The tale of Genji is pretty interesting so I’d recommend it if you are interested in Japanese literature. If you read it, you will understand that Japan isn’t really a socially conservative country traditionally. But as you can see, if you speak today’s Japanese, you will be able to read a lot of classics. So if you want to learn Japanese with me, I can send you some Japanese lessons where I teach you the kind of Japanese that Japanese people actually speak. Click here and subscribe bit.ly/3ioR1WR

I'll never get tired of how you plug your Japanese lessons

Being Chinese, I was actually able to read the first one, but no idea on the second and third....

"i can't read kanji" also them: *reads the whole text* 😁

The interaction at 3:30 was gold

It's like English speakers struggling to read 1300s English.

I would love to see Japanese people react to Emperor Showa's last speech,where he declared that the war is over. I have heard his Japanese was different from normal Japanese, and I'm curious if people today can understand it.

8:00 is me reading normal Japanese

Can you make video about ryukyuan or okinawan language? I heard that the ryukyuan languages has retained a lot of archaic features from old japanese

Despite Shakespeare being from only around 400 years ago, it's hard to read sometimes to the point of not being able to understand at all. Maybe this was because it was written in an artistic manner, and the casual vernacular was easier to understand. But it's interesting how Japanese can be understood that far back even in the 10th century.

Why are they all talking in sync so well though lmao

I’m Chinese and an intermediate learner of Japanese. Hōjōki seems to be the easiest to understand since it contains certain numbers of Chinese words (kango). But when it comes to the last one, I can barely make a guess because of it was written mostly in old Japanese word (wago).

Oh my goodness. As a native English speaker, the lack of obvious subject identifiers in Japanese drives me crazy. You really need to check the particles and ask yourself constantly who is acting upon whom and for what purpose. We had to read Genji monogatari for class and I was going to flip a table.

I remember my Japanese teacher mentioned that older Japanese pronunciation was different than how modern speech sounds, especially because the sounds yi, ye, wi, wu, and we, are no longer used

I think at 7:02 he said "soshi" abbreviate of "makura no soshi"

I cried a river watching "The tale of princess Kaguya"

イタリア人の日本語学習者として、上代・中古日本語に触れ合う機会は滅多にないので、非常に興味深い動画でした!　僕もなるべく理解することに挑戦してみたんですが、半分ぐらいしかわかりませんでした（笑）! とにかく、投稿コメントを読みながら「やっぱり英語圏の視聴者さんと意見が全然合わないな〜」と思いました!　なぜかというと、イタリア語も日本語と同様に、何世紀も経っているにもかかわらずそんなに進化していない感じがするからです…もちろん現代人にとっては深く勉強しなければ全て理解するのは確かに無理かもしれませんが、普通にある程度推測することはできるのではないかなと思います! Thank you Yuta-san for this extremely interesting video! As an Italian native speaker, I actually think Japanese and Italian both evolved pretty slowly in comparison to other "major" languages such as English or French, just to name a few... That's probably because both Japanese and Italian have relatively limited phonetic repertoires, plus Japanese imported many "academic" words from Classical Chinese, re-adapting them in order to make them fit their own language, and since those are basically logograms they carry a meaning within themselves, so that might explain to some extent why today's Japanese are still able to understand their "ancient language"...

when the girl said 読めへん i was like wait what since up till now i'd only heard non-tokyo dialects in fiction so it was weird hearing it from a real person

At first, I was confused because I thought the texts were going to be mostly complicated kanji, but then with all the hiragana I thought it looked like a typical text Japanese native speakers would be able to read and understand without an issue. Then, I was confused about the fact they didn't completely understand what they were reading! 😆 I'm glad Yuta explained so clearly the reason for that at the end. It's fascinating how the written language can be understood relatively easily after centuries, yet the contextual element is the differentiating factor between how people understood a given story or message centuries ago compared to now.

