Question about Japanese usage in the article... [Archive]

Rellik

10-03-2005, 01:17 AM

Hi everyone!

Azrael, I'm wondering, how many of the conversations in your articles are actually in Japanese? :confused:
Some of the stuff said seems very colloquial and other stuff has pretty specific subject matter. It certainly seems above the level of the English spoken by many new immigrants in the US after a couple of years... Are you really that good and everything said or heard is in Japanese unless otherwise stated? :eek: Or is there more English stuff and you just don't feel like having to write "in English" all the time?
I've also heard a lot about foreign English-speaking students trying to do language immersion in Asian countries (Japan, China, etc...) but are frustrated when no one will talk to them in Japanese or Chinese or whatever since everyone wants to use English instead.

I'm asking because Japanese is just so difficult for an English speaker, with its ass-backwards grammar and assloads of homonyms, to name a couple of things - it would certainly take me a very long time before I could talk with Japanese natives like I was just shooting the shit with friends back at home :D And that's just spoken Japanese, the writing is a whole different mess that's made difficult just so Japanese can be proud that it's so "unique"

Pierrot le Fou

10-03-2005, 04:11 AM

Az is still better than me at Japanese by a longshot (primarily the fact that he can read and write, while I certainly can't), but I can have a conversation about just 'bout anything in Japanese, and even make jokes, and I've only been here for 2 years.

Invictus

10-03-2005, 06:17 AM

What have y'all used as study tools? A friend recommended Remembering the Kanji by Heisig, and I'd be interested to see what methods folks have used to improve their speaking ability.

Faumdano

10-03-2005, 06:40 AM

Ketay

10-03-2005, 06:50 AM

Invictus:

While "Remembering the Kanji" will do nothing for your speaking, it is absolutely wonderful for learning and remembering how to write kanji.

For grammar this (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/) is my bible. To get better at speaking you'll need to befriend some (preferable native) speakers and try your hand at sounding silly, er, I mean, try your hand at speaking japanese :D

If you don't have access to any speakers in your area, listen to music, watch tv and movies all in japanese to help train your ear. Also, read as much as you possibly can, it helps immensly.

Also, if you're trying to get good at speaking and don't have access to buy or rent a Japanese person (err... Or befriend... But that's the oh so boring method ;)), and you have the money, then the Pimsleur Learn To Speak Japanese CDs are a great thing to use. Even if they don't teach you anything new, the listening and repetition will totally get you to be able to pull words and create sentences without having to think and translate in your head first. A definite plus to becoming more fluent.

Also... For learning grammar, along with that site, this book was recommended to me (along with the intermediate one) as a good learning resource, and I have to say it IS really good.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/4789004546/qid=1128322143/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-3635396-0366555?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

It goes in depth and gives so much information on pretty much everything. ^^

As for Kanji... A photographic (or at least a visual) memory helps. =D

Invictus

10-03-2005, 06:52 AM

Thanks to all. I do indeed have access to Japanese people, but either their English is good enough that they're reticent to speak Japanese, or their English is bad enough that my limited Japanese can't communicate properly. :P

Kaji

10-03-2005, 08:32 AM

Kanji aren't an up or down, know it or don't sort of thing. Even the Japanese don't remember them in that way. The kanji are all broken down into parts, and if you remember the key parts you can easily remember characters and/or find them in a dictionary. Also remember that if you just know the Chinese readings and have a good sense of what two characters might mean when put togehter.

Uska

10-03-2005, 01:11 PM

Chinpokomon

10-03-2005, 09:07 PM

Hi everyone!

Azrael, I'm wondering, how many of the conversations in your articles are actually in Japanese? :confused:

My money's on that the conversation is in Japanese.

There's no way a principal is going to say:
"It must be pretty easy, with your big-ass eyes you can see everything at once."

'big-ass' is Az's addition during translation, I'd wager.

Also, he usually calls it out explicitly when a conversation is in English.
But what do I know, I wasn't there...

Scott

10-03-2005, 10:11 PM

I could have sworn this was in another post or in the FAQ... he said that they're in Japanese unless he mentions that they're in English. It's sort of the 'default language' for the country... and it makes sense.

Varia

10-03-2005, 11:20 PM

To the thread maker: Japanese is not a hard language. Being an English speaker doesn't have anything to do with it. I think I can honestly say that Japanese is the easiest (major) language in the world. New immigrants don't speak English that well because English is the hardest language in the world.

