Myth: "You're learning Japanese!? WOW that must be HARD!"

[koku]

:confused: um.....no. I hear this alot, and i'm sure many students themselves hear it aswell. I hope i'm not the only person who hears this and thinks..."if they only knew better."

My first day of learning Japanese my teacher(who's also Japanese) spent about half the time comparing English and Japanese. The things he was comparing where things like

"how many ways are there to say the letter "a" in english?"

"how many ways are there to say the letter "a" in japanese?"

Things like that. But it didn't stop at pronuncation and spelling of course. Long story short, in about 1 hours worth of casual conversation he did a pretty good job at showing everyone how ridicilously incosistant and HARD english is to learn compared to Japanese.

It's pretty comical actually. So i'm going to end my introduction post here. Anyone who's taking japanese or learning it, or speaks it very well dive in and throw in some insight. So share what you know and what you've experienced.

[hapacheese]

For some people, it really is hard. Different people have different capacities for learning foreign languages.

And at the college I went to, they do nothing but speak to you in Japanese from the day you walk in :D It causes half the class to quit in the first week, but those who make it through all 3-4 years are pretty damn good at speaking/comprehending it.

[hanacker]

Japanese is hard to learn if you speak English and English is hard to learn if you speak Japanese. I think both are in the top 10 most difficult mainstream languages to learn.

[Loc]

heh kokujin, I have a little look at Japanese now and then to learn it, gonna take it up seriously pretty soon...
Anyway, yeah I noticed everyone says that to me and I just go along with it, makes me look more intelligent ;p

[Henjin]

日本語が難しくてたまらない。
人は「日本語を勉強するのは簡単じゃないみたいだ」って言うなら、真理を伝えている。

[MFDub]

For me, Japanese is fun but EXTREMELY difficult. It's like, once I get my mind around a certain concept or grammatical rule they pull the rug out from under me. "Oh, that rule you just learned. It's actually wrong. This is the right way. Except that you never use the right way, you use the wrong way, but don't ever use the wrong way the wrong way, because that's wrong, right?" ARGH! It just confuses me!

And don't get me started on honorifics and Kanji. I have NIGHTMARES about honorifics and Kanji.

[hapacheese]

Try English grammar "rules." There are like 2... maybe 3 rules in English grammar that *don't* have exceptions.

Spelling is an entirely different beast. At least you can spell something in Japanese with hiragana or katakana with relative ease.

[MFDub]

Try English grammar "rules." There are like 2... maybe 3 rules in English grammar that *don't* have exceptions.

Spelling is an entirely different beast. At least you can spell something in Japanese with hiragana or katakana with relative ease.


True. English is hard. But I know English. I don't know Japanese. Thus, learning Japanese for me is hard. I never had to "learn" English. If I did, I would probably be complaing about the exact same things.


And I still hate honorifics and Kanji.

[Henjin]

日本語が嫌だ。中国語を習おう。もっと簡単だろう。 :p

Seems to me the people who think Japanese is easy are either Native speakers or people who've figured out how that 「だめ！」 means 'bad' from anime and think they're linguistic geniuses. Prove me wrong, people. prove me wrong!

When someone says "Oh, that must be hard," I say "Yes. Yes it is."

[hanacker]

I never had to "learn" English. If I did, I would probably be complaing about the exact same things.

You didn't have spelling and grammar classes all through elementary school?

And looking at your average internet message board (this one is completely different though :p ), many native English speakers could still benefit from some more English classes.

I think Japanese is actually fairly straightforward - there's just a whole lot to remember and the grammar is pretty different from English.

[koku]

i dont know what you guys are learning, or what your learning habits are, but i'm attacking it.

Japanese if fudging easy. The rules? What are you talking about? They are very structured and consistant.

Have you for example looked at plurals?(what sort of inspired me to make this thread).

Some of the stuff in egnlish doesnt make sense.

you know the things like Geese and Flock. You get the idea i could google lists of these. In japanese you want plural you say how much. You want past tense there's one way for each scenerio.

There's just so many inconstiantcies with english i'ts insane if someone has to learn it.

[Henjin]

Everyone here needs to read this: http://pepper.idge.net/japanese/

@Kokujin: I don't want to be a jerk, but I'm not going to take what you say seriously unless you retype your last post completely in fluent Japanese.

[hapacheese]

Yeah, but without counters, how do you tell if something is plural? Hell, without *subjects*, how do you tell wtf anyone is talking about?

Try translating a dialog script with no blocking (action explanations) or visual cues and see how much of it actually makes sense :)

English is primarly f'ed up because it's a mishmash of Germanic and Romantci languages, which accounts for a lot of the spelling inconsistencies. Japanese is just... convoluted.

[Rogue_7]

Yeah, Japanese kicks my ass, nuff said!

[koku]

Everyone here needs to read this: http://pepper.idge.net/japanese/

@Kokujin: I don't want to be a jerk, but I'm not going to take what you say seriously unless you retype your last post completely in fluent Japanese.


:P,

I've read that site it's funny. You can be a jerk, i'm being one as you can see.


I honestly think what i've learned so far is very easy.


at the VERY LEAST

it does NOT merit, "wow you're learning Japanese?? That must be so HARD!"

type comment.

[hapacheese]

How long have you been studying? And how much have you learned?

[hanacker]

I honestly think what i've learned so far is very easy.

And how much is that?

[Vaste]

Japanese is so far the easiest of the languages I've studied (Swedish, English, French and Japanese). That is, as long as you ignore writing and, especially, reading.

Let me put it this way, it takes a while to grasp just how much 2000 is.

[koku]

not long, just 1 year in college.

:P yeah that's going to look bad. I have friends that have taken 3 years and I have discussions like this with them too. They agree aswell.

[Henjin]

:P yeah that's going to look bad. I have friends that have taken 3 years and I have discussions like this with them too. They agree aswell.

Were you talking in Japanese?

[hapacheese]

Vaste: It's worst when you go beyond 10,000. Whenever I interpret, I have to have a chart of numbers in front of me because my brain can't make the transition fast enough.

"Uh... issenman? That's... uh... so... that's like... uh... 10,000,000! Oh crap, you mean in yen? Then that's uh... like... $100,000!"

And the discussion has already moved onto 3 new topics :(

[MFDub]

not long, just 1 year in college.

:P yeah that's going to look bad. I have friends that have taken 3 years and I have discussions like this with them too. They agree aswell.

Oh, that explains it. The first year isn't too bad. I'm approaching my third year. If your college and mine have similar rates of progression, expect a nice surprise about halfway through your third semester.


I really wish there was a l'il devil smiley....guess I'll use this: :D

[Vaste]

Well, that's another headache. Large numbers.. it's probably easiest to just learn the value again, in japanese. I was referring to the number of 常用漢字 (general use kanji?).

Japanese is especially easy to beginners, once one gets past hiragana and katakana (first 1 or 2 weeks). No la/le, la/el, die/der/das, en/ett... No plural, a whopping two (quite regular) irregular verbs and consistent conjugation of verbs.

[koku]

Oh, that explains it. The first year isn't too bad. I'm approaching my third year. If your college and mine have similar rates of progression, expect a nice surprise about halfway through your third semester.


I really wish there was a l'il devil smiley....guess I'll use this: :D

3rd semester eh? I'll guess that will be this year. what's this surprise? Either way i'll demolish it. Trust me, if i actually like something it becomes pretty easy.

So tell me what I should be preparing for anyways. I'm actually going to try to go crazy with studying this year. Last year i'd say i studied about....5 hours of Japanese outside of class in a week. Alot of tiimes less. I'm going to try 19hours(2hrs on class days, 3 hrs on non). Mostly because Kusoyaro told me that's how much he studies a language when he wants to learn it.

So yeah if i pull it off and you're reading, thanks for pressuring me to work harder.

Anywho what the hell is this pleasant surprise that I get to look forward to? If you're wondering about pacing. After 2 semesters we stopped like te form plus some kanji only like 14ish. And I've looked at year two, they only require you to learn like 10 kanji per week at most. And some lesson progress longer than a week.

[Kusoyaro]

as i have no right to say anything, as i just started my self-study into japanese, i will merely stand by and observe, for the most part.

many of my frineds know japanese, some are japanese, and 4 of my cousins know japanese. they ALL attempt to instill in me the sense that japanese is only to be learned if i am willing to slug through it, and my cousins compare it with learning sanskrit, which was a rape up the nostril.
all im doing now is learning hiragana, katakana, some random kanji and so forth, so i have no idea what it is like, but if ANYONE can help me with some tricks and shit, lemme know

[Henjin]

I just compare this to if I started a class on mechanics and I learned how to refill the wiper fluid in my car and from that said that building a car is the easiest thing in the world.
I think the general consensus is to wait till you get into it some more.

Hapa: Sling some Kansai-ben at Kokujin. That'll humble him. :D

[koku]

lol yeah i know how bad it sounds.

I'll rebump this then a year from now for further own3ge. Besides, i asked for other people to throw in their opinions.

[hapacheese]

いや、最近はぜんぜん関西弁で喋ってへんさかい、無理や。pierrotの方がうまいと思うで。毎日喋って はんねん。

Wow. That was bad. I said it before, but I can't really speak it intentionally. It just has to come out. I'm weird like that :D

[Pierrot le Fou]

My God, he's at ～て form for crissakes, and know 14 kanji.

"OMG! Japanese is SO EASY! I r0x0rz at tihs cuz I like it!!111!!ichi!!!one!"

You have yet to deal with:
- Politeness forms
- Giving and receiving
- Kanji
- Kanji compounds
- Kanji exceptions (大人 = otona, not daijin. 雰囲気 = fuinki, not funiki)

Japanese is not 'simple' and it's very hard to speak at any decent speed whatsoever prior to immersion. Because most grammar patterns are the opposite of Japanese, and don't require the subject, it is very hard to make a 'natural' sounding phrase for a long time, no matter how much you study.

Stupid things like getting 行く and 来る backwards. You don't say, "Mind if I come over later?" when on the phone with a friend as you would in English, because you aren't actually coming to their place, you're going there. And you wouldn't generally say "I ate because I was hungry" you'd say "I was hungry so I ate" which is backwards and gets mucked up alot.

And then there are such wonderful things as passive forms and giving and receiving. To give to someone, someone else giving to someone else, you receiving from someone, someone else receiving from someone else. Loads of fun. With passive, especially, tons of fun.

チャリンコが盗んだ！ = bad way of saying, "I stole someone's bike!"
チャリンコが盗まれた！ = correct way of saying, "My bike was stolen!"

Guess which one a student will generally say first when their bike gets stolen? Yeah, real easy.

Sorry kokujin, but learning the simple basic grammar in a book, and actually using that grammar in a conversation, are entirely different. Also bear in mind that people in Japan talk in a giant run-on sentence that never necessarily ends, and you'll realize that no matter how simple each individual grammar point is, you're mixing them all together constantly in speech.

Then toss in the fact that little kids speak differently from adults outside the office who speak differently than they do inside the office, and you have some problems. Then travel to another prefecture and suddenly you're getting totally screwed because you have no idea what's being spoken about.

ぼちぼち行こうか？
なんでやねぇ？！
アホかおまえ？！なんでわからんのかい？！

[Frankey-eh]

this reminds me of one story my relatives told me back when I was five.
---
A guy starts going to school. On the first day, he learns the kanji for 'one'. (if you don't know, that's one horizontal bar) On the second day, he learns the kanji for 'two'. (two horizontal bars) On the third day, he learns the kanji for 'three' (three horizontal bars).

When he comes home, he says "hey, this is pretty simple! I don't need to go to class anymore."

On the final exam, the teacher asked the student to write the kanji for "thousand". The guy wrote one thousand horizontal lines.

[Monkey]

I sort of agree with Kokujin on this one. Japanese speaking is fairly easy to pick up. A lack of very irregular verbs, a simple sentence structure (if a bit backward at first!) and easy pronunciation.


However learning Kanji is much harder! :mad:


Although this could just be my point of view as Japanese was my 4th language. They do say that each language comes a little easier to learn :D

[Xenotrauma]

I've been taking Japanese in college for a little over two years now... sometimes I think it's incredibly easy, and sometimes I think it's incredibly hard. It all depends on what my criteria are.

The reason lots of people things Japanese is easy is because Japanese -class- is easy. Very. Part of this I'm sure has to do with the fact that they try to let the slow kids keep up, but after I'd taken Japanese 1 and 2, I easily tested out of 3 and took 4. That was so easy that I wanted to test out of Intermediate I, but I need the damn credit hours.

The classes are easy, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that most Japanese textbooks take things really slow to get over the writing/cultural barrier. While my comprehension and reading is going at a rate I'm comfortable with, my ability to come up with my own original, normal length sentences is completely pathetic. I can read about 300 kanji, but they are virtually never the ones I -need- for the particular book, newspaper article, etc that I try to read at any given moment.

The part of me that usually things the language is incredibly easy (the part in school) just seems to love getting in a fight with the part of me who occassionally turns on NHK and tries to watch the news. But even still, I love studying and am happy learning more and more, bit by bit... but I'll tell you what's really frustrating.

I went to Europe for the first time last month. The only two languages I've ever studied have been Japanese, and Latin. I went to Switzerland for two weeks. There while I was paragliding I met a big group of kids, probably 18-19 and start to talk to them in English. They respond in -incredible- English. This has me worried, so I ask them how long they studied English.. and each one had only taken three years in high school because they had to.

Now granted it's easier to go from one western language to another western language, and they already HAVE three national languages in Switzerland anyway, but I was feeling really bad about my two full years of Japanese study talking to these kids. Then I remember friends who have taken Spanish, French, German in college and how comfortably they can speak those, and I think I'm starting to get converted.

While Japanese studies may seem really easy (especially to people who love language study and Japanese culture anyway), it's getting harder and harder for me to describe it as an "easy language" comparatively.

Just my two cents ><

[Pierrot le Fou]

Japanese is my 4th language.

I took French from when I was 5-10, Spanish from 12-17, and Japanese from 19-20, and 23-25 (immersion).

Japanese is heads and tails more difficult than French or Spanish. Either of those languages just require me to essentially think in English with French or Spanish words, and the sentences are easily comprehensible, and while maybe a tad grammatically incorrect, perfectly understandable 99% of the time.

Now Japanese, which I have taken the same amount of time and been immersed in, is very difficult because when I started speaking, even if I knew enough words, phrasing things like English would NOT succeed in communicating my point.

For instance, you don't say things like 'my house' in Japanese, you just say 'house' and the implication is that you're speaking of your own house.

You don't refer to yourself as the subject of every sentence, whereas English requires a subject in practically every sentence.

It's just worlds apart, and it is NOT easy to learn to speak, even if the rules on paper look simple. There is a HUGE difference between understanding Japanese in concept, and actually being able to speak it at a decent clip without translating in your head and being understood...

