Japanese - Ask questions thread

Basically if you have a question about the language, ask it and fellow 4channers might see it and answer it for you.

To start it off. When an animate object (iru) dies, is it considered inanimate(aru)?

I get the feeling that Japanese is a very ambiguous language.

Like Russian, it tends to omit a lot of words, yet in Russian the meaning is nearly always clear, either because of declension and inflection, or because of short affixes.
In Japanese, however, so much is implied and/or ambiguous that I can't really imagine someone learning it being able to converse in it by just knowing the grammatical rules and vocabulary. One'd need to live in Japan and speak with Japanese people regularly for years to even have hopes of mastering the language. At least that's how it seems to me.

It seems very culturally defined, in a way. Perhaps a bit too much so?