I adore how logical and straightforward everything about Japan looks, but is simultaneously unnecessarily complicated. Language, food, history, fashion, everything my uneducated eye saw so far.
Discussion
Yeah there are tradeoffs. You see so much stuff that just makes sense that Westerners are too insane or stupid to think of, but Japanese people are insane in their own ways, falling for fallacies and stupid shit that westerners would never fall for. It takes a special kind of person to deduce or draw from the best of each cultural thread, and discard the crap.
I'm trying to think of some good examples.
Let's see... Japanese doesn't require singular vs. plural, using instead optional numbers to specify how many. Easier to work with on that front, while maintaining the ability to specify. Nor must you specify a gender when talking about people: in fact pronouns are virtually not even a thing, you just use normal ass nouns and identifiers, like say "konohito" ("this person") or just using their name, which you usually will do if it's not obvious who you're talking about. Many aspects of Japanese are aspects that lend themselves to simplicity and composability of the language.
Japanese culture and therefore language is also, however, wayyyy too hung up on niceness, subservience to others, protocol, etc. You have to be extremely careful how you craft sentences and whether what you're saying will be taken the right way, even if you're not the type to do it, because the very meaning of things is often tied into connotation and reading between the lines. "A little" is usually what is used to say "no" to an invitation, in order to be polite. For "Would you like to come with me to the movies?", "Chotto" ("a little bit") would be taken as a polite no, whereas "iie" ("no") would easily be taken by at least some individuals as "hell no!" I consider this decidedly illogical and a major detriment.
Tradeoffs.
Extremely interesting!
Meanwhile in czech you have 7 falls (german has 4, english one, idk the right term for folding words based on to what whom where when..), 3 genders that define the adjacent verbs and other words, we have singular, plural and also polite version of "you", which is similar to plural.
What else? Our numbers change words from two up as plural and from 5 again for some reason. Genders have 6 forms to choose from just for male words (could be a castle or a lion..). It's all the same for us (but 5th fall of calling/modifying a whole name is czech speciality), Poland, Slovakia and I believe Slovenia. What you get is absolutely clean reading. You learn our alphabet (with prolongings and hooks over letters) and you will read everything forever. But you will not, because we have Ř, czech powerhouse of foreigner torture.😂
Personally I don't know a czech who can write without mistakes. I'm very good at it, because my mother is educated academic and used to beat me with czech or german vocabularies, and even I fight often.
It makes me love our heritage though, czech has unbelievable capacity of creating and molding words. A lot was "simply" made up during late 19th century, because our country belonged to german speaking lands for centuries and czech language was dying. We're not many, history is wild for a peaceful land, our surviving language is a gem to me.
That's really cool! It's great that little pockets of stuff like that can survive by the efforts of a few people who care and are able.
While I have strong opinions on stuff, I am simultaneously aware of the unseen utility of things I don't understand to other people, and indirectly also to me. It's one of the reasons I got into learning economics and libertarian legal theory, my awareness of the beautiful complexity and coordination of stuff outside myself and my refusal to destroy or dictate that which I don't understand. I know nothing of Czech and yet people like yourself are able to preserve it, and I even actively hate French culture, and yet it is an input into many creations I love such as various wines and cheeses, the movie Ratatouille, and all of Draft Punk's music. So I benefit from my inability to unilaterally extinguish their crap language from the face of the earth. It's quite beautiful and humbling, and lends creedence to my form of anarchism (he said, egotistically).