[KujiInRetsu]

Pretty much the thing people have to know about Japanese, or any foreign language for that matter, is that it is NOT A CODE LANGUAGE FOR ENGLISH. It will follow different grammar patterns and sentence constructions that may or may not make sense in English. A lot of people in my Japanese class have this problem, and they don't bother studying their material, hence a lot of their sentences come out horribly butchered. When they do manage it though, they also speak with the most obvious American accent ever. It's almost painful to hear.

たまに、 僕の日本語のクラスは本当に阿呆に似る。 すごく苦しい事だ、 クラスメートを聞くのは。

Very rusty from a summer's worth of non-usage. Correct as needed, please, I'm sure something's wrong with it.

[Pierrot le Fou]

Argh, didn't I just get through talking about how you would never refer to a class or whatnot in the possessive?

日本語のクラス is fine, you don't need 僕の first, as it is implied.

[spaik]

i'm korean. the way that japanese is structured and built, grammatically, is incredibly easy to me. the examples of the going to a friend's house and the eating/hungry thing? exactly the same in korean as in japanese. kanji busts me on my ass, though. that and casual conversation. so much slang and shortcutting. then again, i guess english is no different in that respect. i mean, how many foreign english majors would understand me if i went up and said "sup yo. so i was just fuckin chillin here, right? then this fuckin wigga comes up and is all steppin and tryin to front an shit. his friend is all standin there thinkin hes the shit, right? so im fuckin pissed, so i snap back the little bitch, send him flying, and start rushing that shit down. im all over cracker and his friend like stridoom on sent."

[hapacheese]

何でやねん...

/Osaka, Azumanga

[Pierrot le Fou]

Yeah, Korean and Japanese share almost entirely the same grammatical structure, to the extent that French and Spanish do it seems. There are polite endings (~seyo) etc. for everything, and the sentence structure is incredibly similar, so to go from one to the other is very easy. Chinese and English are also very similar in their grammar structure, so it's easier to learn.

Here are a couple more things that Japanese students don't understand about Japanese speaking... Intonation is VERY important. Because of the amount of homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings) the way you say them is important.

kUmo for instance is spider (emphasis on the 'u' sound), kumo (no emphasis) is cloud. At least in Kansai. And in each region of Japan, the intonation is different. For instance, in Kanto you would say, "ARigato" whereas in Kansai you would say "arigaTO" instead.

Another thing is that kanji is very important for speaking as well, and it will be VERY difficult to have a discussion that involves lots of new vocabulary (politics, science, economics) if you don't know any of the kanji. Because kanji generally share sounds, you can figure out the meaning of a new vocab word by the sounds, and it helps retention and comprehension 100 fold.

Finally, as touched on, numbers. In English (and most Western languages) we have a new word for every multiple of 1,000; one, ten, hundred, thousand, million, billion. Japanese makes a new word for every multiple of 10,000; ichi, juu, hyaku, sen, man, oku, cho.

[Urban~Ninja]

Japanese for me was easy, but then again i do have my Grandmother who is Japanese and therefore i just talk to her when i want to learn things that the classes arnt being taught, aswell as my Uncle who speaks it fluently. My mother was the only one out of my Grandmother's children who didnt learn the Language, but she grew up in a Country town of Australia so prejudice was high.

I learn things in Japanese failry easily aslong as i remember to revise them for a hour or so after i have learnt it.

Also i practise alot just talking and writing things.

As for tricks, for nouns label things in your house hold with a piece of tape and with a marker write it in Japanese, you will remember your nouns alot easier that way. Also i have found with Verbs saying then whilst your doing the action helps.

Thats all i can think of.

For those who think the langauge is hard, its usually they have the idea that it is spoken fast and that the character system is impossible to learn, while Kanji is difficult at first, Hiragana and katakana are easy to learn. I dont think they speak that fast but then again thats just me.

Also some of my friends only think its hard because they are learning hard things from Anime first instead of starting from the basics of greetings and simple questions and answers and moving forwards from that point.

[Pierrot le Fou]

何でやねん...

/Osaka, Azumanga
Yeah, but while that's how you'd spell it, almost everyone sounds like なんでやねぇ。 The trailing ～ん sound isn't really vocalized that heavily. At least to my ears ;) Of course I mess up shizzy like that all the time. しや vs. しゃ vs. しあ. Pain in my arse.

[Frankey-eh]

I agree there's no set patterns to converting Japanese to English. Even the gairaigo, the closest thing to English, doesn't always match up one to one.

As for me...I guess I know five languages
Cantonese (first language)
Japanese (since 3)
English (since 9)
French (since 14. my foreign language for HS)
Mandarin (since 15)

And my input is this:



English was hard!!



As a Japanese learning English, it was hell. Had I known some swear words, I would have swore it with every word that existed. Thanks to my mom, I got wed to my J-E dictionary. But because of that torture, I was able to catch up to my peers in less than two years.

Not to say that Japanese is easy though... the shift between Western and Eastern language is always hard, and not just the difference in character. The minds work differently, so the language to communcate those thoughts are going to be different.

[hapacheese]

Yeah, but while that's how you'd spell it, almost everyone sounds like なんでやねぇ。 The trailing ～ん sound isn't really vocalized that heavily. At least to my ears ;) Of course I mess up shizzy like that all the time. しや vs. しゃ vs. しあ. Pain in my arse.

Yeah, that's closer to how it sounds. Primarily because the "ん" sound is done with the back of the throat, rather than the tip of the tongue in English. And when you say it fast, you lose the hard "n/g" sound, and end up with what you hear :)

[Pierrot le Fou]

I think the point is that beginners have no clue about how hard Japanese actually is because they don't need to use it yet. Ah yes, those who believe it is so easy would probably be incapable of ordering a pizza in Japan proper at their current level.

[hapacheese]

え～と、ツナコーンピザのSをひとつ、明太子ピザのMをひとつ、そしてイカ墨ピザのSをひとつ 。

/actually likes tuna-corn pizza

[Azrael]

Japanese? Easy?

..........BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Last time I was in the states, my parents showed me a newspaper article that said Japanese was ranked the #1 hardest language for native English speakers to learn. They patted me on the back and said "Good job, son!" I nervously laughed and told them I still had a ways to go.

One of the hardest things about Japanese (in addition to all the stuff Pierre mentioned) is, like he said, you can't just think about what you want to say in English then make it Japanese. That doesn't work. You have to think about how a Japanese person would get that thought across. And that requires actually living here, frequently conversing with natives, or having a *really* good teacher.

For example. Somebody says something to make you laugh. "You're funny" you say in English. Directly translate this into Japanese and it's "Anata wa okashii." ...But now you've just called them weird. In Japanese, you would simply just say "Omoshiroi", for which the English translation is "interesting." To further complicate matters, here in Kansai they use "omoroi" interchanably with "omoshiroi", and that's nothing I ever learned in any Japanese class.

And that is but a small example.

It's kind of funny, I've seen a lot of cases where anime viewers in America critize fansubbers for not having accurate translations. Maybe they've taken a few Japanese languages courses or are doing a self-study, and the words they heard didn't quite match up with the text on-screen. But you really can't do a direct translation...you just have to know what idea the Japanese person is conveying, and then the way to express that in English.

Another example, since Azumanga Daioh was already mentioned, off the top of my head I remember the scene where Osaka was commenting on how tanned Kagura had gotten. Yomi says something like "Aite suru na" to Kagura. Literally translated, this means "Don't be her partner." But the idea conveyed is "Don't entertain/indulge her."

[Pierrot le Fou]

Ordering Pizza isn't that easy hapa... Oy, God, if only it were.

電話ありがとうこれはピザハット<name of town>店オーダさんでございます。よろしかったらご住所とお電話番号お願いもしあげます。

And then you have to select the Pizza, toppings, size, crust, deal with coupons, dear God, it's Hell. The first time I called up I thought it'd be easy. It ain't. Plus they speak at 4,000 miles per hour and are busy and don't want to deal with questions.

Ugh.

[kensei]

One of the only things that really gave me a hard time was the various ways in which certain things are counted in Japanese...Of course, I'm damn nigh the polar opposite of fluent, and my Japanese sucks...I just need more teaching is all.

[hapacheese]

On Square's website for FF9 when it first came out, the character descriptions were in English.

...or Engrish, rather. There was one in particular that was puzzling. It said: "The rotation of the head is early."

We all sat around trying to figure out what the hell that meant. I mean, it was a character description, right? My ex-boss (who is the single most perfectly bilingual human being alive) finally figured it out: 「頭の回転がはやい。」

Translated directly, it means "the rotation of the head is early." But what it figuratively means is that the person thinks quickly. "Hayai" can mean "early" or "quick/fast." "Kaiten" can mean "rotate," or simply "spin" (as in the "wheels in his head begin spinning"). You can see how a simple phrase can be mangled unless you really know the language.

[hapacheese]

Haha, I know pierrot. I hate the way people at shops and stuff talk (in that goddamn nasal voice!!!! do they do that in kansai, too??). And they talk inhumanly fast. When I'm tired and just don't want to deal with it, I pretend not to speak Japanese, and they just shut up and point at the cash register. Ah... peace and quiet.

[Azrael]

This is why Engrish exists. Japanese people take a Japanese sentence, and then use a dictionary to make it into English. But the two languages don't directly translate, so hilarity ensues.

God bless Engrish.

[Pierrot le Fou]

There is Engrish with such reason. The Japanese people take the Japanese sentence, use the dictionary for making that next in English. But it does not translate two languages directly, therefore hilarity continues. God praises Engrish.

As for God Engrish you praise. Indeed.

[KujiInRetsu]

Argh, didn't I just get through talking about how you would never refer to a class or whatnot in the possessive?

日本語のクラス is fine, you don't need 僕の first, as it is implied.See, that's what I was talking about. I knew something was wrong after two months of disuse. Cripes, and school starts in two weeks.

[hapacheese]

Az's line, translated into Japanese, then directly translated into Engrish:

It is why Engrish is existing. Japanese are free Japanese words, and using dictionary change into English. Japanese cannot cheerful excuse into English, interesting things is waking up.

Engrish is a hero.

[4letterwords]

I have a REALLY hard time to write Japanese... I know only probably 400-500 kanji and hiragana and katakana... its just that speaking it is so different than writing it... its an entirely different deal.... I can sit down and have a conversation with somebody (Not about somehting crazy like the philosophy of life or politics) in japanese but I dunno how well I would do in a Japanese chat room... I could probably get by though... its definitely (to me at least) so much easier to just talk in Japanese and even think in it than write in it... Its not the lettering... its just the way it registers in my head I guess... I dunno, I don't get it either. :D

[psychicstooge]

I guess Japanese would also be considered my 4th language. I'm a native speaker of English. I was forced to study French for six years; I remember almost none of it, because I hate the language. I wanted to take German, but my parents said it was a useless language.

Yeah, that French really came in handy.

I took Spanish briefly, and if I applied myself to it, I think I could easily become fluent in "proper" Spanish (as far as I'm concerned, you can't really learn all the slang and casual forms of ANY language without immersion anyway).

I've been taking Japanese in college for a little over two years now... sometimes I think it's incredibly easy, and sometimes I think it's incredibly hard. It all depends on what my criteria are.

I'd have to agree with this. Hiragana and katakana aren't too bad. Kanji kicks my ass. I have far more problems trying to read and write Japanese than I do with proper pronunciation. My grammar skills are still very basic and wouldn't get me anywhere. But for teaching myself what I can, I still think I'm doing pretty well. I've always been able to pick up languages pretty easily (of course, then I don't use them and forget it all).

[Pierrot le Fou]

Errr, hapa, look up a couple posts before you where I already did as much.

There is Engrish with such reason. The Japanese people take the Japanese sentence, use the dictionary for making that next in English. But it does not translate two languages directly, therefore hilarity continues. God praises Engrish.

I have no problem writing as well as speaking. Reading is my biggest problem.

[hapacheese]

Gah! Damn you! :D

I glanced over the quote and didn't realize you had Engrish-ified it!

[deepbluevibes]

to me, going from english to japanese, of course it's hard.

The thing I have the most problem with is the suffixes;

i.e. hanashi, hanaseru, hana*whatever* etc.

in english we have seperate words for all of those (speak, spoken, going to speak etc.) so that makes more sense to me.

The other hard thing about Japanese to me is kanji; this concept does not exist in english at all (written english) so it's hard for my mind to grasp.

BUT

going back into learning english, that has to be the hardest language to learn.

there are SO MANY different accents, ways to pronounce stuff, different ways to say letters, slurring together words, hidden meanings, slang, broken grammar that is somehow correct, etc.

I've been learning japanese for about 5 months now and none of it, except for the whole "true adjective" and "noun adjective" stuff messes with me at all, i understand it all. (i.e. the whole ru, or u verb, and to put either -i or -nai or -denai etc.)

[Kaji]

俺の立場には、ピエローの反対だ。ラテン語の文法は全然出来ないよ。規則がいっぱすぎるので。日本語には助 詞を正しく使って大体平気だ。その上、漢字は日本語をもっと簡単にならせるよ。漢字は日本語の語幹だ。ヨー ロッパの言語はラテン語も同じような関係だ。見た事ない言葉を初めて見れば、漢字で書いたら文字の意味も読 み方も理解できるんだろう。（いつもの規則ではないけど、普通に出来る。）

(Done in Japanese for the practice, English follows:)

My case is the exact opposite of Pierrot's. Latin grammar kicks my ass with all of its rules (I can never remember all the verb conjugations). With Japanese if you can use the particles properly you're pretty well on the right track. Furthermore, kanji (for me at least) simplifies the learning of Japanese because it forms your system of roots, as Latin and Greek do for Western languages. If you come across a word you haven't seen before that's written in kanji, but know the readings and/or meanings of the characters, you can often make a decent guess at what the word means. Doesn't apply in all cases (see: 大人), but it works more often than not.

[Henjin]

Geat reading, this thread is...

I was suprised to see some say that they can speak it better than they can write or read. I'm the opposite. I was able to read and understand everything posted in Japanese in this thread, but had someone spoken it all to me, I sincerely doubt I would've understood even half of it. I suppose that's due to a complete lack of conversation practice. The only times I've been able to converse have been via the internet, so I still have a lot of trouble understanding the spoken language. And as for writing, since I use the IME so much, I can only write a few (couple dozen) kanji from memory, though I can read several hundred.

[Xenotrauma]

I have the same problem with writing Henjin... the IME has made me lazy as -hell-. The ONLY times I will write with my hand is if I'm in a class, and some teacher decides that we need to. Other than that... I have the IME for word, message boards, everything!

Hopefully some of the guys actually living there can help me out on this one. I'd love to memorize the stroke order and bust my ass practicing to make sure I can write thousands of legible kanji... but it's so hard to do that when the only thing I can imagine me writing with my hand is my -name-. Any examples of when you actually get to flaunt your kanji-spouting skrillz?

