How I learned the word "mora" wrong: mora is the singular form, and morae is the plural form of the word! Sorry about that!

As a young child In winter I learned haiku folding snowflakes

That refrigerator haiku tho. Deep!

I finally "get" the haiku! All this time, I never understood what the beauty of that sort of poem was. Now I get it. It's about rhythm, something never taught to me, and when you did something so simple as GIVE that rhythm in the most basic way, it clicked. Imagine if as kids we'd been taught what a limerick is without ever going into their rhythm. It'd just be some weird bunch of words. So thank you again.

Thank you so much for this. I learned so much. I write poetry and have written many Haiku. The idea that "the rules" of 5, 7, 5, don't have to be followed so strictly is freeing. Thank you.

I've been thinking English haiku sound weird for years and this video finally put it into words. Bless. The cow haiku is great it's basically the first time I've heard an English haiku that gets the rhythm right.

めちゃくちゃ分かりやすい説明ですね、音を海外ではモーラと表現するとは…勉強になります。ありがとうございます。

Love this!....I wonder if you read an article I co-authored 20 years ago "From 5-7-5 to 8-8-8: An Investigation of Japanese Haiku Metrics and Implications for English Haiku". It's lovely to see our theory at work!

from edge of the world. what do the butterflies see out there in the void

As both a poet and a student of the Japanese language, this video is very interesting to me. I'm inspired to do some more homework and learn to write a proper haiku of my own. Neat video, earned sub for sure.

What makes this video especially good is its emphasis on the typical objective of haiku. As a classical musician, I learned that genres and forms are not fixed standards but sets of generalizations against which the best composers were constantly pushing and pulling. However, the explanation of the technical issue was also very clear and made me conscious of what I noticed subconsciously about the way Japanese people often read haiku aloud, the pause between the first two lines significantly longer than the pause between the second and third lines. If anything, I want to add to it, because (especially with Kento's accent of English) there's another fundamental difference between the languages which is difficult to reconcile to the genre of haiku: the flow of the language. English is Germanic not only in its emphasis of stress over mora, but also in its choppy, erratic cadence and its abundance of consonants. It struggles to flow. The mora of Japanese flow like oil, smoother even than Italian or Spanish for lack of terminal consonants, and English can achieve some flow if the poet is masterful but it's quite difficult. By direct consequence, the flow of Japanese mora are like a quiet brook, inviting the listener into 間, whereas English will at best struggle awkwardly to achieve the same effect, especially by the same means. No, it is easier for English to aim for a comparable sense of quiet and space in its own way, inventing a different rhythm more natural to itself. The quiet and space will be different than what Japanese creates, but it can succeed on its own terms in its own right. And then we can talk about the very purpose of haiku, because any form or genre can and will be radically repurposed (take, for example, the haiku written to crack up the poor players of the batsu game where they aren't allowed to laugh in school - many of you remember what I'm referring to). I could have written a tanka (one subtype of haiku with a standard 5-line structure) to demonstrate my bit about flow of syllables by using smooth syllables for the first three lines and percussive, choppy syllables for the last two (or vice versa); if I really wanted to push the point I could use Japanese for the smooth section and English for the rough. There's no hard rule requiring a poem to be composed entirely of one language (only the reality that the flavour of fluently multilingual compositions is fully accessible to very few people). See, genre and form can be defied and bent in ways you didn't even conceive of, so of course purpose is not exempt from the manipulations of clever creatives.

This was a revelation. I could add a dozen exclamation points. Dare I say that I felt so much missing from my understanding of haiku, and your analysis both confirmed what I felt was missing and then went so far beyond...Thank you so very much. I'll be listening to this again and again for some time to come.

Its amazing! The artist! Great idea! Thank you for the teaching!🙏🏼

fading evening light the battlefield is quiet now only ghosts and the crows

If you ever talk about Japanese poetry again, maybe you could include senryu? I didn't know about the difference between haiku and senryu until about 15 years after I lived in Japan....