Personally, I think Remembering the Kanji is a really bad approach to learning them.It kind of depends on your goals. As far as I remember, one book teaches you the meanings of the kanji and the meanings of the radicals, but doesn't teach you the readings in Japanese. When it comes to real written Japanese, just knowing the meanings of the kanji doesn't work. It's really hard to piece it together accurately, and a lot of the times, the meaning in Japanese doesn't really have anything to do with the meaning of the kanji.

You just have to face the fact that kanji is a pain in the ass, and there is no easy way around it.

Pimsleur is horrible. There is no real substance to it. If you want real listening practice, I suggest the Hello! Project Radio Drama series. Real dialogue, real speed, interesting stories. The only real downside is that Morning Musume girls do it, so it's girl Japanese. They have really helped me a lot, though.

As far as a textbook goes, I recommend Genki. The best Japanese book I have come across.
________
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more cheerios

10-03-2005, 11:27 PM

Err... Japanese really isn't that easy of a language. French is far easier to learn and so is Spanish and they're pretty major.

Scott

10-04-2005, 12:39 AM

Japanese is actually one of the easiest languages in the world to learn by ear because of its limited number of available sounds, limited number of vowel sounds, and context-relatedness.

For a person who has grown up speaking English, yes, Japanese is harder to learn than a Romance language, which is descended from Latin, which is one of the roots of English. Japanese itself is grammatically more closely related to Finnish than anything else.

However, the hardest part of Japanese is the writing - that requires intense, intense memorization. But for speaking? No way. It's one of the easiest major modern languages in the world - even according to official sources.

Henjin

10-04-2005, 12:52 AM

Eh... it's relatively easy to pronounce, if that's what you mean. Aside from that, I'd hardly call it an easy language to learn. Out of curiosity, how fluent are you, Scott?

Monkey

10-04-2005, 01:10 AM

Personally I did find learning Japanese to be easier than learning French. I believe that this is because Japanese was my fourth language however, whereas French was my 2nd (first foreign).

Scott

10-04-2005, 02:07 AM

Eh... it's relatively easy to pronounce, if that's what you mean. Aside from that, I'd hardly call it an easy language to learn. Out of curiosity, how fluent are you, Scott?

I'm serious - it's one of the easiest languages in the world to learn by ear when you disregard existing lingual relationships due to primary language. Because of the low number of possible sounds and context-based content, it's a lot easier to fill in holes with probabilities. It sounds bizarre, but it's what your brain does when it learns a language.

I'm not terribly fluent at all... personally, I consider fluency to be the ability to be able to speak in a language that is not your native tongue and have native speakers believe that you were born and raised in their country.

That having been said... まだまだです。ちょっとだけができますけどもう勉強がんばっています。

Xenotrauma

10-04-2005, 03:51 AM

We've heard it before, and I think the general concensus was... you really can't say Japanese is an easy language, unless you can explain why in reasonably coherent Japanese :) Ask PLF if you want to know -why- >_<

Scott

10-04-2005, 03:52 AM

Well, I guess linguistics was a waste of time.

Xenotrauma

10-04-2005, 04:19 AM

If I had a nickel for every time I heard that in a sad, reflective tone :\

Pierrot le Fou

10-04-2005, 04:58 AM

Leave it to a linguist to discuss language in a vaccuum.

Sure, if you have no primary language, then of COURSE Japanese will be easy, because you're growing up surrounded by Japanese. It won't be easy because of phonemes or context, it will be easy because you're a little kid with a brain adapted specifically to language acquisition. Good luck teaching a 40 year-old who has never used language how to speak Japanese though.

I'm sure that Japanese isn't that hard for similar languages (and the most similar would be Korean -- not Finnish), but I don't think the person who asked is either Korean or Finnish. Chances are they're an English native speaker, which would mean that their primarily language is INCREDIBLY different from Japanese, making it very hard to learn.

But as a linguist, I'm sure none of that matters to you.

"We shan't allow practical reality to get in the way of our theoretical linguistics!"

Japanese is a hard language. Far harder for a native English speaker than the Romance languages. Written Japanese is probably the hardest language in the world to read. Three different sets of characters, and multiple readings/meanings for those phrases. It can be done, it's just not easy, and it takes work and devotion.