[Beebs]

3rd Japanese lesson:

JP Teacher: For now, know that ～ます form can be used to speak in the present or future. However, there are...
Me: ?!?! Wait! I can use only one conjugation to speak in two tenses??
JP Teacher: Well, yeah. There's more to it than that but...
Me: WOW! Game on!
JP Teacher: But wait, there's...
Me: I...said...GAME-ON!!!!

I don't think there is a font size big enough to write an appropiately-sized "OWNED" to reflect how bad I had me arse handed to me in the lessons that followed.

I can relate to PLF's comment about ordering pizza. I spent an hour with my teacher one day going over Pizza Hut vocab, questions and possible complications. It retrospect, it barely helped given how quickly they spoke. I was getting so stressed out trying to understand them, I'd take a quick shot of rum to ease the nerves before I picked up the phone.

[Kragar]

Japanese? Easy?

..........BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Last time I was in the states, my parents showed me a newspaper article that said Japanese was ranked the #1 hardest language for native English speakers to learn.

I'm curious why they said that. Japanese is kind of hard, but I found Russian to be much more difficult. Japanese doesn't have the illogically applied case system or gender that Russian does, and it doesn't have the hellacious consonant clusters.

Once you get over the alienness of the Japanese and realize that the only way to learn things is to memorize them, it isn't that confusing. At most two types of endings for verbs and adjectives, clear grammatical markers, etc.

Of course, there's also the kanji, which is a different story. Multiple readings, multiple alphabets.... Not fun.

[hapacheese]

Actually, Japanese is the hardest language in the world to learn to read/write. It is the only language that mixes two different writing systems (pictographs and phonetic alphabet).

[Bliss]

Oh great, Russian and Japanese, the two languages I wanna learn. I am screwed.

[Kaji]

Seriously, kanji aren't that bad. If they were seriously as bad as Westerners make them out to be, they would have been discarded long ago. Fact of the matter is, there are numerous elements to each character that if learned will make it much easier to place the characters into logical groups and make them easier to remember/reconstruct. Half the reason why kanji is so hard for many people is that they never bother to learn stroke order or radicals, and instead choose to assume that they either know the character or they don't (which is one hell of a logical fallacy when dealing with kanji)

[MFDub]

Kanji is the devil's language. Honestly, for me, that is the most difficult part of the Japanese language. Both reading and writing gives me a hard time and since sometimes they teach us our vocab through Kanji, I often find myself forgetting simple words. Like 'cow'. I can't remember the word for cow. I remember milk, but not cow.

The problem with Kanji is that it seems rather pointless. Yes, if you read a newspaper and two words that have the same pronounciation but different Kanji appear, it can help you differentiate between them. However, odds are you're going to have to figure out the meaning of the words through context anyway. Let's admit it, that's how Japanese works. Context, context, context. Which basically means, you're screwed, you're screwed, you're screwed. If you're going to be working out the meaning of certain word through context, anyway, then the Kanji serves no real purpose. But you have to memorize it because the hiragana sure as heck isn't going to be handed to you and trying to read without some Kanji is like trying to read with bulletholes in your paper.

The grammar is also difficult, for many of the reasons stated above. However, I feel like I could manage it if there wasn't so much more that we had to focus on. Also, I'd like to recommend a book to every single person on this forum.

"Making Sense of Japanese" by Jay Rubin. It's a small little book that covers some of the more difficult patterns in Japanese. It's nice because it's written by an English professor who teaches Japanese and he cuts out a lot of the bullshit you see in some textbooks. He has, by far, the best description of giving and receiving and the causative, which we all know is a headache.

[Vaste]

Anyhow, after some 5 years of French here in Sweden I'm still stumped by the simplest sentence. Not to mention the grammer. Irregular verbs? 5x5 charts per word with conjugations? la/le confusion? *brrr*

Yet, after 1 year of Japanese I didn't feel I had that much of a problem communicating with native speakers. Granted, my hearing comprehension was better than my ability to speak, and I can't say I understood everything they said to each other either. But I didn't find it that difficult to use the grammer I had learned. (Though combining forms like 買わせられない required some time and effort.) But then again, I didn't exactly discuss the subtle details of Confucius teachings, so I can't really say how deep the rabbit hole goes, I suppose.

Also, about the word order being different and the lack of subject. Why is that so difficult? Obviously a word-by-word translation doesn't work, but does it ever? Rather, we gradually learned how to say things in Japenese first, only then being able to translate into Japanese. I can't really say I ever had much problems with it being different from Swedish (which is very similar to English here).

Reading though, is a completely different beast. Hard. There's lot's of kanji.

About being able to read lots of kanji but not write them. There's really quite some difference. Being able to write them, means you must know exactly how they look, not just being able to recognize them. The latter might easily lead to mistaking unknown kanji as known ones. E.g. I had the hardest time figuring out what 猫く meant, something relating to a painting. Of course it was in fact 描く. Although, I suppose that's not a problem once one got the first 2000 down. (Which may take a while, depending on how much one studies.)

Last time I was in the states, my parents showed me a newspaper article that said Japanese was ranked the #1 hardest language for native English speakers to learn.Luckily I'm not a native English speaker. :p

[Kragar]

Actually, Japanese is the hardest language in the world to learn to read/write. It is the only language that mixes two different writing systems (pictographs and phonetic alphabet).

Maybe, but I don't think they have the random collection of spelling rules that is English. We have spelling conventions from at least four different languages in common use (Germanic, French, Latin and Greek). It seems every other language on the planet has had some type of spelling reform. Why can't we?

[Kragar]

Oh great, Russian and Japanese, the two languages I wanna learn. I am screwed.

They're actually both kinda fun. They're a lot of work, but worth it. I love both of the languages, but I've always liked challenges.

Oh, and I wanted to point out that, if you tell most people you're studying a foreign language, they think you're a frickin genius. It really got on my nerves when I was studying Chinese. Every time I mentioned that I was studying it, or planning on going overseas to continue studying it, people would stare at me goggle-eyed, and say, "Wow, you are so smart." If I were really smart, I'd let the Chinese learn English and speak to me in my native tongue.

Languages are not that hard. They just require time and consistent effort.

[hapacheese]

A good friend of mine learned Russian *and* Japaense simultaneously.

It's doable, apparently :D

[Azrael]

I can read a decent number of kanji, but I can't write them. I'm actually learning that a lot of Japanese people are getting pretty bad with writing kanji too. Because of cell phone email, word processors, and things like that, the occasions to write kanji are becoming fewer and fewer.

Oh, and to answer the post above, some of what may make Japanese hard...

-- Kanji. This just might be public offender number 1. In order to fluently read Japanese, you have to know around 2000-2500 kanji. Many kanji have more than one meaning. Most kanji have at least 2 different readings, possibly more. Then you combine kanji, and the meanings/readings aren't always crystal clear just from looking at them.

-- Japanese uses different language constructs for men and women as well. For all you Naruto fans out there, didja know that Orochimaru talks like an old woman?

-- Several different levels of "politeness", as well as in-group/out-group scenarios will can completely alter a sentence.

-- Particles. You will never, ever, ever, ever completely understand particles, having not been born Japanese. More or less every Japanese teacher I had said "study all you like, you will never understand it. The sooner you accept this, the easier your life will become."

-- I kind of hate the counting system myself. One book, one bird, one dog, one glass of beer, one person, one day, one month, the first of the month, one piece of paper, and one thing all utilize different language. And there's probably lots that I missed there.

-- I dunno about other languages, but Japanese doesn't directly translate into English AT ALL. Even if you memorized all the vocab in the world, your Japanese will sound funny unless you know how a Japanese person would convey the thought in your head.

-- Describers. I've seen sentences that were two lines long, whose sole purpose was to describe a noun.

-- Regional dialects. Study up on that textbook-approved Tokyo dialect. Then come to Kansai and find you have no idea what people are saying. Older folks use a somewhat different form of Japanese as well (Heihachi in Tekken 5 anyone?) that can be hard to understand.

-- Slang. Meccha yabai yo.

[Kragar]

In a way, I'm learning both at the same time while also learning Chinese. I live in Taiwan, and I came here to study Chinese. I have a bunch of friends who are Russian or who speak Russian, and I had studied it in college and started getting back into it. I also started taking Japanese classes, because you need Japanese if you are going to pursue anything serious in the Asian region.

Like I said, languages aren't hard. They just require time and effort. You don't learn them overnight. Every word feels like a victory if you let it.

[Kaji]

Example of kanji skills put to use:

比べる = kuraberu = to compare (Chinese reading of 'hi')
較べる = same as above = same as above (just a more complex character for it, with a Chinese reading of 'kaku')
比較 = 2 different kanji meaning "to compare" = "comparison"

Many of your する verbs are formed in this fashion.

Another common pattern for する verbs is to put the essence of a sentence into two characters. Case in point: 開店

開く = aku = to open (Chinese reading: kai)
店 = mise = store (Chinese reading: ten)

As a result, if you're aware of the meaning of the two charcters, you don't need to worry about the fact that you don't know the Chinese readings offhand because you know what the word means. In this case, 開店する is a verb which means 店を開ける (to open a store for the business day). If you remember your pairings of kanji, then 閉店 becomes obvious as well, as 閉める (shimeru) is the opposite of 開ける.

Prepositional phrases work the same way as する verbs, in terms of kanji. Continuing with the shop example, we'll look at 店内.

店 = mise/TEN = shop
内 = uchi/NAI = inside of

Therefore, 店内 = 店の内に, or "inside the shop".

Once you learn to look for these patterns, it becomes amazingly easy to understand a fair amount of written Japanese, even if you haven't seen it before, with a knowledge of a meager couple hundred characters (last I checked the most common 500 made up about 80% of all kanji used...)

[Pierrot le Fou]

Kanji is really helpful to me. Take Kaji's post. I had no idea what the first kanji compound he used was read as, and I still don't, but I understood its meaning because I knew the two kanji which composes it.

Looking at the English, I know that 立場 is position. But I didn't know that word in Japanese. The word 立つ means 'to stand' and 場 is 'place' roughly (in a not necessarily physical sense). So the place where one stands is one's position, no?

It is not just from context, because I don't need to see the words around it to understand what that word meant. Kanji helped me out there.

I am rather odd in the way I learned Japanese. I took it for 2 years in school, failed out of it, and decided that my teacher could go take it up the arse rather than me having to 'gaman' through her crappy lessons. Then I came to Japan, and haven't bothered to study since. It took me a year to become competent at speaking (in the sense of being able to switch politeness levels, and have discussions on just about anything while thinking in Japanese alone). Now entering year three, I am able to read probably around 1,000 kanji through context, even if I confuse things like 吉田 and 古田 because they look similar.

I find Japanese to be insanely difficult, not because of rules, or because of grammar, but because the language is spoken in one country, is the product of one culture, and is only used natively by one group of people. 80% of English speakers are non-native. That means that the usage in English is not set to express one cultural outlook on the world due to its widespread usage, and the flexibility of it to describe so many things. In English if we don't have a word for something, we adopt a word from a language that does have it.

In Japanese if they don't have the word for something, they take an English word, and switch around the meaning until it has relatively little bearing on what the English actually means. To top it off, they have tons of terms to refer only to the Japanese mindset and culture that cannot be understood or explained in English without an understanding of that culture.

If I were to translate お疲れ様です I would do so as, "Thank you for your hard work" despite the fact that it doesn't mean that. It literally means, "Honourable tired one."

Now quite frankly, if you were to say "Honourable tired one" to someone who just finished work in English, nobody would understand, it and it would just seem kind of odd. That's because in Japan, the culture is big on people working hard, and the expectation is that you are tired after working hard, and therefore it is thanking them for working until they became tired.

Take also 失礼します which I would translate as, "Please forgive my interruption" which is pretty-much the same translation I'd give お邪魔します. Obviously they don't mean the same thing. 失礼します means "I am being rude" literally, and is generally used when you enter someone else's office in a work situation, or you are trying to be polite and move by coworkers, or somesuch. お邪魔します literally means "I am interrupting" and is said when you enter someone else's house.

But neither works in the English mindset as a literal translation, and there is no real way to translate them.

Before you eat you say いただきます which means "I will (humbly) eat" but is more like "Thank you for this meal" in some way. Impossible to translate again, without understanding the cultural context.

And there are dozens, THOUSANDS of these untranslatable terms, from 頑張 to 和. That makes it a hard language, because these terms that you cannot learn from a dictionary or through English or memorization are so fundamental to the language, culture, and communication of Japanese that you need to use them. Anyone can learn translation tables. That's easy. Anyone can learn kanji. That's easy with time and effort. You cannot communicate effectively without an understanding of the cultural context that the language exists in, that is so unique to Japan and Japan alone.

And that's part of the problem that the Japanese have with English. I'm always asked to translate 挨拶 (greetings) or other cultural terms into English, but there just isn't a translation, because the culture is so different. And without any concept of the culture that the language is used it, it will be very difficult to explain how to use English as a communicative language, rather than just how to explain Japanese concepts. That's part of the reason their English textbooks are so screwed -- they focus on the explanation of Japanese rather than on the communication of English.

It is hard to explain to a Japanese person that "How are you?" does not mean 元気ですか？ (lit. "Are you energetic?") despite the fact that we use them interchangeably. That's the reason the Japanese always answer, "I am fine thank you" rather than giving an actual honest answer to the question. They don't understand the question, and there is no way to translate the question into Japanese, because there just isn't the cultural context for it.

Japanese is a hard language, both technically and culturally. The speaking and communicating bit is the most difficult part, and when your only experience with foreign languages is European ones, then you're focusing on the technical differences instead of the cultural ones.

Yes, there are no gendered adjectives and verbs in Japanese. That doesn't make it easy. There is also no subject in Japanese, which means you have to understand who's being spoken about through context. There is no verb form to help you.

So until you can sit down and have a conversation in Japanese, please refrain from saying that it is easy, and anyone who thinks it is hard is full of shit. Because there are those of us, like Az and I, who find Japanese to be very difficult despite being able to communicate in it.

[Xenotrauma]

-- Describers. I've seen sentences that were two lines long, whose sole purpose was to describe a noun.

Now I'm scared, I can't even picture that ^^; Anyone have an example of a brutal meaty describer?

[hapacheese]

...then you try reading the newspaper for the first time, and you feel like crying :D

For all you Japanese-ly challenged, see if you can make sense of this:

ブドウクシティで暗殺を阻止し、ミズホゴ保護区に墜落してしまった僧侶のシャトルを、ジュリアの妹代わりの 女性：イングリッドの協力で救出したマーク達は、ホラク騎士団へと招かれる。

Names have been changed to keep my NDA in tact (and my job), but this was forwarded to me by a coworker to see if I could make any sense out of it. Once you learn to parse the sentence, it's terribly easy, but until that point, your brain is like, "Guh?"

[Kragar]

Kanji always reminded me of German, in that you can see each part of the word, so it kind of makes sense how they go together and have a larger meaning. English does that too, but it's much more hidden.

It doesn't always mean what you would think it means, though.


