Kakokei

I've been learning Japanese for a while now, and I'd say I'm pretty decent at it. People who learn Japanese often complain about kanji and various other stuff. Admittedly, learning a ton of characters is not particularly easy, but it's really not that bad and you don't actually need to know any Chinese characters to write the language; your writing will just look like a kindergarteners if you don't use any. Other than kanji, Japanese is essentially an extremely simple language, which is compunded by the fact that Japanese people basically never really say anything in that Japanese culture is high-context compared to most other cultures. So you can basically get by with a couple nouns, a couple verbs and a lot of soo desu ne? and yoroshiku onegaishimasu.

So, I started spending some of my copious amount of time here at the BOE reviewing some French, which actually comes back pretty easily, and trying to pick up some German because why not. Actually, I looked at a couple other languages, but I decided after reading about it for about half an hour that Dutch is essentially impossible and best left to the Dutch.

French isn't so bad if you are an English speaker, and really not so bad if you knew it at one point, anyway. German is really just a hilarious sounding language, which is what keeps me going on it. I'd say it ranks just behind any of the languages in the Chinese language family for sheer weirdness of sounds, probably just ahead of the Nordic languages. Certain words are just awesome, like das Krankenhaus. I can also appreciate that nouns are capitalized regardless of what they are because at least that's consistent.

But let me get to my point. The past tense is a mess in European languages. I'm glad I'm not trying to learn English as a second language because it is pretty terrible, but I am going to highlight some of the weirdness.

Firstly, multiple past tenses. From what I can tell, French has three past tenses, though one is basically just used in writing and my guess would be will eventually cease to exist whatsoever, and another is for all intents and purposes useless. So, that leaves us with the passe compose (I can't add accents on a Japanese computer as it turns them into random Chinese characters), which is not amazingly hard to form, but has its own peculiarities.

German uses a past indefinite tense, which is essentially the same as passe compose. Both of these tenses are basically equivalent to English present perfect in construction, but translate into past perfect, (simple) past, or emphatic past, depending on the situation. English is probably the worst, but I'm not learning that! The tenses are formed by conjugating an auxillary verb, either to have (avoir, haben) or to be (etre, sein) to the subject, and adding a past participle, which is somehow formed from the original verb that you want to express. Whether it is to be or to have is something you basically just have to memorize, though they follow ridiculous rules. Forming the past participle for most verbs is rather simple:

French:
jouer -> joue (accent aigu over the e)
choisir -> choisi
appredre -> apprendu

(verbs in French all end in -er, -ir, or -re, so most change as above)

German:

sagen -> gesagt
arbeiten -> gearbeitet
studieren -> studiert

Unfortunately, Europeans seem to hate any form of regularity, so all the verbs that you'd ever want to use are irregular. My list of French verbs with irregular past participles has 40+ members, and I'm pretty sure doesn't list all of them, while my list of German verbs with irregular past participles is pretty close to a hundred. At least in French the irregularities tend to fall in nice little groups:

prendre -> pris
apprendre -> appris
comprendre -> compris

German past participles seem to be chosen essentially at random, as if to confuse non-native speakers. At least they sound funny.

fliegen -> geflogen.

Here's a thing that's nice about Japanese. There is one past tense. It works like this:

shimasu -> shimashita
kimasu -> kimashita
demasu -> demashita

Getting to the -masu form requires a little bit more work, but it's entirely regular excepting two verbs. I have to admire any Japanese person who can be bothered to gain a mastery of English because doing comparative lingustic stuff like this makes it apparent that European languages, English in particular, are ridiculous and almost mind-bogglingly complicated.