I love these kind of vídeos a lot! I find these people you get to interview very endearing

That was actually really fun and interesting because it's like history and old stories in literature and I like talking and hearing about those kinds of things. Good video Yuta! I might have to go read those stories now.... hahaha

Really love the channel keep it up

Yuta, Japanese text from as recent as the 1930s can look quite different from what it does now, as the number of kanji got markedly reduced in the meantime. A famous piece of text from that time was the Kwanon camera advertisement before they became Canon, a one-page print ad where the top 2/3 was the picture, and bottom 1/3 is text. It would be interesting to see if it presents any difficulty for modern readers.

Nice video. Thank you for uploading

Yuta: If you want to learn Japanese… then come with me because we're going BACK IN TIME BOIIIIII YEAH

Language is an ever changing thing, but japanese case must be pretty unique as it went so long without external influences and without mixes.... up until now that is. So, I have a personal interesting case to share. Me, mom and relatives went to Japan twice, once in 2008 and once in 2018. Group of 6 people, all japanese looking, except on the first trip when a friend of my cousin also went - he's brazilian of portuguese descendancy, so caucasian looking. My mom and an aunt of hers learned japanese as kids at home... not a whole lot, and they didn't use much of it after growing up, but they were just more familiar with the language in comparison to the rest of us. The only problem is, their japanese is pre-WWII japanese. xD Both sides of the family it was either my grandparents who migrated to Brazil when they were still kids, or grand grand parents who migrated... so I'm in between 3rd or 4th generation japanese descendant. So, if you can imagine japanese without many foreign loan words... that's what it is. Instead of asking where the toilet is, initially they were asking for "benjo". Milk isn't miruku, it's gyunyu. Jitensha instead of baiku. etc etc xD Some stuff people got, some people were extremely puzzled. It also didn't help that - we all look japanese, so people probably got very confused with these japanese people speaking this weird japanese, and that both my mom and her aunt also don't know a whole lot of english to begin with... so if the original old japanese words don't make sense to japanese people anymore these days, the english loan words don't make any sense for my mom and her aunt. xD So it's like, WTF is toiretto peepa? xD Sometimes I knew how to say stuff without knowing japanese because I know english. xD Conversations always ended up in a mix of them trying to speak old japanese, me trying to pick up loan words, lots of gesturing, and the rest of the group who only speaks brazilian portuguese giving up... xD

For the first interview, the background music was Grand Escape from Radwimps and I just had a Goosebumps just listening from the song. It was more awesome when I've watched the anime on theater

interesting; if I try to read Dante's Divine Comedy - that is roughly from the same period of the Tale of Genji and is supposed to be the de-facto literary founding stone of my language (of course there's no problem in the written characters but) I almost struggle to the same point in understanding XD; most of the difficulty tho is because of the poetic form

We've just learnt kobun in the last semester, and we're going to learn kanbun in this one :"D

Very interesting! I think Polish is very similar with texts still readable from so long ago because not only writing style but also grammar hasn't changed too much. I really wonder why some cultures (Japan, Poland, I'm sure others as well) pick a way to write their words and seem to stick to it while others like English change alot every 200 years or so?

Strange as I'd used differences in languages between eras in comparison to learning new languages from old reference books. It was addressing some difficulties in learning English in Japan, and I'd used some of the reasons it might be difficult due to using old books to teach, not being as useful in modern conversational use. I'd used something more contemporary though, Miyamoto Musashi's Go Rin No Sho. Reading and comprehending the older literature can be tricky as you mentioned. Use of words and constructed phrases changes over time, and not understanding the period in which it's written in makes it difficult to fully understand the concepts being expressed. Hope your new year goes much better than last year. Stay safe!

Always interesting to watch Yuta’s video!

I LOVED this vid. I’d also never heard of kobun before but I did notice some differences in the way hiragana was used. I think I noticed う->ふ and え->へ (not as a particle)?

I only understood “waga” because of YuGiOh GX where Judai faces Darkness who kept saying “waga no turn”

As a Chinese people ,I can definitely say that I could understand nearly 90 percent of the old Japanese even I only know a little about Japanese language.Because most of which were written in kanji...lol

Can you explain a little more about old Japanese and modern Japanese, maybe how it has evolved etc? I'm curious now!

Your content is very interesting.