This is insane, thank you and I seriously enjoyed

This was very instructive. Of course, the thesis is deliberately provocative. What we English users have done is to adapt a foreign form to our language and culture. Something the Japanese have themselves mastered better than all others. It does not make it wrong-merely adapted or partially absorbed into a different cultural blotter.

Dude. This is such a great video. The production value deserve more subs. Subbed, shared. Hope your year is great.

Brilliant! I always thought something missing with my Haiku. Thank you for shining the light.

Awesome video! I learned a lot, and my eyes have been opened to many possibilities for my writing. Thanks Kent!

Excellent video, Kent! The best I have seen on the topic of Haiku!

Thank you so much for making this video. I’ve been fascinated with haiku for ages, but never heard of morae before. Now it makes so much more sense!!!

Very much appreciated this video & all the info I learned from you! Thank you!

Good explanation. Thanks 😀

Great video! Really enjoyed the topics you explored regarding the similarities/differences between the Japanese and English languages as well as the culture surrounding that relationship.

Wonderful. Thank you. So much to reflect on as I attempt to write haiku.

thanks for the explanation. I hope you will make more videos!

Great content!

Nicely done!

Excellent explanation. Thanks.

What is a dog? A dog is a pet. -Conversation i made up 4(2)-5(2)-7(2) The numbers outside the brackets are the syllables~, and the ones inside are the silent beats. The break at the end isn’t said but helps to keep the rhythm if followed by another Haiku.

THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO! 🙏💜

This is a pretty late comment, for some reason this video just showed up on my recommended, but I think English can fit the original rhythmic pattern if you follow a sort of iambic meter, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables in a 3-4-3 pattern. For instance: The snow lay on the ground, The stars are shining in the sky, Winter warms the heart.

Just stumbled onto this video but I really love your video and teaching style

Clear, simple, helpful. Thank you. Onwards.

Helpful video I have written here and there Thinking hat is on! Lol. Thanks for the haiku info. 😁

thank you so much! i had haiku that i was happy with, but knew there was more. i didn't know how to get it, but this has been extremely helpful.

That was fascinating and so informational. Thank you so much!

Fantastic video, great work! One addendum to consider is that when a new compound word is created, such as English Haiku, a new set of modified rules would be logical to consider as part of the new definitive expectation.

Thanks for the video, and your explanations are very helpful. Subbed.

I don't need the rules. The concept is what I like.

Super interesting, and as a big fan of the Haiku form who sadly does not speak or read Japanese, this was really illuminating. I always had a feeling that the form was both less strict and also differently-defined than I'd been led to believe. So thanks! A quick note--more for viewers than for you, since you pretty clearly are already aware of this--regarding your mention (around 1:20) of English being "a stress timed or syllable timed language": this is misleading. It's stress timed, not syllable timed. In syllable-timed languages, each syllable is given equal time (and thus unstressed sounds tend to be less reduced), in stress-timed languages the stressed syllables are what is given roughly equal time (meaning a big reduction in unstressed sounds). You demonstrated this with your riff on cows and grass, of course. This is one of the most difficult things for learners to master about English, in my experience, and those who can do it will always sound more natural, even with an accent, than those who can't, though their accent might be less pronounced. In case anybody has read this far and is mentally composing a rebuttal: Yes, while there is something of a spectrum between the two (French is more stress timed than Spanish, which is more stress timed than Italian, but they're all basically syllable timed languages), English is very far toward the stress-timed end of things (more so than German, for instance). Other examples of stress-timed languages are Arabic and Russian. Interestingly, while Cantonese is strongly syllable-timed, Mandarin is somewhere near the middle the two extremes of stress- and syllable-timed (though it's nearer to the latter). The existence of a spectrum doesn't eliminate the usefulness of categories. So we might say that languages like Italian, which adhere to a very rigid syllable-timed scheme, lend themselves more easily to Haiku than others, like English or German. I think this is both right and wrong. Obviously if we're mainly concerned with rhythm and meter, then yes--but then again, as you point out (the cow thing again), scansion is a thing in all languages, and while some English poetry (nearly all of Shakespeare, for instance) scans, practically no utterances in the spoken language do. On the other hand, when you think of the fact that Italian has both a very regular syllable-timing structure and also a very limited range of word endings, it makes Dante's accomplishments seem a bit less impressive. Kidding--he's the fucking master. On the other hand, as you point out, the rhythmic structure is only a part of what haiku is really all about, and arguably not the most important part. Still, I think "stick to this syllable pattern" is useful because it will constrain people and make them work a little harder. For the same reason, I value constraint in the creation of pretty much all art (rhythmic structure, musical scales, representationalism in painting for the most part, etc): I feel that it forces the artist to work a bit harder and thus have a better chance of capturing that elusive moment of truth.