Henjin

10-04-2005, 05:42 AM

I always figured Chinese was harder to read because nothing's phonetic at all.

And the fact that he says Finnish is most like Japanese... well that kind of hurts his credibility a bit.

Varia

10-04-2005, 06:33 AM

My experience is that Asian languages are easier to learn. European languages just don't work well with me.

The reason Japanese is so easy is because it has a relatively small amount of grammatical patterns that are used, and aren't strayed very far from. This is why English is a nightmare. There are like 10 ways to say things, not all of which really make sense, but are understood by the listener.

There really is no right or wrong answer because it is on a person by person basis. You picked Spanish up in a snap while I will be forever stuck with a Taco Bell vocabulary.
________
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Pierrot le Fou

10-04-2005, 07:08 AM

Finnish grammar IS close to Japanese. I don't know why, but that's not a load of crap. It just isn't closer than Korean. Korean is really really REALLY f'ing close to Japanese.

BluZytrix

10-04-2005, 08:04 AM

As a native English speaker, I have found Japanese it to be a mixed bag. I have found the way that verbs contract to be very easy and essentially give you the power to learn one root verb that will give you access to most of the tenses very easily. This in opposition to English where you may need to know multiple different words to get different tenses that may be related or not. On the other hand, particles are a bitch. Correct usage of particles is important in sounding native. I have equated it to native sounding English speakers who will leave out 'a', 'an', 'the' or get 'in', 'on', 'at' confused. They may not seem to be important words and yes, you can understand much of English if somebody omitted little words like these but it just doesn't sound right.

For me, speaking isn't that difficult. Besides the random tongue twisters that usually include ら、り、る、れ、ろ, I have had to do some speaking training to get my tongue to make things flow out more naturally. Listening can be quite hard. Straying away from formal ways of talking and into the realm of more casual speech, hearing every sound can be very difficult. For reference, I currently do live in Japan and attend anywhere from 4 to 7 hours a day at Keio University learning Japanese. I had a 3 hour listening class yesterday. Near the end, we were trying to figure out what was going on in this drama. Specifically, the name of the characters as said at mach 5 by one of the characters. After listening 10 times, it was still hard to make out all sounds. Perhaps it is only me that is weak at listening to more native level speech, but the others around me could confirm its difficulty too along with the teacher. Then again, when listening to teachers talk very clearly, comprehension goes way up.

Kanji are kanji. From 26 characters to over 2000 is very difficult. Constant review, writing and drilling are required to retain them. Reading is also very important.

As for tools I have found useful, there is a book called Kanji ABC that I have gotten into recently that makes a lot of sense to me. Most humans look for patterns in things to help in their memorization and understanding. This book breaks things down into graphemes. These graphemes are then combined with essential graphemes to show you how characters are made. The readings of each character are given. For me, the organization makes it easier for me to remember the kanji because that is how my brain works. For those lovely one hour train rides on the Yamanote line, I have encoded the contents of what I'm studying into a program called JFC(japanese flash card) and then flash myself on my pocket pc. The program also works on the pc, has timed flashing features for developing the ability to recall words more quickly and is easy to use. JWPCe is a Japanese word processor I use in conjunction with JFC to write the flash cards. It's nice because you don't have to install anything to use it, giving it the ability to put it on a USB key stick for transportation.

Above all, I love to see the way the brain works at trying to learn a new language. It's an interesting process and I'm looking forward to becoming bilingual.

Azrael

10-04-2005, 08:15 AM

I usually specify if a conversation takes place in English. Most of them have been in Japanese, especially the recent ones. It's not that I'm good, I've just put in my work...4 years at university, then living here for 2+ years (and trying to unlearn most of what you learned in university).

The principal didn't literally say "big-ass"...he said "meccha dekeh" which is really rural slang. The idea conveyed here is "really big". It's up to the translator how to convey this sentiment. I could have gone with "hella big" or "wicked big" or something like that, but knowing this guy, if he were American and we were having the exact same conversation in English, I imagine it coming out as "big-ass".

In reverse, if you wanted to translate "hella" to Japanese you wouldn't use "hidoku" and for "wicked" you wouldn't use "fusei". "totemo" would be the basic, but I since I used slang you might want to pick from something like "chou" or "meccha".

