Talking about obsession, for me, a native Japanese speaker who learned English as a second language, English is pretty crazily picky about numbers.
English has strict rules of ‘singular and plural’, but in Japanese that concept doesn’t really exist. Let’s say in Japanese, ‘猫 (cat)’ is ‘cat’, whether or not if ‘cat’ is one or two or thousand. Singular and plural forms are not grammatically required in Japanese, more relaxed, okay to be vague, and not absolute requirements like they are in English. Japanese focused on more the context. So I easily slip “a” or “s” out (as you can see from my posts), and it’s difficult to know whether to add “a” or “s”, and also deep sigh for countable and uncountable…
Knowing about the English obsession with numbers, makes me obsessively think about numbers when I use, speak, or think in English from time to time. The wing of my imagination goes wide & wild like this:
’Sugar’, I know it’s uncountable, I’m pretty sure about it but come on, I can count if I try, is it really uncountable then?…Well, I keep saying nose holes (I was talking about nose holes for some reason I don’t remember, and please excuse me that I didn’t know the word ‘nostrils’), but right and left nose holes are usually like two halves of a whole, a whole = single, should I have used ‘nose hole’ instead of holes?, well if so, a set of two parts, then maybe could I have said ‘a pair of nose holes?’ But I never really heard anyone saying that way though…and so on.
Language show us how the people who use that language see and perceive the world.
English is very clear; you have to say it all and if you don’t say, it does not exist.
Japanese is more like read between the lines; we expect people to sense the vibe.
If I were to summarize this random thought, it’s very interesting to see the world from your eyes. Thank you for sharing with me.
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