It is hard to explain to a Japanese person that "How are you?" does not mean 元気ですか？ (lit. "Are you energetic?") despite the fact that we use them interchangeably.

In Taiwanese, they always ask, "Have you eaten?" or more literally, "Have you eaten your fill?" It plays the same role, but can't be taken at face value.

A lot of langauges are like that -- idiomatic use of words are the hardest part of learning them. I mean, anyone can look up a word in the dictionary, but it takes a while to figure out all the words associated with any given word. "Sugar and..."? There's logical way of knowing the next word, but any native English speaker probably will. You just have to roll with it.

[hapacheese]

Oh, and a lot of times, Japanese simply don't finish their sentences, assuming you know what they mean.

「すみません、斉藤さんが見当たらないんですが．．．」
「私はこうしたほうがいいのではないかと．．．」

:)

[Frankey-eh]

about reginal dialects... I have a hard time understanding what's the big deal about them. (granted, I grew up in kantou)

1. In elementary school, I found a series of book in the library that deals with it. I told my friends, and they called me crazy. No such thing exists in Japan, they said.

2. In second grade, we took a road trip around the southern end of Japan. I don't remember hearing one single kansai or any other regional dialects.

3. So maybe I was still too young then, but this summer, I spent all my time in Kansai, and not a single person used that to speak to me. The only non-standard jpn I heard was a mom speaking to her kid, and only her voice rose up and down a little differently.

So I'm saying that a person living in Japan for six years have never encountered anything other than hyoujungo. I find it a little strange that Az would include it in a list of things a foreigner must learn...

[Frankey-eh]

Oh, and a lot of times, Japanese simply don't finish their sentences, assuming you know what they mean.

「すみません、斉藤さんが見当たらないんですが．．．」
「私はこうしたほうがいいのではないかと．．．」

:)

yep yep. I do that ^^ Even in English. and then, my friends get annoyed...

[hapacheese]

rika: Remember that Az lives in the thick of kansai-ben territory (as does pierrot). So chances are, they get exposed to it a lot more.

But guys... if you're having trouble with kansai-ben, *never* travel to northern Japan (Aomori, etc). You know that the dialect is bad when they have to provide subtitles *on Japanese TV* just so the damn Japanese can understand it :D

[Azrael]

I've only been here two years, and I've noticed the differences.

At first, I didn't understand A WORD any of the kids in the Ghetto School would say to me because it was all in heavy Kansai-ben. Maybe "Ah, Jefu nanya! Doko ikun?" isn't that grammatically different from "Ah, Jefu da yo! Doko iku?", but to a non-native speaker it can be hard to pick up.

I remember being at the Board of Education, and one of the guys on the phone answered with "Ah, sore wa wakarahenkatta desu." ...Grammatically speaking, that's probably horrible Japanese. But it flies here. And I hear it often. I also hear "Ah, gomen nasai, Yamazaki-san wa ima sekiharun desu kedo..." This is something I did not learn in textbooks.

Down here, the "chou" used in Tokyo becomes "meccha". I noticed people using chou when I went to Tokyo, and occasionally hear it on TV. But I never hear it down here. Oh, and "honma" replaces "hontou".

I also had to ask what "Maido!" and "Ookii ni!" meant.

[Kragar]

That reminds me of some movie that I saw on the independent film channel. It was in English, but the accents were so thick that they subtitles. It's not just Japanese.

It also reminds me of the book a Year in Provence. The author spent most of the first chapter explaining the difficulties of buying a vinyard and retiring in the South of France, the bastard. One of his problems is the French that they speak down there doesn't resemble textbook French at all. Accent, speed, vocabulary -- all wrong.

Then again, I look at the rediculous things in English that I have to teach my students. It might be the textbooks that are the problem.

[Kaji]

That reminds me of some movie that I saw on the independent film channel. It was in English, but the accents were so thick that they subtitles. It's not just Japanese.

That happens with Jamaicans a lot. I once ran into a Scottish girl with an accent so heavy I thought she was speaking Serbian or some similar Slavic language...ended up being slightly embarrassed when the lady next to her explained that she WAS speaking English when I asked for a translation...

[Kragar]

And Az should be happy that his Japanese at least partially works. In the remote regions of Taiwan, the speak an entirely different language called Taiwanese. Sure, they call it a 'dialect' of Chinese, but that's like saying English is a dialect of German. It's that different.

[Pierrot le Fou]

There is a JET in our prefecture (I think his name is Gordon, is that right Az?) who had a Scottish accent so thick that I kept asking him to repeat himself in small group discussions. I was f'ing shocked to death at how incomprehensible he was.

Learn proper English! I mean for crissakes, if I can understand someone who's 3rd language is English and lives in India, you guys can learn to speak properly too! Or at least get taught Canadian English in school or something for crissakes.

As far as dialects go, yeah, Kansai-ben is pretty heavy (but far easier here in Kyoto than in Osaka). Let me just tell you that I had a lot of trouble when I first got here with the Kyoto-ben though.

仕事で何をしますか？ becomes 仕事で何をしはりますか？ or 仕事で何をしはるんですか？

Pain in my arse indeed.

But really really heavy Osaka-ben (like my girlfriend's mother speaks at time) is nigh incomprehensible. So many words change. So many grammar forms change. And ehime-ben was pretty bad too.

タバコがガイヤくさけん！いけんも！

It's incredibly insane. Plus even when speaking normally, the intonation is crazy. It's like, 私はつり【fishing】が好き…｡｡｡．．．..よ

They pause for an hour before giving this SUPER sentence-ender.

But the ～けん and ガイヤ！ were driving me absolutely nuts. Everything was 何とかいけん！ and whatnot.

[Kragar]

I knew a Scottish guy here who I had difficulty understanding, and I'm good at picking through accents. e was a friend's boyfriend, and I used to go drinking with him. As bad as he was sober, he was incomprehensible drunk. I don't know how my friend understood him at all.* There was a time when Scots English was considered a different language, and I guess in their hearts, they never forgot.

*Then again, she might not have cared what he was saying.

[Henjin]

*Wonders where all the "Japanese is easy!!" people went*

I'm enjoying this thread so much... Though it's kinda depressing because it's driving home the fact that with no bachelor degree, I'm never gonna become fluent.

[nice gaijin]

bachelor degrees guarantee nothing. If i study abroad for a year I can get a bachelors in Japanese, and I can almost guarantee you I won't be fluent, despite my best efforts. The key is practice, perserverance, and lots of time. Immersion only speeds up the process, but a degree just gives confidence (when it's sometimes undeserved).

[hanacker]

Yeah, but while that's how you'd spell it, almost everyone sounds like なんでやねぇ。 The trailing ～ん sound isn't really vocalized that heavily. At least to my ears ;) Of course I mess up shizzy like that all the time. しや vs. しゃ vs. しあ. Pain in my arse.

I've always heard the "～ん" pretty clearly. It could just be my imagination or my girlfriend could pronounce it more distinctly than most people do, but I think I can usually hear it.

I can read a decent number of kanji, but I can't write them. I'm actually learning that a lot of Japanese people are getting pretty bad with writing kanji too. Because of cell phone email, word processors, and things like that, the occasions to write kanji are becoming fewer and fewer.

Definitely. I did ok in school at kanji but once I got into the real world I forgot how to write so many of them. I had no problem recognizing them, but since I was mainly typing in Japanese I rarely got a chance to hand-write them. Japanese people forget how to write difficult Kanji every once in a while. They also use a whole lot of shorthand for Kanji which makes it especially hard to read (writing a seven-stroke kanji in four strokes for example. I don't remember any good examples offhand though, since I never really learned how to write like that).

I guess it's really the opposite problem (reading and not writing), but in my old office it took ten minutes of searching to find a guy who actually knew how to pronounce a kanji from the address of the building we worked in. Place names can be really hard to know how to read. People can't even agree on the correct pronunciation of the most popular trainline in Japan (the 山手 (Yamate) or 山の手 (Yamanote) line).

Edit: And it also took me a while to realize that even if you live in Kansai, you generally don't write in dialect. I wrote 本間に... and my friend didn't know what I meant. "Oh I thought that was the kanji for 'Honma'", I replied. I guess it technically is, but nobody uses that.

[Monkey]

*Wonders where all the "Japanese is easy!!" people went*

I'm enjoying this thread so much... Though it's kinda depressing because it's driving home the fact that with no bachelor degree, I'm never gonna become fluent.


I went to sleep :P

Maybe I was a little overboard in saying it was easy. So many people were saying it's hard though and that really ticked me off :D

The only tricky parts I found when i lived in Japan were the slang (including the regional dialects) but most people you asked explained them to you. When I was in Osaka for example, people would be quite helpful in explaining Osaka-ben to the funny foreigner.

I also found the best way to deal with slang and unknown dialects too. Just pick out the verbs from the sentence and ignore the bizarre endings. Nine times out of Ten you know what they are talking about anyway (whether they are talking past or present, that sort of thing) so most of the time I found little trouble in understanding them even though there was a little guess work at the end :D

When I got home or I could talk to a friend about the strange endings, then I would puzzle them out. Whilst I'm out and about though, I just take it on faith and a little bit of linguistic intuition. :rolleyes:

[Henjin]

bachelor degrees guarantee nothing. If i study abroad for a year I can get a bachelors in Japanese, and I can almost guarantee you I won't be fluent, despite my best efforts. The key is practice, perserverance, and lots of time. Immersion only speeds up the process, but a degree just gives confidence (when it's sometimes undeserved).

I meant the only path to fluency is immersion, and w/out a BA, I can't get a working visa, so I can't stay in the country for an extended period of time. That's all.

[Vaste]

Well, I'm aware of all those things mentioned here. Japanese does have a disproportionally large amount of idiom phrases. Kanji's a pain 'till you've learned them, when they start becoming an aid instead. Their only problem is the sheer number of them (And their multiple readings.)

Counters, yay, Japanese's attempt to make up for lack of gendered nouns. (Think 2 sheets of paper, but everything has it.) Politeness levels, well doesn't exactly help but not that difficult either.

All in all, I still don't find it that difficult. Maybe I'm just overestimating other languages, and haven't got enough to compare with. (E.g. I never really dived very deep into French.) If so, then I really ought to learn another language.

[Henjin]

Counters, yay, Japanese's attempt to make up for lack of gendered nouns. (Think 2 sheets of paper, but everything has it.) Politeness levels, well doesn't exactly help but not that difficult either.

I think you mean 'plural' nouns. Gender doesn't really have anything to do w/ it.

And according to Edict, 「ほんま」is 「本真」, short for 「ほんまこと」. Interesting.

[Vaste]

I think you mean 'plural' nouns. Gender doesn't really have anything to do w/ it.I was thinking of genders like in German/Swedish/French/Spanish.

en/ett in Swedish, die/der/das (I think) in German, la/le in French, la/el in Spanish.

[Kragar]

I think he means makes up for the complexity of gendered nouns by having the complexity of counters.

It's funny. I got into a discussion about this earlier with one of my Japanese classmates. She keeps freaking out about all the "exceptions" when counting. I said, "pair of pants, loaf of bread, sheet of paper, cup of sugar." That doesn't include pride of lions, herd of cow, lump of coal, etc. Counters are only hard because they try to give them to you all at once, and they're in a foreign language. I'm sure if you're a native speaker, you'd say that the right counter is just describing the actual form of the thing you're counting.

Thought I also know that Chinese has the same complex system of counters, but that's easily replaced by "ge" at all times when you're not sure of the proper counter. It makes you sound uneducated, but people understand you.

[koku]

"for native english learners to learn."

doesn't neccesarily mean it's the hardest no? So many people just make the mistake and think they can learn it and structgure it like english with different words. If you try to understand how japanese people think as a language it gets much easier. Also to the point where you can guess stuff you don't know ahead of time.

I'll read up to page 4 and edit this later, but for now, my arguement goes as this:

#1. The classes are brainlessly easy. Can't blame me for what I've been exposed to. Only way for me to learn it, is through classes. year 1, 2 or 3 it's not going to matter. The one's that are disagreeing with me completly because I said it was easy, take a class here. Something gets explained, learned, then you waist almost a week until the slow people who are still not grasping this is a seperate langauge with seperate rules to figure it out.

Two, challenging or not, I welcome it. If 20 million people learn it it can't be that impossible. I guess it's hard for me to voice my opinion because it seems like i'm taking credit away from all the people here who are fluent or near fluent.

The recieving and giving though....I don't see how that can't be learned. And i've done independant study for Kanji...I think it's much easier than learning spellings for new words constantly(like you would in english). I'd rather use ideograms and compounds of them.

Mabye I should restate, Japanese taught in american colleges makes it seem very easy. And for the record, there were a few posters who are in year 3 and 4 that say the same things. So you can't be too harsh on me for being an early student.

carry on, i have to go pay for a speeding ticket, but first i"ll defend it.

I just don't like hearing "omfg it's so hard! you must be a f'n genius."

If it was that hard I should be struggling already. If it was that hard, year 3 students shoudln't be telling me it's easy.

In my opinion chinese would be alot harder to learn, ALOT.

[Vaste]

I've actually heard that Chinese is the easier one once one gets over the pronunciation. Regarding reading that just might be so. I'd guess the multiple reading of kanji in Japanese makes quite some difference. (I've heard that there's normally 1 reading per character in Chinese.) Also, the grammer is supposed to be dead easy. But really, I've no idea. Someone knowledgeable who could enlighten us?

[Frankey-eh]

since we're on Chinese dialects, I remember a TV show I watched in Japan, where the challenge was to talk to a family or friend who speaks a regional dialect and converse with standard Japanese. In other words, they'll be using the dialect, and you have to answer in standard. For every time you slip back into regional, you get one point marked down. It was really hularius, I stayed up until two watching it and laughed until tears spilled out.

but putting aside the funny parts, I realized learning dialects in China is MUCH easier than in Japan. Because the dialects are so different, it's easy to distinguish them. But in Japan, the dialects are only half similar, so it's easy to slip back into regional.

I mean, one girl forgot how to speak standard and another guy ran a penalty of -60 after his conversation with his mom, where his mom accused him of smoking, and how disappointed she was.

maybe some people have seen it...?

[Kragar]

In my opinion chinese would be alot harder to learn, ALOT.

Have you ever tried? It is, by God, one of the easiest languages in the world to speak. There are no conjugations, no inflections, no noun markers, no plurals, no gender, no agreement of any kind except counters. Chinese always say that their language has no grammar, and they certainly get by with a bare minimum. Almost all verbs get by with the same rules, except 'to have' (you), which has its own negative (mei you) and is very common.

Each syllable is fixed, and once you learn all the basic sounds of the language, you know how to say everything. There are no contractions (except in the Beijing accent), so everything is said the same way almost any time it shows up. There are a few exceptions, where one syllable might change tone or even pronunciation , but they are truly exceptions and very rare. If you can figure out the tones once, you never have to think about them again.