I don't think Japanese and English are two languages you can translate directly. This is why Engrish exists - Japanese people try to do translations with a dictionary or a computer translator, and it just doesn't work. Rather, you have to think about the idea being conveyed, and how a Japanese person/English speaker would say it.

Also, I read a newspaper article last time I was in the states declaring Japanese to be the number one hardest language to learn for native English speakers. Japanese isn't easy. You can pick up sounds maybe, and study vocab all you want, but you still have to master grammar, which is not a cake walk. And as I said before, you have to figure out how people use Japanese to convey their thoughts.

Invictus

10-04-2005, 09:22 AM

I don't think Japanese and English are two languages you can translate directly.

Agreed 100%. In my experience (English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian, Portugese), you can't/shouldn't translate any language directly, or you'll lose the intent of the phrase and just end up spouting meaningless word-for-word stuff like a robot.

For those lovely one hour train rides on the Yamanote line

これは山手線ですか?

Sorry, couldn't resist making the reference. :P

BluZytrix

10-04-2005, 10:00 AM

I'm glad you pointed out that fact that English and Japanese are not translatable. For me, this was a big hurdle that I had to jump over while learning. For some strange reason I tried translating things in from one language to the other. All this does is confuse you. Instead, figuring out how to convey the meaning using the language is a million times more valuable and will aid in aquisition greatly.

Henjin

10-04-2005, 02:31 PM

I realized that quickly when I started studying. Since then, I freak out whenever anything can be literally translated or whenever a word's meaning lines up w/ English. Heh.

Scott

10-04-2005, 02:37 PM

Finnish grammar IS close to Japanese. I don't know why, but that's not a load of crap. It just isn't closer than Korean. Korean is really really REALLY f'ing close to Japanese.

It's probably because Japan owned Korea (quite literally) for quite a long time. As a result, despite the fact that Korea was a province of China for several hundred years, its language more closely resembles Japanese.

Additionally, I would like to point out that I did not say that Japanese was easy to learn for an English speaker - indeed, I stressed the opposite. The CIA has it in their list of top-five hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn, along with Mandarin. One of the reasons for this is the writing system.

So I'll reiterate myself... Japanese is /supposed/ to be one of the easiest languages to learn from scratch /ORALLY/ due to its simplicity. I'm not talking about the writing here, just the spoken language.

Henjin

10-04-2005, 02:40 PM

So I'll reiterate myself... Japanese is /supposed/ to be one of the easiest languages to learn from scratch /ORALLY/ due to its simplicity. I'm not talking about the writing here, just the spoken language.

When you say 'fron scratch, orallly,' do you mean as a baby? As your first language? I mean... Isn't anything 'easy' to learn at that age?

Scott

10-04-2005, 02:50 PM

When you say 'fron scratch, orallly,' do you mean as a baby? As your first language? I mean... Isn't anything 'easy' to learn at that age?

Sure. I'll have to try to dig up the article on it. It's just a bit unfair to say that Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn - because if you're not an English speaker, that's not necessarily true.

As far as the entire Japanese-Finnish thing goes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages has a decent rundown of the Altaic Family. The problem is that languages have typically been geographically grouped as well as linguistically grouped; the idea of the Japanese-Finnish connection is relatively new (15 years or so?). However, when you consider Japan's location and the fact that it is almost alone in Asian languages (save Korea), it becomes an anomaly.

If you read the descriptions for what makes an Altaic language, bells should start going off in your head because all of them apply to Japanese.

Pierrot le Fou

10-04-2005, 03:12 PM

No two languages are the same. Trying to directly translate will cause problems to varying degrees. Going from Italian to Spanish probably won't cause much of a fuss, but going from Italian to Russian with direct translation will cause a lot more. So much of language comes with the nuance and expressions that are not literal (especially English), and so a direct translation will end up with something that just makes no sense.

"Here you go" when giving someone something doesn't make sense in any other languages that I know of for instance, and there are trillions more daily phrases that work the same way.

When we're little kids, we learn languages intuitively, and learn how to separate them with practice. That makes kids great learners because they don't have the limitation of constantly comparing new languages to the one they know. I sure as Hell know that when I learned French as a kid, it was a simple matter of just, y'know, learning it like I was learning English. By the time I got to Spanish, I was comparing things to French and English constantly, and with Japanese, I'm just entirely fucked for comparison.

