NOTE: This whole post is based on and inspired by Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You by Jay Rubin. Stylistic language in bold is Rubin’s language (not my own), because I liked his style and I’m too tired to think of anything better. See citation at the end.







In English, we pretty much only have one word for the verb “to know,” and it’s…well, “to know.” We can say “I understand” or “I comprehend” or “I ken,” but in day-to-day conversation all of these can be and usually are replaced with “I know.”

This often gives trouble to Anglophones who try to learn a Romance Language for the first time, since those languages frequently have two different, non-interchangeable verbs for “to know.” For example, French has savoir, meaning “to know a fact, or to know how to do something”; and connaître meaning “to be familiar with (a person or a place, for example).”

But what if I told you that Japanese doesn’t have a verb for “to know,” at least not in the senses described above?

In effect, Japanese contains two words that roughly approach the senses described above, but deviate a little from these senses in beautiful ways. (Forgive me, I am going to romanize the Japanese words here for the sake of ease.)



The first Japanese word (which is somewhat similar to connaître) is wakaru. Wakaru means “to understand” or “to be clear with,” but unlike “to know” and connaître, wakaru takes as it’s subject an idea instead of a person. Thus in Japanese, people don’t understand an idea. Rather, an idea is understandable; it is clear to anyone who happens to be in the neighborhood. I love, love LOVE this idea of universal understandability.

The second Japanese word (which I like even more than wakaru) is shiru. This is as close as Japanese gets to savoir, but it’s really not that close and the differences are absolutely beautiful. First and foremost, shiru doesn’t actually mean “to know” at all; rather, it means “to come to know,” “to find out,” or “to learn.” If you want to say “I know X” in Japanese, you actually have to say “I learned X (at some point in the past), and I still have it up here where it belongs.” In Japanese, this phrase is written shitte iru (literally, “I am in a state of having found out”).

Question: Why is this peculiarity of Japanese so beautiful? Answer: Because of how one would say “I don’t know” in Japanese.

“I don’t know” in Japanese is shirimasen (literally “I haven’t found out about it yet”). One really cannot say shitte imasen (literally ”I am not in a state of having found out about it”), but if one could it would give an impression of a desire to remain ignorant. The semantic connotation would be something akin to “I intend to remain in a state of not having found out about it.”

Thus, the Japanese language only allows ignorance to be expressed in temporary terms: “I haven’t found out about it YET.” The Japanese language does not allow one to express a desire toward willful ignorance. And that, my friends and followers, is beautiful.





Citation:

Rubin, Jay. Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You. New York, N.Y.: Kodansha USA, 2012. Print.