There are a few levels of formality, but nothing compared to Japanese. It doesn't even compare with most European languages, and is probably closest to English. Formality is expressed through word choice and not grammar.

There is a lot of idioms and idiomatic usage of words, but that's true for any language. I haven't run into anything as illogical as "going nuts" to mean crazy, though. The leaps in logic usually aren't that large, or are based on some famous book written thousands of years ago.

Admittedly, they also have the problem of characters. They aren't _that_ bad. I keep forgetting how to write them, but after a few months you get used to reading them and they do make a sort of sense. Words that use the same radicals (parts of the character) often have similar pronunciation, so it's a good way to remind yourself how to read things. It's not always true, but it's not completely free-form.

At the end of the day, the more Chinese I understand the more I wonder why we bother with all of the grammatical and orthographical nonsense we put up with. No more the! No more n't! No more -ing, -ed, irregular past tenses, etc. They just need to switch to an alphabetical system and then no one will talk about it being a difficult language.

[Kragar]

but putting aside the funny parts, I realized learning dialects in China is MUCH easier than in Japan. Because the dialects are so different, it's easy to distinguish them.

Dialects in Chinese aren't. They're part of the myth of the Eternally Unified China that plagues anyone who comes into contact with the country. Chinese dialects are, for the most part, more distinct and varied than the Romance or Slavic languages. With the exception of Hakka, knowledge of Mandarin will not help you understand or be understood by any other dialect speaker.

European languages often go to the other extreme, giving a language two or more names because it is spoken in more than one coutnry. Flemish/Walloon springs immediately to mind. A friend of mine told me that the Southern Slavic languages are basically interchangeable, and are considered distinct languages only for political/patriotic reasons.

[Pierrot le Fou]

The reason 3rd and 4th year Japanese students say that Japanese is easy is because they don't know shit. I have taken 2 years of 'proper' Japanese study, and I failed one semester, but I could stomp all over them in any sort of Japanese conversation practice in a heartbeat. They don't know shit, and neither do you kokujin.

Japanese as a studied language, and as a language you communicate in, are entirely different. If you can come here at your current level and communicate in any sort of a level equivalent to me, then I'll eat my shoe. Otherwise, you're just talking smack because you're batting in little leagues and are claiming that when you make it to the big leagues, that it will be easy because you can bat 400 when playing with 8 year-olds.

[CopraSanctum]

Actually, some major chinese dialects are quite similar. Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, and Mandarin (originally Beijing's dialect) share most of their vocabularies; the difference lies mainly in the pronunciation and intonation.
The other chinese dialects, like Fuzhou and Shanghainese, are so radically different that I can't notice any similarity.

[Henjin]

Kokujin must be fluent in Japanese... Afterall, reading his posts, he seems like an ESL student.

[Kragar]

Actually, some major chinese dialects are quite similar. Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, and Mandarin (originally Beijing's dialect) share most of their vocabularies; the difference lies mainly in the pronunciation and intonation.

What kind of contact have you had with the various dialects? I've studied Mandarin for years (three in the States, two in Taiwan), and I've been around Cantonese, Taiwanese (Southern Hokkien) and Hakka. Of these, the only one that made _any_ sense was Hakka, and that was still difficult.

Yes, when you sit down and analyze the vocabulary, you can see that they spring from the same place, but that doesn't help you when they're going by at the speed of sound. Pronunciation and intonation can make a big difference.

I said before that the languages are as different as German and English, and I stand by that. Looking at a page of German text, you can see that the two languages are clearly related, but that doesn't help you when you're trying to order food in Munich. Even with my years of Mandarin, I couldn't get the cabbie to take me to Kowloon (man: jiuleng) any way except pointing to a map.

Edit: oh, and Mandarin is from the region around Beijing, not Beijing itself. Beijing has that nasty retroflex at the end of a number of words (nali --> nar, hua --> huar) that is not in standard Putonghua.

[Henjin]

I learned like 3 words in Chinese (Mandarin) from watching Singaporean TV. Wish I knew how to write them, though.

But hey, based on that, CHINESE IS EASY! I learned 3 words in a few weeks. I should be fluent by next season. :p

[hapacheese]

Hey Henjin! Check yer damn PMs!!!! ;)

[Frankey-eh]

Even with my years of Mandarin, I couldn't get the cabbie to take me to Kowloon (man: jiuleng) any way except pointing to a map.

Um... maybe because you need to use Cantonese with them? Since it's in HK territory, and they don't speak Mandarin...?

In terms of 'easy', I was saying that you don't get them confused. If someone was to say a sentence, you can easily tell it's Cantonese or Mandarin. But if someone was to say a sentence in Japanese, you don't know if it's regional or standard. Plus, Cantonese is a lot common for a regional. Pratically everywhere except schools and official places uses Cantonese in Canton.

example: I've been exposed to cantonese all my life. I used to know only one Mandarin: Ni hao. And even then, I could live in canton (take taxi, buy food, go out to restaurant, shopping/haggling, etc.)

But it's not the same in Japanese regionals. Regionals are like an arm of the person, while the standard is the body itself. You can't survive with just an arm. You need the body too.

[Henjin]

Um... maybe because you need to use Cantonese with them? Since it's in HK territory, and they don't speak Mandarin...?

In terms of 'easy', I was saying that you don't get them confused. If someone was to say a sentence, you can easily tell it's Cantonese or Mandarin. But if someone was to say a sentence in Japanese, you don't know if it's regional or standard.

I don't know how true that really is... it all depends on familiarity. I mean, I don't know Mandarin from Cantonese, but I can ususally tell if something's Kansai-ben... It's only easy if you're familiar with it.

[Kragar]

Um... maybe because you need to use Cantonese with them? Since it's in HK territory, and they don't speak Mandarin...?

Sorry, I was trying to give a practical example of how knowledge of one _didn't_ help with the others. I know I needed Cantonese, but I didn't have it . English didn't work so I tried something else. That didn't work either.

example: I've been exposed to cantonese all my life. I used to know only one Mandarin: Ni hao. And even then, I could live in canton (take taxi, buy food, go out to restaurant, shopping/haggling, etc.)

Question: I had a Vietnamese classmate at one point in time who said that Cantonese and Vietnamese were quite similar. Have you ever dealt with Vietnamese? Was it similar to Cantonese?

[StormShadow]

I have been speaking to a co-worker who is learning Japanese, and I am learning Korean. From my comparison Korean is more difficult. For example, in Korean, there is no differance between plural and singular unless otherwise noted. eg. u-bang either means "breast" or "breasts". Unless you say something like '6 breasts'. Also there is a backwards sort of Yoda speak. 'Hungry I am" "Ugly face you have". In one of my study books it even goes on to say that even 2 people from the same city might not say even the same word in the same way. Korean does not have any numbers past 99, so after that, your speaking Chinese. It is one wicked language to learn

[Henjin]

I have been speaking to a co-worker who is learning Japanese, and I am learning Korean. From my comparison Korean is more difficult. For example, in Korean, there is no differance between plural and singular unless otherwise noted. eg. u-bang either means "breast" or "breasts". Unless you say something like '6 breasts'. Also there is a backwards sort of Yoda speak. 'Hungry I am" "Ugly face you have".

That's um... that's exactly like Japanese... How long has this coworker of yours been studying? If at all. Heh.

[StormShadow]

He's been teaching himself for the past month. He says he has been reading books on it, but I think all he does is watch Anime. I try to keep our conversations short cause I don't like thim too much, so I may have not gotten all the information from him.

[Henjin]

Yeah, don't get any more from him. Japanese also doesn't have plural forms for nouns and uses 'SOV' structure.

[StormShadow]

Good to know. I should have known that guy would be wrong. I hate that guy. Korean has been pretty difficult though for me. My gf is Korean, but she can't speak it, so the only person I can talk to is the lady that makes my Teriyaki. Even then, she speaks so damn fast! My favorite phrase is "I don't understand".

[Henjin]

What's 'hello?' I have an idea, but I'm not sure. And 'thanks.'

[StormShadow]

it's "ann-yong ha-sayo". Goodbye is "ann-yong-ghe Ka-sayo". "kam-sa-ham-needa" is thank you. "Tay-da-knee Ka-sa-hamneeda" is thank you very much.

[Xenotrauma]

I thought about taking Korean for my language credit in college (as well as Chinese), but after looking into it I just found standard Korean to be harder for me to understand. I could never follow any transcriptions or sounds, it was always like trying to listen through a door for me... but I'm sure if you could get over the listening thing it would be considerably easier than Japanese. Hangul is -pie-.

[Frankey-eh]

Sorry, I was trying to give a practical example of how knowledge of one _didn't_ help with the others. I know I needed Cantonese, but I didn't have it . English didn't work so I tried something else. That didn't work either.

Heh. You couldn't have picked a worser example. HK is the ONLY place where Mandarin isn't used. Just an hour away in Shenzhen, people will understand mandarin because it's the official language of China. But if that driver didn't know English, he's probably not a native HK-nese either.

henjin:
but isn't it true that there isn't a kansai-ben version for every standard Jpn word? There's only a kansai-ben for the everyday conversation words. That's why, for example, if I said "kagami", you won't know if I'm using regional or standard.

Now, that's not the case in Chinese. For EVERY word, there is a cantonese version and a mandarin version. no matter how similar... like "it hurts" sounds like 'hao ton a' in mandarin with the word 'ton' dropping in the end. and in cantonese, it's 'hou ton na" with 'ton' going flat.

[StormShadow]

Hangul is pie? I went to this Asain store near my work with tons of Japanese stuff, but nothing Korean. I found some cookies, though, and they were great! Yeah, I had one of those taped language assistors, were the guy says something in English, and then repeats it twice in Korean, and each Korean time I swear he said it differantly. I think maybe it was a ploy by Kim Jong Il to screw with Americans.

[truce]

Korean does not have any numbers past 99uhh... what?

[Rupugus]

Japanese is harder to learn if english is your first language, because the thinking is different, the structure is different and the way people use it is different. it is "backwards" from what you're used to in english, and grammar rules are woven together in ways that are impossible to do in english.

I found Japanese alot easier to learn to speak than English.
it took me about 9 years to learn english at my current level of fluency, and after 2.5 years of japanese I feel like I'm at least at the point of learning that I was at during about the 4th year of english learning. and then there's the thing you have to remember about English... for anyone who's first language is not English,
IS MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE.
ever.
too many exceptions to rules and things that you just know. I won't claim japanese is easy by any means, but it's a heck of alot easier than english. it only took me a couple of weeks in kanji class to remember 大人, but I still don't understand why there's 2 frickin Ls in Lincoln, or why "Fuel" and "Mule" have the same "oole" sound but are spelled diffrently..... and a million other things.

"oh you're taking japanese? that must be hard!" "Damn straight, not as hard as English though,"

[StormShadow]

Truce.
Korean has 3 ways to count.

1) Korean. This only goes up to the number 99

2) Shortened Korean. Like taking teh number 1, Hana, and cutting it short Han. This also only goes up to 99 as well

3) Chinese. The lady at the Teriyaki stand understands when I use Chinese numerals. These go way past 99, so they are used for everything above that number.

[akitaka]

When I listen to the workers at Fujiya (a market) talk amongst each other, I don't hear nearly as many idioms as what I or anyone I know would use in a casual English conversation. I'm sure Japanese is riddled with them too (as with most languages), but English feels really dependant on them, until you have to speak formally in, say, a business presentation. Even then, ambiguous terms seem to be apparent (such as the use of words like "always" or "hard"). My JPN teacher seems to have gotten the hang of them, though I don't know any Japanese who's English is nearly as fluent.
Alphabetically, though, Japan takes the cake without a doubt. Its a mind-stab trying to learn 2-3k worth of kanji when you are not native, as opposed to the simple 26 letters of the English alphabet.

By the way, to above posters, you all make me feel really good about learning languages; if Japanese is this bad, then learning other languages won't be the horror that I imagined it to be. I'd try not disagree with anyone on this topic if they have learned more than 3 languages.

[StormShadow]

I had a friend who was learning Japanese, and he once told be you need to know at least 500 characters just to read a Japanese newspaper. And even then, I think your just getting the jist of the articles, not the real meat and potatos of whats going on

[Frankey-eh]

if you're talking about kanji, nothing's worse than Chinese. Japanese do not even compare to Chinese in terms of kanji.

In first grade, I was learning 60 kanji. My cousins in china were learning 1000.

[akitaka]

So how would you rate difficulty in speaking? I know a dude who took the classes and was wound up in the tones.

[StormShadow]

That's crazy! That's one of the reasons I really like learning Korean! Each symbol represents a letter, not a word, so even if you are not sure of the meaning, you can tell from the ending or other characteristics what it means. Kind of like English.

[koku]

flame, flame, flame, i'm better than you.

All right buddy, first off, you failed Japanese in class. Now you're trying to tell me it's difficult.

If you didn't take it seriously enough in class....why should I believe you're making the effort now?

Second off, you can keep all the flames coming but alot of the reasons you struggle with it in your head is because you keep trying to treat it as a subtitute of vocabulary for english. I learned since the first month I started that they have a seperate way of thinking and I'm going to have to get used to that.


Third, you have to read the context of my post. I think japanese is easy when compared to comments like "omfg! japanese!! whooaoa i bet that's hard."

I'm also comparing it to english. English is a fudjing mess. English is very inconsistant. Alot of times, even native speakers will use the ol' "hmmm it sounds right. hmmm it looks right when i read it" method to figure out if soemthing is correct or not; The language is just so out of place sometimes people don't know.

Yes I believe what I'm learning now and what I'd learn by being immersed in the language are two different things.

Yes i give you more credit because you live there and i'm just studying and take what I know from other students who are 1-3rd years.

but I can tell when i'm learning soemthing easily and when the pacing isn't getting difficult at all. Pierro, if you bothered to read any of my posts besides the first one, you'd even realize I changed my arguement to "japanese taught in college."

Everyone's who's flaming me because I challenged your intelligence can all go to hell for all I care. Atleast Az and a couple others had some common sense to just state there opinion and stay respectfull.


*And also, for those of you bitching and complaining, I really wonder how hard you even study Japanese once you're there. I doubt you study as much as you did when you were taking it in college.*

irt Chinese: Good to know it's easy, atleast form your perspective. I think the tones and pronuncation will screw me over at first. It is good news though, because I might start learning Cantonese/Mandarian after I feel i have a solid enough grasp for Japanese that It won't confuse me learning both at once.

This thread's good but i wish some of you people were'nt so f'n rude when someone thinks something you are struggling with is easy or will be easy. And you have to remember when i say easy i mean it doesn't merit the stupid comments I get and the fact that Japanese compared to English doesn't look so tough anymore. Either way, I like challenges so all your comments are only going to irritate me temporarily; I'm only going to look forward to having to work harder.

and Pierre, some of the stuff you complain about in the language

tone
speed
translation

all that stuff can be learned pretty easily if you actually practice it.

p.s. henjin i hope to god you were joking about that esl crap because I place very high in composition. I don't have to try on a forum and i really get irked by snobby people who make comments/assume things on that.(not that i'm assuming you're doing that, but that's what it remdinds me of).