The point is that no matter what the language, translating in your head will never make you fast enough or make you sound good enough to have a casual conversation. You'll be constantly thinking and rethinking and coming up with gobbledygook responses to basic questions.

koku

10-04-2005, 04:17 PM

You guys dont think Japanese has less rules than say english? Seems to me everytime I learn soemtthing in japanese and compare it to how it's done in english, it's about 20% of the work (just an estimate -- sometimes more, sometimes less).

Henjin

10-04-2005, 05:06 PM

They each have parts that are easier than others. Sure, Japanese verb conjugation is a snap compared to the convoluted English forms, but then you have things like counters and keigo.

koku

10-04-2005, 05:21 PM

They each have parts that are easier than others. Sure, Japanese verb conjugation is a snap compared to the convoluted English forms, but then you have things like counters and keigo.

coolness. From the little that i've learned so far, it's a lot more simple and consistant compared to english.

What would some fluent speakers of both say? Overall, is it safe to assume english has more irregularaties and rules?

I Monkey

10-04-2005, 06:10 PM

I think Japanese is quite easy to learn(I'm studying it on my own)at least... easier than French, German and Dutch(especially Dutch). I studied French for 4 years and German for 3 years and compared to my Japanese, my French skills REALLY suck I'm even better at Japanese than German o_O although I've been studying Japanese for less than 2 years.BTW. Comparing Japanese grammar, vocabulary with other languages (Dutch, English and Vietnamese) does help me alot though!

BTW. Who is learning/has learned Japanese from Japanese For Busy People? What do you guys think about this book? I'm currently learning from the second volume I think it's a pretty good book but there are some things they use in the texts and quizzes wich they don't explain the meaning of...

NERD

10-04-2005, 06:41 PM

It's probably because Japan owned Korea (quite literally) for quite a long time. As a result, despite the fact that Korea was a province of China for several hundred years, its language more closely resembles Japanese.

You got it wrong.

If you go to the Wikipedia entry of Japan, it states that:

"The Japanese did not start writing their own histories until the 5th and 6th centuries AD, when the Chinese writing system, Buddhism, advanced pottery, ceremonial burial, and other aspects of culture were introduced by aristocrats, artisans, scholars, and monks from Baekje, a kingdom in Korea."

Also, Korea was occupied by Japan from 1910-1945. The only other instance of Japan claiming any part of Korea was from 1592 to 1598 when Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded the peninsula.

Secondly, Korea was a never a province to China. In exchange for sovereignty, the Korean king had to call the Chinese king 'elder brother', not to mention sending gifts every year; nevertheless, Korea was independent from Chinese rule.

Lastly, if you look up Japanese on wikipedia, it states that

"... relationship to Korean is considered plausible but is still up to debate"

Scott

10-04-2005, 07:50 PM

Varia

10-04-2005, 08:26 PM

Japanese and Korean are so close, because historically, their roots are nearly the same. They both come from Mongolian ancestors. Mix that with influences from other countries, location, isolation, occupation etc and you get what we have today.

In my opinion, the Japanese occupation of Korea shouldn't cause any big changes. It's not like there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese there. Korean had been the primary language there for a long time, and Japanese occupation for 35 years wouldn't change that. The best example I can think of is the US occupation of Japan. Yes, the language has changed, but it's still Japanese. They just throw in a lot of crappy English here and there. Not only because of US occupation, but because of the world's economy. I have never heard of anything like that happening in Korea because of Japanese rule, though.
________
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Scott

10-04-2005, 08:30 PM

Not quite the same - Japan, when it occupied Korea, outlawed Korean and began teaching Japanese in schools. America, when it occupied Japan, did not do that.

that guy

10-04-2005, 09:11 PM

Hellos. I am new here and thought that I should share my thoughts. Having studied Japanese for little more than a year so far, I think that it's safe to call myself a foremost authority on the language :) . Seriously, though, I do not think that the language is that difficult.

Our university uses Japanese: The Spoken Language. Although the book is dated (it still uses gaijin -- which, by the way, would be 'gaizin' using our romanization) and boring as hell when compared to newer textbooks like the Genki series, it explains the grammatical aspects of the language really well.

If anyone is interested, I could post a few excerpts from the book.

Sorry if my head is up my netherrealm due to my inexperience, but....