Thanks a lot for this amazing video. It really helped me to understand it better and is a great inspiration for my haiku journey.

One of the best videos on Haiku Thanks

Great vid - thank you!

Such a brilliant video.

at last! Great!

So very cool to hear the possibilities

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Thank you so much for this haiku insight ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

I still amazed by the depth of this video. It makes me mad love with haiku

Thank you. You are very smart. Love your video.

I learned something today over breakfast. Great video! Domo arigato!

This is great, dude

Kento I just loved this video👍🏽

This is fascinating

Thank you!

Thank you so much.

its like self Therapy. love it

You are the best to describe it ❤

*slaps desk* THANK YOU! I've been trying to tell people the 5-7-5 "rule" is nonsense for years!

Thank You

Check out the lyrics to "Moonlight in Vermont"! They seem to fit the intended rhythm and tone pretty well

Thank you for explaining this, I never understood them

Thank you

Thank you for the clear explanation! I had been screaming internally "No! Something is wrong!" all these years every time I heared the English explanation of 俳句.

This makes so much sense. Even with closely related languages, usually poetic forms need to be adapted to match the melody of languages. Just like how sonnets in English have 5 iambic feet per verse and are 4+4+4+2, VS sonnets in Spanish that have 11 syllables per verse and are 4+4+3+3, and even Italian uses a different rhyme scheme than Spanish. Each form doesn't adapt to the other one because each language is different, and so the parameters need to be loosened up a bit. This makes haikus so much more interesting than I was thought. This simple definition even made me think they weren't that special.

Wow. You just spoke to my soul. I get it

The cows poem is stuck in my head 😂 thank you for this video, really helped me!

Thank you for this video. I’ve had to send this video to many people promoting 5-7-5 in English :)

the flowers tell the bear take my forgiveness and go hunger is not sin

Thank you so much I can fo haiku way better now ❤

Great video

surprised how small this creator is even though with all his work it's really crazy i found this channel today through a lesson in my 9th grade english class

Nice! Is the seasonal word in the cow poem cows or grass?

Cool info.

As a pianist/music produder I can’t even turn off that beat in my head 😊 Good video 🎉

Thank you very much Wondered about this all day Now I'll try in Dutch

画期的説明！この知識を絶対広めて欲しいです！ 俳句ってリズムが構造の中に入っているからこそ 575の「ルール」としての意味がありますしね。 一方、リズムパターンはいくつかありそうです。 2列目に着目すると 「4文字＋3文字」「3文字＋4文字」で リズムが異なるかと。 古池や、は「3＋4」なので 以下のリズムの方がが自然に感じました： 1　●●●●●○○○ 2　○●●●●●●● 3　●●●●●○○○ 柿食えば鐘がなるなり法隆寺、も「3＋4」 夏草や兵どもが夢の跡、は「4＋3」 字余り、字足らずも考えると面白そうですね。

Oh now I understand. I was reading the English translation of "Four Haiku" by Basho. I was counting it using the 5/7/5 syllables and was wondering why was it not 575. Was this because the translation of Bownas & Thwaite was using 5/7/5 morae?

Amazing. Thanks. Is there an English book of Japanese haiku you would recommend? Maybe. Thanks much. : )

My favorite haiku is probably this one by Kobayashi Issa: 露の世は露の世ながらさりながら. If you know the story behind it, it just rips your soul apart. English translation is often rendered as: "This world is but a dewdrop world, and yet, oh and yet!"

