The Hindu : International : It baffles the natives too

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 26, 2004

International

International

It baffles the natives too

Osaka (Japan): With its phonetic symbols and complex vocabulary, Japanese can defeat even the most talented linguists. Now it seems to be baffling native speakers, too. Nearly a fifth of the students at Japanese private universities have the reading ability expected of 13- to 15-year-olds, according to a survey. The students were presented a multiple choice test and asked to define nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Two-thirds of the respondents thought that a word meaning ``to grieve'' actually meant ``to be happy.'' The study showed that foreign exchange students who had spent some years learning Japanese could sometimes read better than locals. The Japanese have long attributed the reduced vocabulary of students, at least in part, to the proliferation of comics, which use ideograms and sentence structures. Foreigners consider Japanese to be one of the world's most difficult written languages. It uses two separate sets of phonetic symbols and thousands of Chinese ideograms, and some words have as many as a dozen meanings and nearly as many pronunciations. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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