There are very few differences between German and English, but there are tons of difference between European languages and Asian ones.
I studied in Korea, I was specially interested in Hangul, and found Japanese extremely similar to Korean in the cultural side of things.
For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.
The same happens with different levels of respect and politeness in Japan, it does not match anything the Western world has.
Words are like icons or shortcuts for something the culture has.
The intimate relationships, the families, the social contracts,violence, the way of working... it is simply another world of thinking.
> For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.
The Japanese are well aware of this because they've seen American movies. The word you want is ヤンキー.
"There are very few differences between German and English,"
While English is, more or less, a simplified version of German I still would not agree to your statement.
English has no declension (a simplification of a grammar).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension
In German it does not make a difference if you say "Dog bites Man" or "Man bites Dog". The word order is very flexible and it is always clear who bites whom. This is a major difference in a language.
This is true. Words like "shit" (くそ) exist, which is fairly tame compared to other languages. One of the worst phrases you can say is basically the command "die" (死ね).
When "cursing" at someone in Japanese, it's more about inflection, tone, and using the social status constructs of the language to talk down to someone. Such as the insanely informal Kansai dialect below:
お前、何をやてねん？！あほやで！
"What are you doing?! Stupid!"
Translated it's pretty tame, but depending on the context this could be quite shocking to the receiver.
I studied in Korea, I was specially interested in Hangul, and found Japanese extremely similar to Korean in the cultural side of things.
For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.
The same happens with different levels of respect and politeness in Japan, it does not match anything the Western world has.
Words are like icons or shortcuts for something the culture has.
The intimate relationships, the families, the social contracts,violence, the way of working... it is simply another world of thinking.