I got here by googling "Haiku Rhythm" because I innately understood something about the English haikus I was hearing were wrong and out of rhythm.

how do you only have 1K? Seriously this should get more attention

So why not just designate it as 'Western-Style Haiku'?

Wow, thank you for this! Since I learned about haikus in maybe 3rd grade, I’ve never understood them. For years I’ve literally thought “no offense to Japanese culture, but what is the point in haikus?” 😂 So finally about 18 years later I’ve decided to come to KZfaq to see if someone could explain haikus in a way that I would appreciate them, maybe even hear one that resonated with me. I searched “what is a haiku?” And chose your video first, as the title made me hopeful lol. And I love everything about this video! The mora-syllable adjustment just does not translate well, and I was never taught that rhythm had anything to do with it in school. So truly, a thought (usually about nature) conveyed in a 5-7-5 syllable structure just did not sound like poetry to me. I got an A on a poem as silly as your cow and refrigerator one, it was literally about Daylight Saving Time! Anyways my eyes have been opened, despite feeling a little skeptical that I would feel any differently about haikus after doing the research. Also, I love the one you shared of the lonely man. Now understanding the rhythm aspect of a haiku, I can hear the silence after he says he is alone. Incredible!

Nice video and excellent explanation. Do Japanese put musical rhythm to their Haikus or is it just poetry with Mora restricted parameters? If the later, then the rhythmic sound can't be a valid argument because linguistically English and Japanese differ. Therefore a separate paradigm must be create for the environment it is created. So we can call this, as a different commenter mentioned, a Western Haiku construction. Similar to Brazilian Jiujitsu, it creates it's own style within the environment it is introduce. Like Japanese style pasta and pizza (which I love!), they are fundamentally wrong, but oh so good!

I went looking for a video like this because I had a feeling haikus had to be a bit more complex than a simple dumb 5-7-5 rule

Very interesting, thank you. One quirk of this formulation is that there are 3 morae beats between the 1st and 2nd lines, whereas the 3rd line follows the 2nd almost immediately. Is that standard in Japanese haiku? I had hard a similar formulation years ago, but I had remembered it as in 2/2 time, with the first line starting on the first downbeat of ms 1, the second line on the last upbeat of ms 4, and the last line on the first downbeat of ms 10.

はじめまして。とても興味深い内容だったので登録させていただきました！ ところで俳句の「リズム」のところで気になったのですが 〇〇〇〇〇××× ×〇〇〇〇〇〇〇 〇〇〇〇〇××× と２行目の頭を一拍開けたほうがしっくりくると思いました。いかがでしょうか？

dude you are awesome. thanks for the video. Greetings from Turkey

a fox and cat will sometimes just dance under the moon fireflies and crickets

wonderful.. I've been explaining this until my throat was sore... still is -

Very many thanks for this. It's helped my appreciation of Haiku enormously. FYI though, I find the PiP inserts very distracting and a barrier to my understanding. Why not assume that your viewer is coming to you for knowledge, not for entertainment?

I have been saying these things or awhile. Liberated Haiku both in English and Japanese. 5 7 5 is basic. Seasonal words and the required break. I never counted beats before.

fall winds from the north now they come white wings and black our glorious cranes

I came across this video just a few days before submitting my first draft of a book. It is a collection of haiku. I think I might have gone wrong in some but I didn't rework on them as I didn't want to break the rhythm I had selected to depict the story. Would you like to read my book once published? I'll love to hear your views on it.

well, i m a rapper too and i have always sensed something wrong like you said. thanks mate, great job

What was the last haiku? Thanks

I could be wrong but what I’m getting is you basically need 3 simple beats that combine into a powerful effect on the reader. More or less 5/7/5 but ultimately it’s 3 simple beats creating 1 ultimate effect

Wow 🎉 how come we get fluency on Nihon language and English 😮 so differs. Arigatto and Thank you. Very very educational video. 🎉