/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>46604035
thats cool now lets hear you vocaroo this

>>46255680
>>46255683
Yeah, I wouldn't have made a post like that guy did. (I also wouldn't be reading the bible. What a chud!)

An important factor in knowing Japanese is understanding that ye olde Japanese (古文 et al) will be significantly more difficult than the every day Japanese you see. Japanese has experienced more major and calculated shifts in its writing forms than English, so even relatively more recent literature can have incredibly difficult to parse language. You'll have to specifically focus on it and specifically learn it to get better at it (which is why Japanese schools have both 古文 and 国語 lessons), so I wouldn't really post it as an example of difficult Japanese, any moreso than I may post a section of Beowulf as an example of difficult English -- key to note here is that it's common for ye olde lit to have entirely new, rewritten versions republished for the ease of modern readers. That wouldn't happen if Japanese people (masters of the language in any sense that mastery has meaning) found it comfortable to read ye olde text. Not that the posted bible quote is mind-bendingly difficulty, though, but I would acknowledge it is high level. The thing is that I would also acknowledge that its a kind of difficulty you can largely ignore and still be great at the language, so I wouldn't trounce it about.

As for myself, I don't know exactly what I would post myself to represent "hard Japanese". I think I may be old-fashioned and just post Mareni. Although he of course has old literature influence, in my experience he largely accords to a modern writing style and the difficulty therefore becomes in keeping up with labyrinthine sentences and advanced vocabulary rather than simply ye olde writing customs. Struggling to read Mareni much more closely emulates someone being bad at Japanese in general since it would primarily reflect their understanding breaking down when sentences get too long and reflect more abstract, literary concepts. This isn't "as hard as Japanese can be," though.