NERD

10-04-2005, 09:13 PM

Psst. 35 years is a long time, especially with the way Japan controlled Korea. If you look at Korean before and after Japanese occupation, you can see a significant change. Even Koreans agree on this.

Japanese as a language is up to debate in many ways - nobody is quite sure where it comes from. It is maintained, however, that it does have a strong connection to the roots of Korean going way, way back in time.

As a side note - we're derailing this poor guy's thread. Does someone want to make a new topic?

There's been a lot of changes made during the Japanese occupation, but language being one of them. No. And tell me about any Korean person who agrees with your argument, becuase I do not. How would you explain the Catalan/Basque in Spain where their language remains very different from Spanish, and many people of Catalan/Basque heritage still speak their language, even after hundreds of years of Spanish rule?

PLF was arguing that Korean is really close to Japanese, which you contributed to the 35 years of Japanese occupation. 35 years is not a short time, but not enough to change a language to be similar to one another. Rather, it would be more natural for Koreans to adopt Japanese as their native language, according to your way of thinking. Also, the similarity between Korean and Japanese can be traced from their common roots from Mongolian/Siberian language.

Also, though Korean was not allowed in school, not many Koreans could afford to go to school in the first place, not to mention that any Korean person who chose Japanese rather than Korean were stigmatized amongst other Koreans.

Scott

10-04-2005, 11:06 PM

Our university uses Japanese: The Spoken Language.

I hate Jordan's book. It's needlessly obfuscated and very slow.

Xenotrauma

10-04-2005, 11:42 PM

^^ Agree with Scott, I had it at my school all through the first book, and it's pretty worthless.

that guy

10-05-2005, 11:30 AM

I hate Jordan's book. It's needlessly obfuscated and very slow.

Well, I agree. It is painfully slow, and their explanations are convoluted to the brink of absolute nebulousness, but I still think that it is the best at explaining grammar -- it really is not good for anything else, but you will know grammar.

Case in point: My friend uses Genki and, though I love his book, I am the one who usually ends up explaining proper use of particles. In addition to that, he still has trouble remembering how to convert the plain forms of verbs to their respective -masu forms because he has to convert "tsu" to "chi", whereas I only had to convert "tu" to "ti", and so on. Using our system does simplify a lot of things.

Now, that being said... his vocabulary pwns mine. He was learning commonly used words while we were practicing, "パイ食べませんか。"

Frankey-eh

10-05-2005, 11:31 PM

This reminds me of the time when I was trying to learn English. I put sentences like 私は公園に行きます into "I is park to go". And I bragged to my mom that I knew English ^_^; Good times...

But if I look back now, I think Japanese is an easier language because order of the words don't matter:
学校へ歩いて行きました。
歩いて学校へ行きました。

[edit]
Oh, we use genki too! And yes, their vocab is extensive. Helps me practice writing kanji...which is stuck at fourth-grade level right now.

Henjin

10-05-2005, 11:45 PM

Wait, what's your native language, Rika?

Frankey-eh

10-05-2005, 11:52 PM

Wait, what's your native language, Rika?

It's a long story, but to put it simply, it's Japanese.
And I'm taking Japanese in school right now as well. Was that where you got confused?

Henjin

10-05-2005, 11:54 PM

Yeah, I suppose that was what confused me. You don't need to give any details you don't want to, but I was thrown off by that.

Frankey-eh

10-06-2005, 12:08 AM

no, it's nothing personal, really. Just didn't want to confuse you more... But if you don't mind....

my first language is Cantonese. That's the language I was initially exposed to and was taught. Japanese is a close second... by three years. I actually had picture books as sort of a "textbook" to help me learn the 50 hiragana.

Chinpokomon

10-06-2005, 12:38 AM

But if I look back now, I think Japanese is an easier language because order of the words don't matter:
学校へ歩いて行きました。
歩いて学校へ行きました。

Well, there are situations where the order can make the sentence sound strange, right?

３月に日本語を勉強するために日本へ行きます。
３月に日本へ日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本へ日本語を勉強するために３月に行きます。
日本へ３月に日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、日本へ３月に行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、３月に日本へ行きます。

The only ones that sound natural to me (admittedly, what do I know aout what sounds natural??) are the 1st and 6th sentences.