[hanacker]

I think it's also a myth that quantum theory and astrophysics are hard. I made it through high school and 13 years of math no problem so how bad could 4 or 5 more be?

[hapacheese]

kokujin - I think the issue here is that you are coming in and making a general claim about a language that most people have issues with, and with very limited experience. You very well could be great at languages, but you should reserve such commentary until you've had more experience, or have had to actually try to immerse yourself in the culture.

And judging from your comments about your school, you should try the UC Berkeley Japanese Language program :D It's one of the best (and toughest) in the nation. In fact, from what my professors told me, it's the only one in the US that requires undergrads to learn *classical* Japanese.

[hanacker]

All right buddy, first off, you failed Japanese in class. Now you're trying to tell me it's difficult.


Uh, people don't fail stuff because it's easy. The class my brother got by far the lowest grades in in high school was Japanese. I could be wrong but I'd assume he put the same effort into it as his other classes.

[akitaka]

When people insite anger into their replies they, themselves, are asking to be "flamed". There, another ambiguous term. Anyways when it comes to language learning, I generally think it's dependant on ther person, and what language they initially learned.

I can imaginge a Chinese or Korean having an easier time learning Japanese, rather than English. But since this is based on an English > Japanese perspective, things we CAN confirm are difficult are:

-structure
-alphabet
-language evolution/dialects
-formal/informal uses

...basically the backbone of langauges in general. "Easy" for the broad spectrum of learning needs to be more exact; what do YOU find most easy? That's all there really is to it. That, and immersion, as Az/Hapa/Pierrot/Henjin(?) have had.
I think they come off as hard on you because your tone seems too frank. And since they've asked/demanded you to try your aim and write it on this thread (which you had not), the only option for them seems to be to push until you fall down and admit that it's "hard".
Just acknowledge potentially challenging parts, and we won't be aiming too high, I think.

[hanacker]

I think they come off as hard on you because your tone seems too frank.

The reason people are coming off hard on him is that it's like he's telling a math PhD who's complaing about his studies being difficult to "stfu because I totally pwned 3rd grade math in elemntary school. Math is easy!" He's basically saying anyone who ever thought Japanese was difficult is a dumbass. And he hasn't even gotten to the hard part.

[koku]

When people insite anger into their replies they, themselves, are asking to be "flamed".

yeah i know, but pierro's really f'n annoying to me. Constantly insulting me because I disagree with him, and he always thinks he knows everything. I don't know why he's trying to convince me there aren't people in the world who can do all the things he can't, because that's simply not true. It wasn't just this instance but alot of stuff.

Let me ask you this. Have you met any foriegner who really like Japanese, studied it, Traveled over to Japan andlearned it to fluency. A person who claims it wasn't that hard as he thought or others have said, and it was fun. You think everyone who attempts to learn Japanese to fluency runs into major problems??

It always seems like Pierro's like "no no that doesn't exist. shut up stupid teenager i'm better than you."

-but I just had to blow some steam, i'm good now.

And judging from your comments about your school, you should try the UC Berkeley Japanese Language program It's one of the best (and toughest) in the nation. In fact, from what my professors told me, it's the only one in the US that requires undergrads to learn *classical* Japanese eh, financially I'm stuck here for another year. Then if i can save enough money I'll do a semester abroad. The potential for crappy situaion part though is the study abroad trip will be in Akita. I hope to hell I'll be able to seperate the tokyo dialect I learn and the whatever dialect they speak there I'll hear. I wonder if my teacher alone will be like...forcing a tokyo dialect to teach me or if he's going to naturally be a tokyo dialect speaker. ah jeez.

Is that going to really screw up my learning?


The reason people are coming off hard on him is that it's like he's telling a math PhD who's complaing about his studies being difficult to "stfu because I totally pwned 3rd grade math in elemntary school. Math is easy!"

Um....no. I didn't say it like that at all. Infact i'll repeat myself again because it seems no one is reading it. I'm saying its easy when compared to all the extre,e comments people assume. When compared to english. And if you bothered to read any of my posts, in my second one I changed it to "japanese taught at colleges." in respect for the people who are In Japan and still learning/having to learn new things. How many times must I repeat myself? It seems all people want is to read the negative stuff, ignore the compromise and good stuff, just so they can argue. That irks me too.


"just people disagree, doesn't mean they have to rip each others heads off" -


People need to learn that sometimes instead of always looking for fights.



I just want to ask you this. Do you think that there are people who naturally learned Japanese and actually didn't strugle with it? People that eventually moved there, studied still and learned the language, culture, references, and completed that over a couple years?

Do you think people like that exist?

If the answer is yes, then I don't see why we can't leave it at, "well mabye for you. It's hard for me and it's possible you'll sturggle later." Instead of

"rar rar rar how dare you attack my intelligence."

That's what I think.

[akitaka]

The reason people are coming off hard on him is that it's like he's telling a math PhD who's complaing about his studies being difficult to "stfu because I totally pwned 3rd grade math in elemntary school. Math is easy!" He's basically saying anyone who ever thought Japanese was difficult is a dumbass. And he hasn't even gotten to the hard part.

Yeah; when we get those moments I feel it's best to leave the subject alone and pass off, if it's online. Otherwise, as stated before, a redundant flame war incites. Kokujin, if Pierrot is getting on your nerves, don't toss a pie in his face (no pun intended. Honest.). He's got a lot of experience and has said his part; Japanese contradicts heavily to the English language structure. If you find it easy, even then, cool. No need to shove it any further. Personally I find it pretty difficult too, even though I was (meagerly) raised around it. To each man, his own.

By the way.
The crappy end though is that it will be in Akitaka.

...huh?

[hanacker]

Let me ask you this. Have you met any foriegner who really like Japanese, studied it, Traveled over to Japan andlearned it to fluency. A person who claims it wasn't that hard as he thought or others have said, and it was fun. You think everyone who attempts to learn Japanese to fluency runs into major problems??

Yes I have met people like that. And it would have been extremely annoying if they were to rub it into my face about how easy it was for them to learn Japanese when at the same time I was struggling with the language.


Um....no. I didn't say it like that at all. Infact i'll repeat myself again because it seems no one is reading it. I'm saying its easy when compared to all the extre,e comments people assume. When compared to english.

What are these "extre,e [sic] comments"? For a native English speaker, compared to almost any other language offered by most universities, Japanese is hard. Period. Nobody is saying English isn't hard to learn. It is. Nobody is saying Japanese is hard to learn if something like Korean is your native language. It isn't. But for a native English speaker, Japanese is hard. There's no "myth" about that, and saying that it is a "myth" is insulting to anyone who does think it's hard.

[koku]

Yes I have met people like that. And it would have been extremely annoying if they were to rub it into my face about how easy it was for them to learn Japanese when at the same time I was struggling with the language.




What are these "extre,e [sic] comments"? For a native English speaker, compared to almost any other language offered by most universities, Japanese is hard. Period. Nobody is saying English isn't hard to learn. It is. Nobody is saying Japanese is hard to learn if something like Korean is your native language. It isn't. But for a native English speaker, Japanese is hard. There's no "myth" about that, and saying that it is a "myth" is insulting to anyone who does think it's hard.


no i'm not. You're not reading, i'm just pointing out some people take it too far. And i'm not rubbing it in anyones face.

And if you have met people like that, and you know it is possible, then how do you think I feel when SOME people keep trying to pretend like it doesn't exist?

like I said, any insults are things you assumed. Intentionally, i don't want to insult anyone...with the exception of pierro AFTER his couple replies.

**I'd actually be happy enough to shut up if some of the attackers are willing to admit some people actually learn it without too much difficulty and enjoy it. That's enough for me to stay optemistic about it.**

and extre.e is extreme. really, look at the keyboard once in a while when you see a typo. I type 70-90 wpm and I'm going to make a lot of mistakes mainly because I'm not trying to hard.

If it's a shorter post, i'll try to clean it up afterwards.

[4letterwords]

No offense kokujin, you're a cool guy and all ;) we've talked :P

But (although this message was lost with the board switch) you sent me an email after I said that I had been taking Japanese for 5 years that said something like "5 years and you're not fluent? I'd kill myself" or like you said something about my japanese "sucking" or something. Yeah, my Japanese isn't perfect... Like I said I have a really hard time writing it down... but I learned the hard way that the language you learn in school is WAY different than the language you speak... It took me forever to figure out what people were saying when they said thing slike "Iranai tte"... I had no one to tell me how, and you just have to play it by ear. I do however agree with you that college lessons and high school lessons are easy... But of course thats not really how you speak it ;)

If I had to sit down with a 7th or 8th year Japanese student, like some at my college, I would fail, gloriously. But I *know* I could whip their ass in conversation. Its just about how you think about it. Because I learned english first (in my opinion) I have trouble differentiating between spoken language and written language... With a few exceptions, there is very little spoken language in English... discounting slang that is.

Now for dialects... Ho boy...

I learned Japanese first in Hiroshima... Bikkurishitan! gah... but thankfully, I got back from that summer and my Japanese teacher beat any dialect out of my head and taught me proper Japanese because thats what they speak and thats how to be fluent (looks around nervously)...

;)

But this past summer I spent in Nagoya... It sounded like Jibberish the first time I got there... Oru ka oran ka shiran... huh? Thats iru ka inai ka shiranai in Nagoya (nakatsugawa was where I was at) dialect. Good luck with that one...

Problem is now, I'm stuck on that dialect. My mind is stuck on Ikanaikan instead of ikanakerebanaranai... yipee, especially when I have a meeting *in Japanese* with my Japanese (tokyo bred) professor... in 2 days... YAY!

Japanese people have no trouble *switching off* their dialects, but if you're a native english speaker and you're speaking dialect non stop, it can be difficult to switch back to 'proper' japanese. I know this FIRST hand... for me its hard to switch to respect language after talking to my friends in Japanese...

Maybe my Japanese sucks, but honestly, I don't care...

Because if my friends from school back in Nakatsugawa can call me, have an entire conversation in Japanese with no translation help, dialect included, and not have to correct me... my Japanese can't be as bad as you think. I know I can't write it that well, but I can read it pretty well, and speak it pretty well, so I think I'm ok.

Oh, and it IS a hard language... but its not impossible. I, by no means am fluent... like I said, I couldn't have a conversation about difficult subjects (ala philosophy, astrology, politics...) but I get by.

I don't discourage people learning it... its fun to learn dispite the hills you have to cross... go for it!!!!!!!!!!!!

[koku]

No offense kokujin, you're a cool guy and all ;) we've talked :P

But (although this message was lost with the board switch) you sent me an email after I said that I had been taking Japanese for 5 years that said something like "5 years and you're not fluent? I'd kill myself" or like you said something about my japanese "sucking" or something.


I hope you were able to sense the blunt sarcasm in it. Also, that comment means I, because I treat things that I like/go for diffently. I'm ver hard on myself if i finally decide I want to do something. I'm a procastinator it's hard for me to be motivated. Mainly because I'm always weighing pros and cons and I just enjoy not working hard :P.

But if i set my mind to something, I usually aim for/expect alot. I figure if I'm going to major in a language, why not learn it as fast as I can and be very good at it? That's just how I think.

Hmmm, allright. I think i'll wait awhile for replies now.

[hanacker]

**I'd actually be happy enough to shut up if some of the attackers are willing to admit some people actually learn it without too much difficulty and enjoy it. That's enough for me to stay optemistic about it.**


Maybe I didn't read this thread carefully enough, but I didn't see anyone denying that. Some people are extremely good at learning languages. I met a girl who spoke no Japanese before arrival in Japan but after a few months of living there was pretty close to fluent (and much better than me). I'd imagine people like that (who are native English speakers) will still have more trouble picking up Japanese than French. Because Japanese is hard. But it can be learned quickly and easily if you're in that small minority of people with incredibly good language skills. And I think most people who stick with it enjoy it. Japanese class was much more fun than my engineering ones.

and extre.e is extreme. really, look at the keyboard once in a while when you see a typo. I type 70-90 wpm and I'm going to make a lot of mistakes mainly because I'm not trying to hard.

Of course I know what you meant, but I used quote marks so I quoted what you wrote. You're not supposed to change quotes even if they're wrong. It wasn't a personal attack on your bad spelling or anything.

[Mushu]

This may have been said before but ill say it:
Don’t ever believe what other people may say about studying, because your are not them and 99% of the time you wont handle it like they did. Simple as that. What might be hard for you might be easy for him or vice versa so don’t take their word for it. When you getting into studying and pick a subject, try to ask yourself there questions:

1) Is this right for me?
2) Am I willing to put my whole heart into it?

If he says it’s easy for me, then it is and it’s good for him and by saying he hasn’t even gotten to the hard, that’s just weak imo.
If it’s hard for you, then you should answering those questions and try harder, simple as that. He is not smarter then you, he just has it bit easier. That’s all.

Now as for me, I’m blessed/cursed with the ability of learning languages fast, among other things, but it has a condition, they always do and the condition is that in order for me to learn these things, language being this time is that I can mostly learn it from hearing it and interacting with the environment. Learning stuff from books bore me and I need a ton of coffee and 2 ton of sugar just to get me past the first 2 hours of opening the book and the process repeats it until I go to school and looking like Tyrone Biggums from Chapple's show. I’m a Somalian who has lived in Russia, learned Russian in 1.5 year, only speaking though as I didn’t not go to school there, and I was pretty good, people were shocked hear me speak. I didn’t speak fluent (maybe I did?), but I was damn close. I learned it from dubbed reruns of Transformers, Power Rangers, A-Team, Air Wolf, Captain Planet(man I loved Captain planet, the girls were shexie nudge nudge wink wink) etc etc. Then we Moved to Sweden and the learning process started all over again, unfortunately me and my brother had concentrate on Swedish, so we stopped speaking Russian, so we forgot mostly as we were kids, but now then when we hear Russian people speaking Russian, random words make sense to and we would laugh. Some of the conversation might go something like this: blablabl...pretty...blabla.....get you.....blabla......why...blabla...nigger giggling? That’s would we would hear and for that last part it’s not a joke, it did really happen. As nor me or my brother will ever forget the word nigger in Russian. See there was a big park close to our apartment when we were in Russia, so me and my brother would go there to play and old people sitting on park benches with bottle of vodka in their hand would start to point/wave and smile, with most of their from teeth missing(which scared the shit out me. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night screaming 'the teeth less Russians are coming to get me'. Scared me for life) yelling 'journi' not sure the spelling but it sounds like that, like journey as in lets take a journey in our sexuality. What was my point... o yeah in order for me to truly learn Japanese and speak as fluent as I can; I need to go to Japan and study there. Which I’m trying right now, I’ve talking to the good people of Kyoto institute of culture and language and if everything works out with the department of education here in Sweden about the student loan, I might be in Kyoto in end of March.