This was really fun! I would love to see a video asking people about 歴史的仮名遣, having them identify the correct spelling or something

That's so interesting! Some old words that aren't used in Japanese anymore can still be found in the Ryukyuan languages. For example, the Ryukyuan word "tuji" for wife is cognate with the Japanese "toji" (spelt 刀自) and the Ryukyuan "nee" for earthquake is cognate with the Japanese "nai" (spelt なゐ).

Reading out loud together seems common in Japan. It seems to be a way to unify pronunciation. But, it doesn't help with comprehension since the readers' mind is occupied with unifying/competing with the others. This video was an interesting insight into the Japanese language. Thank you.

I am reading a book on the history of the Japanese language. This video also makes me wonder what historical topics Japanese students are learning (though classics would probably be read in a college literature class).

Can you tell us about the synchronicity some people seem to have with each other (e.g. these girls 9:20 saying many lines together)?

The English language has some historical forms also, such as Old English and Middle English, that are difficult to understand today unless you have been trained. Chaucer wrote 700 years ago in Middle English. and it takes some getting used to before you can understand it. Pretty amazing that Tales of Genji dates back even further, about 1000 years ago.

That is super impressive. Even more so if you consider how much other languages (mainly english) have influenced Japanese in the last 3 or 4 generations.

Great video! Now waiting for 漢文 in 白文 and 書き下し :)

Very interesting !

7:02 "I like things like [inaudible]" has to be rather hilarious in and on itself.

I've had to read all of these textes for university and it was so hard

The difference sounds almost like saying “waga no kokoro” instead of “ore no kokoro” Like some words are different but the majority of main words are same or similar to the point where they’re discernable

Yuta does it again!

The second group of guys were so funny 😂

Dunno why I wasn't subscribed to you, I watch all your videos. Bam, subscribed now.

That’s funny. You guys interviewed some groups from Kansai area where the people are thought good at history (especially people from Kyoto).LOL. And the parts of ancient Japanese languages is still remain in Kansai accent more than Tokyo or other places .

I wish Japanese subtitles of the interviewees' speech were included too. Or if instead of English hard subs there were soft subs for both English an Japanese. That would be helpful for everyone learning Japanese. It is interesting how the third group of young girls were speaking in your normal everyday Tokyo-ish Japanese, and the first groups used some dialect.

I knew of Tale of Genji for the first time from Yamato Waki's shojo manga

Did you do these interviews in Osaka? These people sound really sound like Osaka people to me, whereas most of the other interviews I've seen of yours appear to be done in Tokyo. Very interesting video for me anyway. Thank you.

We do have somewhat similar tale of a princess who was born out of a bamboo shoot in South East Asia. Interesting.

Interesting video, but could you move the subtitles to the top of the screen when showing the original texts? As someone who already knows Japanese I was curious to try reading along, but was unable to read the Japanese through the subtitles a lot of the time...

ユータ様のビデオは愛しています！

I hope some one does this in the UK with old English cuz I was reading some out of curiosity and it’s very different to Modern English but I could still read a very small portion of it

Reminds me of if English speakers reading Beowulf in Old English or Canterbury Tales in Middle English 😅 Classical Japanese literature is so interesting!

I have a Kanji dictionary that pretty much has every Kanji ever and lemme tell ya, there’s some pretty crazy characters..

One of the advantages of writing in ideograms instead of phonetic writing. If you tried to riead texts in the original old english it would be very hard to understand anything (although it's somewhat similar to icelandic from what I know)

I can read and understand Danish that is a couple hundred years old because the only difference is really that aa is now å, and that Danes back then almost wrote in poetry or at least with a very sophisticated tongue and most of the time I am able to piece it together fine. ........go back a thousand years though and I am lost as we wrote in runes back then xD

I love these videos because I get to hear and see real interactions of real Japanese people

Interesting how you show up vertically in your into!

You should,ve shown them Zeami,s 明宿集 lol, mostly written in katakana

the first paragraph reminds me of the time i tried to.mail something from.japan to my home in china located at 朱雀门，so i asked the guy to write suzaku mon on the address line and he was like "oh wow so they are the same characters across the languages." and i said yeah my hometown is where kyoto and nara came from so most of the place names can be found...like 上野 京都 青龙寺 北大街 x条

this channel is criminally underrated

How many times Yuta broke his ceiling during the Intro?

