In the event of applying English grammar onto Japanese, we can easily overlap language ideology, cultural coding and purely linguistic features. If a weeaboo always finishes his Japanese sentences with desu it is possible that he wishes to avoid what he feels as an English grammatical error, such a rule he assumes is present in another language, and doesn’t realize that (a) his avoidance of zero copula is more of an ideological factor (to avoid ridicule for poor use of the Foucaldian-discursive entity that is “Standard English”) and that (b) zero copula in Japanese [if that exists?] is not necessarily an ideological factor but one of cultural convenience. But then again I don’t know anything about socio-linguistics in Japanese, it’s a hypothetical situation.

put more simply: linguistic rules need cultural spaces in which to function. People may mistakenly take one contingent rule as absolute, and thus fumble around in cross-cultural “rule slippage”.

na is the attributive form of the copula da. In modern Japanese, it mostly turns up after so-called nominal adjectives, e.g. ano hito wa kirei da “This person is beautiful” -> kirei na hito “A beautiful person”.
no is a pretty ubiquitous particle in Japanese, but one of its function is nominalization: it turns a verbal clause into something close to a noun, like gerund in English, e.g. Taberu no wa hitsuyou da “eating is necessary”, Asahayaku okiru no wa ii “waking up early in the morning is good”.
Combining the two, we get things like Mahoro’s famous line Ecchi na no wa ikenai to omoimasu “I think dirty things (literally, “that which is dirty”) are bad”. And then there’s an “explanatory” sentence marker na no da deriving from there: Naze konakatta? — Shigoto wa taihen na no da. “Why didn’t you come? Work has been pretty hard.” (literally “it is the fact that work has been hard”).
na no is the same thing as na no da with the copula omitted.

Note that omitting the da like this actually softens the sentence a lot, making it less assertive and very feminine. Both are informal of course.

chuchlann: hmmm, I don’t really get the ga/wa thing, and so the “ore wa…ore ga zero” still confuses me, so it’s probably some “deep” cultural thing I’ll never comprehend entirely.

That’s kinda funny, how zero copula in Japan is associated with high status, whereas in the US zero copula is associated with very low status.

Oh, I thought of this earlier today — the copula and its absence in Japan mark politeness and social position. To leave it off is impolite, and only something a person much “higher” in the social structure than the listener would do. Of course, to be informal without being rude, one uses “da” instead of “desu.”

This I’m sure of: the “o” you’re talking about there is actually two different particles. There’s “o,” which is the honorific you’re noticing (analogous to “go,” it just depends on which word you’re adding it to). There’s also “wo,” almost always pronounced as “o,” which is a direct object marker. I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “wo” in songs.

Pontifus: as per [76], the blogosphere debate on “fansub authenticity” spawns more from an issue of authority and power rather than pragmatics. I really can’t talk much about the neuro-psychological processes of language since I’ve never read up in that area, though.

Chuchlann: Ah, Pinker. Reading “mentalese” (a chapter in one of his books) is standard fare in the communication program I’m in, and we’re also obliged to read snippets of sapir, whorf and lakoff. Essentially, points 2 and 3 are sort of in contradiction (though that doesn’t necessarily make sense): we can listen to the culture itself to be immersed in it, but it’s a false immersion since listening in such a respect is linear and one-directional. I guess the best bet would be to go live in Japan for a while!

Mike: I really like to try and figure out the rules of Japanese when watching anime. Like, I can’t figure out why, seemingly, two particles “na” and “no” and juxtaposed at the end up sentences….”blah blah blah na no“. It’s fairly easy to get the gist of wa, ga, ni, o (isn’t o an honorific too? o-bento, o-ni, o-chichiue), no, etc. But yeah, languages in which word ordering is more or less pointless is relatively harder to figure out than others, but that, of course, is from personal bias.

You might enjoy reading Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory, an account of a Mexican-American’s assimilation or Americanization. He ended up losing his Spanish language since he was reading advanced books at young ages (Nathanial Hawthorne in elementary school – I hated the scarlet letter). Dunno, I think you might be able to relate to him in some ways. And yeah, I read it…I’ll reply again later since I rarely go on gtalk.

Linguistics is not my field, although I love playing with words. I have been ‘addicted’ to anime for more than five years, though, but it was only when I enrolled in a course on Japanese language did I partly understand the nuances of the language.

>I heard plenty of Japanese before I took courses, and never picked up anything.

Exactly. I think Krashen is right. I read a lot of English material when I was still a child (arguably a lot more than most normal children), so I assume part of the reason of my fluency in English is my acquisition of it (in addition to ‘learning’ it properly, too).

I replied to your e-mail, btw, Daniel. :P

And yeah. Stephen Pinker described a famous case study wherein a doctor told two deaf parents to put their hearing child in front of the TV. The child didn’t acquire any spoken language until it started interacting with other speakers. TV is one-directional.