Now speaking of Kyoto. I know Az lives there(do'h) and there was a 'what if' game going on another part of forum and someone asked what if Az come to your house. So I thought to myself what I met Az in Kyoto? Immediately my evil side jumped and yelled KONCHO HIM! And surprisingly my good side agreed...hmm that has been happening allot lately now that I think of it... anyways I called my friend whom ill be traveling with and that shit floored him.
It went like this:

Me: dialing....ring ring ring banana phone...ring ring ring banana phone(yes he has that as ring tone, that bastard.
Him: Sup?
Me: I was thinking there is a chance we might meet Az in Kyoto...
Him: Go on.
Me: So what if I kanchoed him?
Him: *LHAO* <laughing his ass off>

Minutes later...

Him: *hahaha takes a deep breath* but wouldn’t his kancho sense sense it coming.

Both my good side and evil side doing the evil laugh in my head

Me: no, because his koncho sense is limited to the skinny Japanese school kids, as it hasn’t evolved to detect all upcoming kanchoes from gaijins because no gaijin as attempted to koncho him before, not to say in Japan in all places.
Him: *starts to crack up again* had to hang up because he couldn’t stop.


Edit: Az, mate, friend, i was just kidding, i would never :p

[Henjin]

I don't think there's any reason for me to restate what everyone else has been saying, but Kokujin, you come across as really arrogant. That's not very endearing. And sarcasm or not, you should know tone doesn't come across the internet via text, so people judge what you're saying by what you say, not the 'tone' of it. And just going off what you've said so far, it's not suprising that you've been flamed. So don't act like the victim, because you're not.

And don't give me any 'I type 70-80 WPM, so that's why it looks like a drunken monkey typed my posts.' I can type up to 90wpm. The difference is I proofread, and correct my mistakes. Internet or not, show some pride in how you come across. If you can't type a measly paragraph using correct English, it doesn't reflect well on your study skills.

And when I was talking about Chinese/Japanese dialects, I just meant that I don't think either is inherently easier to differentiate. It all depends on familiarity w/ the langauge itself. If you're studying Chinese, you'll be able to quickly identify the Chinese dialects. If you're learning Japanese, you can tell Kansai-ben from Nagoya-ben... etc. Most of my friends can't even tell Japanese from Chinese.

[koku]

I don't think there's any reason for me to restate what everyone else has been saying, but Kokujin, you come across as really arrogant. That's not very endearing. And sarcasm or not, you should know tone doesn't come across the internet via text, so people judge what you're saying by what you say, not the 'tone' of it.


um.....tone can show if the writer thinks. I've been with these forums a long time and I've never been the type to actually try to personally insult someone. With the exception of one thread I remember(and also vs. pierro) i've ALWAYS been sarcastic, lighthearted and just opinionated but never personal. Some things are obvouis.....I think.


And just going off what you've said so far, it's not suprising that you've been flamed. So don't act like the victim, because you're not.

And don't give me any 'I type 70-80 WPM, so that's why it looks like a drunken monkey typed my posts.' I can type up to 90wpm. The difference is I proofread, and correct my mistakes. Internet or not, show some pride in how you come across. If you can't type a measly paragraph using correct English, it doesn't reflect well on your study skills[U].

I FUDJGING HATE STUPID ASSUMTPIONS LIKE THAT! You have NO idea how hard or easy I study, NONE. And just because I don't try on some forum that I go to for FUN(yes fun. for me, proofreading when majority of people can understand my post, and even the snobby ones aswell if they would just sit down relax and read it = NOT fun). That type of assumptions, my parents do it and i hate that i hate that i hate that. If they are the same thing? Mabye. But they are different, nothing to do with each other. People try harder at things they like, slack off on things that are not important to them. May be hard to believe but not everyone gives A work on everything. Atleast I sure as hell don't. I also thought I already explained that.

either way, I can come across any way I want but if i don't throw personal insults at you...I don't think you have the right to do so back. Especially when you just misinterpernt my bluntless, sarcasm as such.

Like i said, I've already solved how I feel about this situation with a few people that ARE as you would describe "language people." I've seen enough people in this thread that don't automacily contest what I say because it's not what they want to here. So I already feel great about it.

I just think it's kinda shitty that when someone tells you what you don't want to here in a polite way, some people feel the need to respond in a not so polite way.

[Henjin]

Learn what the phrase 'doesn't reflect well' means. It doesn't mean 'your study skills are crap.'

[spaik]

it's "ann-yong ha-sayo". Goodbye is "ann-yong-ghe Ka-sayo". "kam-sa-ham-needa" is thank you. "Tay-da-knee Ka-sa-hamneeda" is thank you very much.

too bad that doesn't take into politeness levels and all that fun stuff. korean also has numbers above 99, its just that they count using conjugations like the japanese do, and that you only get 'new' counting words at like 100, 1000, 10000, etc....pretty much exactly the same as japanese.


I can imaginge a Chinese or Korean having an easier time learning Japanese, rather than English. But since this is based on an English > Japanese perspective, things we CAN confirm are difficult are:

-structure
-alphabet
-language evolution/dialects
-formal/informal uses


chinese kanji knowledge is useful, but not that useful. my chinese friends also have a ridiculously hard time learning japanese sometimes. the sentence and grammar structure is not similiar, and the kanji used in japanese is used differently in chinese. they use kanji that the chinese don't, and vice versa as well. knowing chinese doesn't mean you don't have to learn kanji, it helps with character recognition (or it can confuse you haha). no, i don't think chinese (especially speakers only...chinese is notorious for having people who can speak but cannot read) have an edge on any western language speaker in learning japanese at all.

on a side note...man, you're all a bunch of fuckin gradeschool bitches in this thread, you know that? i mean come on. "OMG HE TYPES BADLY HAHA" like seriously. what the hell does his typing have to do with anything that you are arguing here? the manual dexterity of his goddamn fingers determines how eloquent and well spoken he is? you hate him that much that and you wanna take shots at him, so u talk smack about his typing? get real ethug and wipe that fuckin smug grin of superiority off your face. and kokujin, you're just a little bitch that can't handle getting slapped. someone stepped, and now you've got some shit to prove. 'oh no, the fucker is trash talking my typing! i gotta rep my badass intellect and education!' fuckin calm down nigga. he didn't fucking stab you, he make fun of your typing, OVER THE INTERNET. holy way to blow over. put that shit in perspective. man, intellectual ethugs are the worst kind. both of you need to grow the fuck up.

[Henjin]

Yeah, because cursing someone out over the internet is that much more mature.

[sakana]

I took half of a year of Japanes in 7th grade, a whole year in 8th and a year in 9th. I think that the class is easy because the conversations are all what we are learning about but if I had to have a real conversation in only Japanese I would sound likea moron and you'd barely be able to understand what I'm talking about. For me the talking is the easy part. I've got hiragana and katakana down but the kanji...well, I hate kanji. I know its great for shortening things and its easier quicker to write but it drives me nuts. I just started learning kanji in 9th grade and I'd say I know only like 50. I get good grades in the class but when I go to Japan in a few years I know it'll be tough.

Oh and a lot of people say Japanese must be hard because it uses different characters than English unlike Spanish, French, or German (for the most part)

[Vaste]

Putting all the anger and petty quabbles behind us...

I wonder about intonation. I've never really put much thought into it. I figured it was similar to the situation in Swedish, where there is an unwritten intonation that can distinguish to otherwise identical spoken words, but in general isn't important other than in determining whether you sound like a Swede or a foreigner speaking Swedish.

Does it come naturally? Is it something easily picked up? Should (can) it be studied separately? Does it even matter much? How would one go about studying it? Etc..

Futhermore, I find the difficulty some appear to have with Japanese being "backwards" regarding sentence structure interesting. (Especially as I haven't really felt that way and am coming from a language with almost identical sentence structure.)

[hanacker]

I wonder about intonation. I've never really put much thought into it. I figured it was similar to the situation in Swedish, where there is an unwritten intonation that can distinguish to otherwise identical spoken words, but in general isn't important other than in determining whether you sound like a Swede or a foreigner speaking Swedish.


That sounds about right

Does it come naturally? Is it something easily picked up? Should (can) it be studied separately? Does it even matter much? How would one go about studying it? Etc..

I wouldn't worry about it. You'll probably be pretty close to fluent before intonation becomes the biggest problem in you not sounding native.

[Monkey]

As the arguments in this thread are getting a little confused maybe a small lesson in logical fallacies would come in handy. All taken from this website: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html


Please be aware that I am fairly neutral in this debate and with this post I am not saying that peoples conclusions are wrong, merely their ways of arguing them.


Accent

Accent is a form of fallacy through shifting meaning. In this case, the meaning is changed by altering which parts of a statement are emphasized. For example:

"We should not speak ill of our friends"

and

"We should not speak ill of our friends"

Be particularly wary of this fallacy on the net, where it's easy to misread the emphasis of what's written.


NEKO: this one applies to the email you recieved from Kokujin where he said he'd die if he was at your level after 5 years. Whilst the fallacy isn't quite the same, it's still the same principle. Simple misinterpretation. :D


Affirmation of the consequent

This fallacy is an argument of the form "A implies B, B is true, therefore A is true." To understand why it is a fallacy, examine the truth table for implication given earlier. Here's an example:

"If the universe had been created by a supernatural being, we would see order and organization everywhere. And we do see order, not randomness -- so it's clear that the universe had a creator."


KOKUJIN: This is what people are saying about your arguments, you are arguing a point of view after only a relatively small amount of time and thus deducting that the whole of Japanese learning is easy.


Argumentum ad hominem

Argumentum ad hominem literally means "argument directed at the man"; there are two varieties.

The first is the abusive form. If you refuse to accept a statement, and justify your refusal by criticizing the person who made the statement, then you are guilty of abusive argumentum ad hominem. For example:

"You claim that atheists can be moral -- yet I happen to know that you abandoned your wife and children."

This is a fallacy because the truth of an assertion doesn't depend on the virtues of the person asserting it. A less blatant argumentum ad hominem is to reject a proposition based on the fact that it was also asserted by some other easily criticized person. For example:

"Therefore we should close down the church? Hitler and Stalin would have agreed with you."

A second form of argumentum ad hominem is to try and persuade someone to accept a statement you make, by referring to that person's particular circumstances. For example:

"Therefore it is perfectly acceptable to kill animals for food. I hope you won't argue otherwise, given that you're quite happy to wear leather shoes."

This is known as circumstantial argumentum ad hominem. The fallacy can also be used as an excuse to reject a particular conclusion. For example:

"Of course you'd argue that positive discrimination is a bad thing. You're white."

This particular form of Argumentum ad Hominem, when you allege that someone is rationalizing a conclusion for selfish reasons, is also known as "poisoning the well."

It's not always invalid to refer to the circumstances of an individual who is making a claim. If someone is a known perjurer or liar, that fact will reduce their credibility as a witness. It won't, however, prove that their testimony is false in this case. It also won't alter the soundness of any logical arguments they may make.


PIERROT, HENJIN and anyone else who commented on something other than Kokujin's arguments by commenting on his typos or his being only relatively knew to Japanese etc... (excepting the people chatting about chinese :p ) : This applies to you very easily. Just stick to the discussion at hand. I know American politics is all Ad Hominem and so most people see this as a legitimate argument but it's not. Everyone falls into the trap at some stage, it's just what we do about it once we've realised that's important.





Phew, I found some of the major flaws in this thread without even having to step outside the A section of the website. I don't expect it to ever happen but I really do think any internet discussion would be sooooooo much happier if people actually knew a few of the common fallacies like the ones stated above. :P


As this is intended to be a neutral statement I won't give my opinion either way. ;)

I would however appreciate some comments on this. Maybe I'll make a new thread teaching people how to debate properly without resorting to personal insults. Please, Please, Please do not ever make the mistake of the Argumentum ad Hominem it's just plain stupid :p

[Myrsilus]

This monkey guy is quite correct. We can't communicate all our feelings completely, so it's best not to jump to conclusions so quickly. Consider the fact that accenting on certain words is not so clear in text.

Well done, sir.

[Henjin]

I didn't mean to get involved in the flames. Sorry about that.

[Kragar]

I wonder about intonation. I've never really put much thought into it. I figured it was similar to the situation in Swedish, where there is an unwritten intonation that can distinguish to otherwise identical spoken words, but in general isn't important other than in determining whether you sound like a Swede or a foreigner speaking Swedish.

Does it come naturally? Is it something easily picked up? Should (can) it be studied separately? Does it even matter much? How would one go about studying it? Etc..


Can you handle word stress? Can you say "project" in the two different ways it's said? Then you can handle intonation.

It's a lot like a really complicated form of word stress. Because they make a big deal of it, you'd think it's difficult, but it's not that bad. You just have to use your ears and really listen to yourself.

On the plus side, intonation isn't _that_ important in real speech. In conversation, the tones mostly flatten out, and you understand what they're saying from context. Clearer intonations mean less guess-work, but people still understand you even if your tones are way off.

[koku]

To what monkey said:

well, I think some/alot of people know what counts and what doesn't. But all they want is to LOOK right and for OTHERS to believe it. Unfortantly, attacking another poster or taking interpertation the wrong way or shifting them the wrong way is.....a sort shortcutt to do it.

IRT this little arguement-
pierre le fou you obvouisly like to argue. But alot of times you just take it too far with the insults. Even when you're not completly right or wrong you will argue your point to death. And the fact you take the effort/time to type everything properly, use a higher reading level of english in your writing, most people just eat that stuff up with total disregard to if was actually quality or not. I'm not buying it. Sugar coat it all you want, but it's still an idea that can be right or wrong; It's just covered up in all the things we tend to associate with intelligent and correct, good bullshit and big words. doesn't mean much to me.


*keep reading that's about as negative as this one gets*


:P I already threw my idea out, most disagreed, some agreed a bit, and because I didn't want to lie about how many years I've taken, no matter how much research i've done, no matter how I phrase things, most people have already given up on listening.

I already got what I want out of the thread. General agreement that some people go through/learn a language fairly easy and enjoy the whole process. That'll just be my goal and I'll go on my merry way.

I will say though, it's a foreign language and it's not suppose to copy english. If some part of it does, HELL YEAH! you've already got some work cut out for you. But you shouldn't toss and tumble and say "it's so hard!" when it doesn't. That's what I think anyway.

[Monkey]

To what monkey said:

well, I think some/alot of people know what counts and what doesn't. But all they want is to LOOK right and for OTHERS to believe it. Unfortantly, attacking another poster or taking interpertation the wrong way or shifting them the wrong way is.....a sort shortcutt to do it.




You are completely right about that, most people do know what is right and wrong. If we all used logic to make every decision we would see two main things happening:

A) We would take ages to ever decide on something. Just because two opinions disagree, doesn't mean they can't both be right.

B) We would be wrong a LOT of the time. Logic doesn't always apply to everyday situations.


