Japanese Language Switching and Money
Friday August 18, 2006This isn’t about learning Japanese, but it’s something interesting I’ve observed, and heard others remark on.
Almost ninety-nine percent of the population living in Japan is Japanese, and as you can imagine, a fair number of Japanese words creep into the vocabularies of other people who live here, often because there’s no equivalent in English or Portuguese or whatever language one happens to speak.
One curious case of language switching, I’ve noticed, involves money and numbers. Every English-speaking foreigner I’ve met, while conversing in English, will switch to Japanese when naming an amount of money in yen. Even strangers I overhear in stores or on the subway do this, and I do it too — it just happens naturally for some reason. People will say “Dinner last night cost me go sen en” or “my rent is almost juu-san man en per month”.
I suppose part of the reason is the difficulty of converting from Japanese numbers, which group by ten-thousands, into English, which groups by thousands. Another reason might be sheer immersion; a person living in Japan hears prices spoken in Japanese constantly, and basic survival requires being able to say and understand Japanese numbers quickly. Additionally, there might be a link between thinking about money in terms of yen instead of one’s home currency, and becoming comfortable with the Japanese numbers that are always used to count yen, instead of trying to marry Japanese currency with English numbers in your head.
I wonder if other linguistic communities in Japan do this. Do the country’s quarter-million Portuguese speakers switch to Japanese for prices? How about the Koreans, whose number system is already close to Japanese?
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Koreans use the four-zero system just like the Japanese and the Chinese. They have also, like the Japanese imported the Chinese numbers. This must make the switch much less dramatic to them, if it exists at all.
I have never experienced the phenomenon you describe. The closest I have come is someone calling units 10000 yen ‘man’.
— Mårten Aug 19, 12:08 pm #“I have never experienced the phenomenon you describe.”
Never at all? Astonishing. :)
While I was typing this response, a friend walked into the room to tell me about a spindle of 50 DVDs he saw at Yamada Denki for “ni-sen roppyaku en”.
— Paul Davidson Aug 19, 09:07 pm #