Frankey-eh

10-06-2005, 12:58 AM

３月に日本語を勉強するために日本へ行きます。
３月に日本へ日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本へ日本語を勉強するために３月に行きます。
日本へ３月に日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、日本へ３月に行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、３月に日本へ行きます。

The only ones that sound natural to me (admittedly, what do I know aout what sounds natural??) are the 1st and 6th sentences.

I think your sentence itself is weird to start with.
Using 日本へ and 日本語を together is redundant (sp?). If it was to learn cooking, 料理を... and there seems to be something with the time that's making it weird. If it was 三ヶ月間 it doesn't seem too bad:

三ヶ月間、料理を勉強するために日本へ行きます。
三ヶ月間、日本へ料理を勉強するために行きます。
日本へ料理を勉強するために三ヶ月間行きます。
日本へ三ヶ月間料理を勉強するために行きます。
料理を勉強するために、日本へ三ヶ月間行きます。
料理を勉強するために、三ヶ月間日本へ行きます。

Now they all sound okay.... Or maybe it's just me getting used to them...

Yokohama

10-06-2005, 01:43 AM

３月に日本語を勉強するために日本へ行きます。
３月に日本へ日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本へ日本語を勉強するために３月に行きます。
日本へ３月に日本語を勉強するために行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、日本へ３月に行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、３月に日本へ行きます。
All sentences sound quite natural to me. :)
But it is much easier to understand when you put ‘、’(comma?) in a proper point.

３月に、日本語を勉強するために、日本へ行きます。
３月に、日本へ、日本語を勉強するために、行きます。
日本へ、日本語を勉強するために、３月に行きます。
日本へ、３月に、日本語を勉強するために、行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、日本へ、３月に行きます。
日本語を勉強するために、３月に、日本へ行きます。

EIJI

10-06-2005, 03:11 AM

３月に日本語を勉強するために日本へ行きます。　Good
３月に日本へ日本語を勉強するために行きます。　Not Bad
日本へ日本語を勉強するために３月に行きます。 Bad
日本へ３月に日本語を勉強するために行きます。 Very Bad
日本語を勉強するために、日本へ３月に行きます。Not Bad
日本語を勉強するために、３月に日本へ行きます。Very Good
The only ones that sound natural to me (admittedly, what do I know aout what sounds natural??) are the 1st and 6th sentences.
There is No mistake in that sentences technically.

But as you said, 1st and 6th sentences are more natural for me.
Because 日本へ行きます is a main message in this sentence,
So you don’t separate日本へfrom 行きますin single sentence.

This is delicate nuance of Japanese. Usually, it doesn’t matter at all.
You have a keen sense of Japanese！

Daddaluma

10-21-2005, 02:57 PM

^^ Agree with Scott, I had it at my school all through the first book, and it's pretty worthless.

If the language is taught the way it's should be taught, then Jordan's books are the absolute fastest and best way to learn to speak Japanese. I can guarantee it.

I did the program at Cornell created by Jordan, and after I finished I was light years ahead of all my classmates in every class I took after that (studying in Japan, where I got to meet people who had done many different programs all over the world). Not only was I able to speak circles around almost all of them, but i had a far better understanding of the grammar and the way the language worked. So I was equipped to continue learning faster than anyone else as well.

You may think the books are slow, but if you're really practicing each new thing you learn to the point of mastery, then you're not going to be able to go any faster.

I'm glad you pointed out that fact that English and Japanese are not translatable. For me, this was a big hurdle that I had to jump over while learning. For some strange reason I tried translating things in from one language to the other. All this does is confuse you. Instead, figuring out how to convey the meaning using the language is a million times more valuable and will aid in aquisition greatly.

Japanese and English are plenty translatable. It's ridiculous to suggest that you can't accurately translate a japanese sentence into an english one that sounds reasonably normal and still reflects the grammar and word usage of the Japanese one.

Of course there are gonna be ideas and constructions that are really hard or impossible to do, but for the most part, it's more than possible, it's relatively easy to do.

But it depends on what your goal is. If you're translating a conversation you had in an editorial like Az, clearly you're gonna want to want to make it sound good rather than reflect the words that were used in Japanese. But if you are attempting to study the language and learn it, then it's going to be more beneficial for you to know exactly what each part of the Japanese sentence is doing, so you should favor slightly stiff sounding english that reflects the Japanese instead.