Learning a new language means getting used to new concepts, like the way nouns have gender in most European languages, something they lack in English. One of the more interesting aspects of Japanese is that there are multiple first- and second-person pronouns that people can use, depending on their personality and the “T.P.O.” (a phrase used in Japan meaning “time, place, occasion”). For the first person pronoun (e.g. “I”), a man might use the formal 私 watakushi during a job interview, 僕 boku for casual and semi-polite speaking and the more “manly” 俺 ore (oh-reh) if he’s talking with his male friends. A girl might use the slightly-formal わたしwatashi in neutral settings, the feminine あたし atashi if speaking to female friends or her boyfriend, or 僕 boku if she were a bit of a tomboy, like my daughter was for several years. In the Nintendo DS dating-sim Love Plus one of the first choices you make in the game is whether to use the more polite but weak-sounding boku or the rougher but potentially rude ore when referring to yourself, which subtly changes how the girls in the game respond to you. These hard-wired language aspects drive male and female interaction to a certain degree, perhaps making social change between the sexes slower than it would be in a country where male and female language were more neutral.
When changes happen to society, Japanese language is slow to keep up.