Old Japanese language had “ti” (teeh) and “si” (shee), they became “chi”, and “shi”.

The girl at 4:25 is absolutely GORGEOUS!

The Genji monogatari text in the video has a copy-paste error, where some furigana made it into the body of the text (言ひ消(け)たれ, 咎(とが), ...). I wonder if the girls saw the same text, as it would be a bit confusing...

Reminds me when I try to read olt tests and most of the times the font is almost unreadable.

beautiful writing

interesting video, were the interviews done in Kansai this time? thanks for the videos!

This was filmed in Osaka right? 大阪に住んでいた！懐かしいだよ〜

Fascinating

So relatable, being able to read a lot of words but with not a lot of understanding. Is it bad that watching this was oddly satisfying, seeing nihonjin struggling with their own language? lol

Hello from Indonesia. Yuta Sensei, i suggest, may be this can be next video if you want to make it. I wonder, can Japanese write the kanji that usually we using hiragana or katakana? just for challenge. For example like" レモンときれいは、漢字で書けますか?" そういう質問かなあ。。　Thanks a lot

We have a relatively hard time understanding written Portuguese from 1000 years ago too, it's only normal, since languages change over time.

So yutasama, would you be able to read a news paper or have a casual conversation traveling back 1000 years? How is it to read the Literatur and how would it be actually traveling back? How different is japan today? I hope you and your beloved ones are well, please stay safe. Thank you.

Can you tell me the differences between 2 sentences? And may this can affect on the meaning of these sentences? あと一粒の涙でひと言の勇気で あと一粒の涙がひと言の勇気が (Just one more tear, just one more courage word) (Source: あとひとつ - FUNKY MONKEY BABY) (Note: Please explain in English because I don't know Japanese much)

Wait wait, this wasn't in Tokyo?? I heard the telltale signs of Kansai そうなんや, ~やから, ~やろう and 分からへん and 読めへん. What city did you do interviews in this time?

You should do a video on Old Japanese, it's the earliest stage of Japanese and almost unrecognizable. Goes back all the way to the Kofun period.

Well it happens in other countries also, in Italy for example The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (composed between 1307 and 1321)has obscure words and meanings to most of modern people and is teached at what you call college.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy

I noticed that several of these strangers were using casual japanese. Is that common? I was taught to always use formal speech with new people

The title is a bit misleading given all of these are what we'd call in English academic literature 'Middle Japanese,' which can broadly be split into two periods based on linguistic characteristics. The linguistic characteristics of it are quite different from what we see in the Manyoshu etc. which we would call Old Japanese.

Did they translate japanese to japanese? I think it's time for me to give up 💀

So they can read kyuujitai kanji? Or were the kanji presented in shinjitai form?

I was wondering that in Inuyasha, would she be able to even understand what they were saying? Of course that was not too long ago, only a few hundred years (1400-1600ish)

My acquaintance H. said that "old Japanese"/kobun lessons in high school were a pain.

Did you go to osaka to do the 竹取物語 one? The girl said わからへん

I don't know much Japanese (N5) and I've learned the meaning of 2040 kanji via the Heisig method but the text seems to me like normal Japanese? I recognize the kanji. Or did they get a different text than what you showed? Because you also wrote hiragana in brackets.

3:15 I understand the guy in the red jacket. Makura no Soshi is a most beautiful diary written by a bitchiest wittiest girl ever. I hope to be able to read it in the original one day.

Ah yes, Princess Kaguya. Stage 6B was the pretty hard to beat in my opinion.

This is like a native English speaker trying to read middle English. We can make sense of about a third of it but it's real tough and the rest sounds like gibberish unless you really think about it

Hi Yuta. Good day may i ask you something. Can Japanese usually use romanji?

for your next video can you talk about how honda tohru speaks japanese? the anime is fruits basket!!

10:17 The way she said that, I thought she was about to break into song.