicate whether the doer is 1st/2nd/3rd person and whether it's singular/plural, but nothing more. You don't need to state it for a grammatical sentence. You only state it to clarify, avoid ambiguity, or emphasize it. It's like you can add information such as time, place or manner. Do you consider omitting the time an action occurs a null time specification? No, it's additional information for semantics, but optional when it comes to grammar.
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@redwiresound never let the facts get in the way of a good story!
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This is all absolutely true. Oh, youforgottosaythattheydon'tputspacesbetweenwords. Thatmakesitevenhardertoread. You know when I was a kid, I learned to read Greek (as in just pronounce the words) in 5 days. As an adult, I learned to read Italian in 5 minutes (no joke, it's easy). It's taken me nearly 50 years and I still can't read Japanese proficiently!
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the classical interpretation of the babel story is not the only possibility. "all mankind" could mean all the peoples that the (now anonymous) author happened to know about, and "a common tongue" could mean a lingua franca, not necessarily excluding regional dialects etc. the story doesn't say exactly what the "confusion" was that God caused. it certainly doesn't say that people miraculously had their brains rewired so that they spoke another language.
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Everything here is absolutely true. Japanese is a writing disaster! Yet the strange thing is that it's so lovable and artistic in spite of all this.
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Nicolaus Volentius Informally you can ask a question by intonation alone, の, or sometimes か. The word だ is not often used anyway unless required for grammatical reasons as it sounds overly assertive. だ makes an assertion, "this is how it is", but か asks a question "is this how it is", "what is it?". It doesn't usually make sense to put them together. Where you would need to put them together, I usually hear it changed to なのか.
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someone learning french once told me that you have to learn at what point in a word you stop pronouncing the letters. so for example "someone" might be pronounced "som" in french. "something" would be "somt" so you can tell the difference.
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@gaoda1581 dikio ki'esy exeis (OSV). hmm ... maybe not so rare.
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