All I would like to see is a little more awareness of the common fallacies. Whilst as you say, we take shortcuts, at the same time this leaves us open to making incorrect decisions. Logic gives us a method of double-checking our own reasoning to make sure that we aren't making any silly mistakes. A little bit of knowledge goes a long way :D

[CopraSanctum]

What kind of contact have you had with the various dialects? I've studied Mandarin for years (three in the States, two in Taiwan), and I've been around Cantonese, Taiwanese (Southern Hokkien) and Hakka. Of these, the only one that made _any_ sense was Hakka, and that was still difficult.

Yes, when you sit down and analyze the vocabulary, you can see that they spring from the same place, but that doesn't help you when they're going by at the speed of sound. Pronunciation and intonation can make a big difference.

I said before that the languages are as different as German and English, and I stand by that. Looking at a page of German text, you can see that the two languages are clearly related, but that doesn't help you when you're trying to order food in Munich. Even with my years of Mandarin, I couldn't get the cabbie to take me to Kowloon (man: jiuleng) any way except pointing to a map.

I come from a Cantonese family, live in a town where most, if not all, chinese speak Hokkien, attended Mandarin courses for 7 years, have parents who can speak Hakka, and had a Teochew roommate in my boarding school.

The dialects that I mentioned share most vocabularies that differ in pronunciation. For example, let's take a look at "The US" in different dialects:
- Mandarin: may kwo (I purposely didn't use Hanyu Pinyin, you should know the reason, right?)
- Cantonese: may kok
- Hokkien: be kok
- Hakka: me kwek
- Teochew: be kok (I think, but I am not sure)
- Japanese: bei koku (just for comparison)
I can give many other examples.

Those dialects also share nearly the same grammar. They are not as different from each other as English is from German.


Edit: oh, and Mandarin is from the region around Beijing, not Beijing itself. Beijing has that nasty retroflex at the end of a number of words (nali --> nar, hua --> huar) that is not in standard Putonghua.

I didn't know that. Thanks for your info

[PopCulturePooka]

So, while in Japan I was friends or close to three people in particular that had studied Japanese at school and college. two were room-mates, one was a co-worker. As in studied. There degree was either in Japanese, Culture or Business and Japanese. One had done the 6 month study exchange in Japan earlier.

All 3 agreed that learning it in school and actually USING it in practicality were completely different kettles of fish. They struggled a fair bit to be understood, understand what was happening and especially do kanji.

Granted their communicative ability was light years ahead of mine, they could shop for goods, perform basic and minor tasks and converse with people somewhat. But even in Japan they still needed to study. Attend lessons. Do the tests. My workmate has been in Japan 3 years, she flew through univeristy with crackingly high grades. She is far from fluent with the language, and herself describes herself as 'only comfortable' with it.

Theres a huge gap between learning a language and using it. Come back when you have lived in Japan a bit and REALLY need to use it.

[Frankey-eh]

- Mandarin: may kwo (I purposely didn't use Hanyu Pinyin, you should know the reason, right?)
- Cantonese: may kok
- Hokkien: be kok
- Hakka: me kwek
- Teochew: be kok (I think, but I am not sure)
- Japanese: bei koku (just for comparison)
I can give many other examples.


OH.

I finally understood what Hakka and Teochew was. I was reading them like Jpnese, so it made no sense to me. Silly me.

My grandpa's from Hakka and my grandma's from Teochew. (by the way, my grandpa's on one side and my grandma's on the other side of the family). I heard my grandma speaking 100word per minute in Teochew before. I only recognized one or two words.

And Hakka? I understood zilch.

[Azrael]

I studied Japanese for three years in university. Not UC Berkeley, but UC Davis, which still has a good program. And we had the Japanese version of me, exchange students from Japan to come and help out with our classes.

Then I went to Japan over the summer. I could hold basic conversations with the college students we were living with. They alwayas told me how good my Japanese was. I felt proud, like I was studying hard and really making progress.

After the Japan trip, I took another year of classes (total - 4) and in my final year before graduation/coming on JET, while I didn't have Japanese class, I watched raw, unsubtitled Hey Hey Hey/Dragonball Z/random dramas on the International Channel, and for the most part got the gist of it.

Then I came on JET, and actually lived and worked here. A few months later, I realized how little I actually knew.

For awhile, I felt terribly stupid. 4+ years of university classes and I still got lost in conversations! If I wasn't paying careful attention, I didn't understand what people were saying around me! I still had to ask people to talk more slowly and repeat certain things! I couldn't watch TV and understand more than 60% of it! I had to realize that what they teach you in the textbook is NOT everyday spoken Japanese, no more than "Hi, how are you?" "Fine, thank you. And you?" is an everyday English greeting. I had to unlearn a lot of what I had learned, and learn how to speak like a Japanese person, not a textbook.

Two years later, I've made a lot of progress. There's a CIR in my town. He's half Japanese, and was taught by his mother, who was from the Kansai region. It's his job to translate things, so by definition his Japanese should be better than mine. And yeah, he can do official documents and things like that probably a lot easier than I could. But he still has problems with some things. And if we go out with some Japanese people and have to talk in Japanese the whole time, he tells me there are some things I say that he doesn't understand. It frustrates him, because he grew up speaking Japanese but still feels inadequate in some ways. I told him that there are some things, essential things, that can only be learned by living here, and to just be patient and absorb all the conversation around him.

But I still wouldn't dare claim fluency myself. Nuh-uh, no way, no how.

[Frankey-eh]

- Mandarin: may kwo (I purposely didn't use Hanyu Pinyin, you should know the reason, right?)
- Cantonese: may kok
- Hokkien: be kok
- Hakka: me kwek
- Teochew: be kok (I think, but I am not sure)
- Japanese: bei koku (just for comparison)
I can give many other examples.


hmm. I think you've got the Japanese confused. The Mandarin mei guo is 美国. but the Japanese bei koku is 米国. Two different kanji. There's no 美国 in Jpnese, but if there were, it would be read "mi koku".

[kshgosu]

I won't even bother trying to learn to write kanji, I can't even write ledgible english, but thankfully due to the advent of electronics/internet I may not have to. The written language is all but incomprehensible to me, but understanding spoken/conversing is the only thing that comes naturally. Heh, likened to my 1st and 2nd languages, I can't speak anymore due to dulling from disuse, but I still retain understanding. Japanese seems like the hardest of all languages I've been exposed to from the 1.5 years I've studied it, then again I'm surrounded by otakus/Chinese and Korean people who claim it is easy shit. The prospect is almost hopeless from this point although I'm still in HS. I remember near the beginning of the year I was in the semi-otaku crowd and thought I'd just breeze through and independently study complexities/culture/mannerisms. Boy was I ever delusioned. I haven't met ANYONE who has learned any language coherently/fluently without immersion. There was a boy in my class who lived in Japan for 4 months and was lazy as shit, despite people busting their asses off studying, he regularily got top marks with minimal work.

[Pierrot le Fou]

I find it ironic that I don't post for 5 pages of the thread, a giant shitstorm blows up, and kokujin manages to insult me/whine about me in several different posts over that span despite the fact that I hadn't responded.

You're doing the same thing that you did on the 'Is it possible to become a native Japanese speaker?' thread on the old forum. Your original assertion was absolutely ridiculous, and so rather than trying to defend the indefensible, you dumb down your argument and complain that people are bitter about what you said at the beginning.

You opened up this thread with a silly assertion that Japanese isn't hard.

It is.

Anyone and their mother knows that Japanese is a difficult language to learn, and that's why everyone keeps telling you it is. Do you think they're just making it up? Japanese is a tough language to learn as a native English speaker. Full stop. You're wrong.

Does this mean it's impossible to learn? Of course not. Does this mean you will feel it is difficult? Of course not. You could think it was simple. You also have no idea of how well you know it, or how hard it is in comparison to learning another language. Japanese was my 4th language (3rd non-native) and compared to French or Spanish, Japanese is a beast and a half.

Does this mean I can't speak it? Not at all. I communicate, debate, and make jokes in Japanese. I dream in Japanese, and I can function in an entirely Japanese environment. I am comfortable though not fluent in Japanese. Clearly it is possible to learn the language even if you think it's hard.

Other folks in this thread have pretty clearly stated what the issue is with how you write.

You sit there and make some absurd statement for which you have absolutely no experience/knowledge to state, and then you sit there and get pissy when people tear into it. Sorry, but your opinion that Japanese isn't hard doesn't make it a reality. Japanese is far harder than almost any other language for a foreign speaker to learn. So rather than sitting around and complaining that we're all being oh so mean to you, how about you moderate yourself by thinking before going off on some flight of fancy half-cocked, eh?

There are plenty of native english Japanese speakers on this board. Have you noticed how almost without exception, they've all stated how hard it was to learn, and how different studying and actually using it were? Have you noticed how almost everyone on this thread taking the piss on you are folks who have experience with what you're talking about beyond the amount you have, and are calling you on it?

You are like a wounded child.

You make some half-assed comment, get told that it's a half-assed comment, and then change your original argument. When people call you on it, you whine, as if somehow the fact that it's your opinion alone should give it validity and make us all listen. That's just arrogant. Your opinion doesn't matter for shit if you're wrong, as all the opinions in the world won't make the sky a different colour than it is.

You are over your head.

I find it highly ironic that you're sitting here and having what's essentially the same topic that we all pissed on you in the old forums about. I find it ironic that you didn't learn the first time. I find it absolutely hilarious that you were trying to be 'chummy' through PMs in the last forum, and beyond that were announcing in threads that you were surprised that I wasn't picking on you.

Get something through your head: I hate idiocy. That means that if you make a moronic comment, I will call you on it, and tear apart that argument.

You seem to think that I hold grudges. It's a funny thing really, because I don't generally take arguments with a person in one thread into another one. It very rarely happens. I love to argue, yes, because I'm good at it and because I have a lot of stuff that I can share with the other members of a forum. Because I am good at expressing myself, and take care not to mince my words.

[CopraSanctum]

hmm. I think you've got the Japanese confused. The Mandarin mei guo is 美国. but the Japanese bei koku is 米国. Two different kanji. There's no 美国 in Jpnese, but if there were, it would be read "mi koku".

Oops, my mistake! Thanks for pointing that out.

[truce]

Truce.
Korean has 3 ways to count.

1) Korean. This only goes up to the number 99

2) Shortened Korean. Like taking teh number 1, Hana, and cutting it short Han. This also only goes up to 99 as well

3) Chinese. The lady at the Teriyaki stand understands when I use Chinese numerals. These go way past 99, so they are used for everything above that number.yes, i know.. i am korean, thanks. and i have no idea what you're talking about.

the number "baek" ring a bell?

[4letterwords]

*Dances*

-Distraction, distraction!!!-

[Kragar]

I come from a Cantonese family, live in a town where most, if not all, chinese speak Hokkien, attended Mandarin courses for 7 years, have parents who can speak Hakka, and had a Teochew roommate in my boarding school.

Ah. We are seeing the same set of data from two entirely different points of view. As an outsider, I still see far more dissimilarities than similarities. Rika seems to make the same point with:

My grandpa's from Hakka and my grandma's from Teochew. (by the way, my grandpa's on one side and my grandma's on the other side of the family). I heard my grandma speaking 100word per minute in Teochew before. I only recognized one or two words.

And Hakka? I understood zilch.

I hear things like:
Mandarin: ni qu nali?
Taiwnese: li ki dowee?
Cantonese: nei hui bin do a?

While I can see certain parallels (ni/li/nei, dowee/do a), there are enough differences that I can't think of them as dialects. They're languages, and without schooling mutually unintelligible.

And the linguist in me wants to point out that "America" is a bad example, because it's a relatively late addition to the languages, from an outside source that's constantly reinforcing the foreign pronunciation. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like to see better evidence before conceding.

[CopraSanctum]

While it's true that "America" has been part of chinese vocabularies for decades only, its two constituents "mei" and "guo" have been in chinese words for a few hundred years.

Maybe you are right about them being mutually unintelligible, for I myself have not really researched into their similarities. I put forward my opinions based only on my own experiences, so I can't say they are reliable.

[StormShadow]

[QUOTE=spaik]too bad that doesn't take into politeness levels and all that fun stuff. korean also has numbers above 99, its just that they count using conjugations like the japanese do, and that you only get 'new' counting words at like 100, 1000, 10000, etc....pretty much exactly the same as japanese.



Yes, this is true that I did not take into account politeness levels, but I am guessing that he was planning on using those phrases among his friends, and not his teachers, parents, people that deserve respect. And yes, Korean can go above 99, however, every book, and Korean person I have spoken to has said that only Chinese is used past 99.

[truce]

Yes, this is true that I did not take into account politeness levels, but I am guessing that he was planning on using those phrases among his friends, and not his teachers, parents, people that deserve respect. And yes, Korean can go above 99, however, every book, and Korean person I have spoken to has said that only Chinese is used past 99.true the proununciations are from the original chinese, but we use those numbers below 100 as well. the fact is, there are two ways of counting in korean, it has nothing to do with above or below 99. when you go to a korean store and the lady tells you to pay up "oh bul chilship ii jeon", she's not speaking chinese, is she? korean is korean, chinese is chinese.

by the way, if you've ever read a korean newspaper, you've seen that they use chinese characters (hanja) as well as hangul.. after learning japanese, i feel like it would be helpful if they used hanja as a standard because of the meaning a single character can have.

[StormShadow]

Way back in the day I outlined that you can use Korean or Chinese in counting below 99. I never said that Korean ONLY used Chinese to count. And I never said that Chinese is ONLY used to count. It I only was responding to the comments of an earlier comment of mine.

[koku]

snip

I Found enough people that view things differently. Despite what you've said and this thread, I still feel confident and I welcome the challenge of having to "learn again" once I start using it in Japan/around Japanese people.

Only real lesson i've learned from this is

#1 using Japanese and learning it in college is almost like two different steps

#2 don't say things people don't want to hear because the majority will take it the worst and most negative way.

Don't know why alot of you did though. And Pierro, i do have experience learning a new language. Even though I forgot my first langauge, I learned english when i was like 5/6+.

Anywho, you're not some guru debator to everyone pierro. Some people realize you flame and blow things out of porportion just as much as others. I could go on at all the things you critisize but do yourself but I"d rather not get into it.

Also...learning a language through textbooks should be alot different than using it. I really don't see why so many people were surprised.

oh and im done killing myself in this thread. carry on as you wish.

[Frankey-eh]

While I can see certain parallels (ni/li/nei, dowee/do a), there are enough differences that I can't think of them as dialects. They're languages, and without schooling mutually unintelligible.

I know what you mean. Before I learned Mandarin, I couldn't understand a single word. It all sounded like music. But now, I can actually recognize some mandarin words because they are similar to Cantonese, and you have no idea how happy I was. It's like being able to hear again after you've gone deaf for a several years. (I think...)

more examples of how they're similar (because you asked):
English- It hurts!
mandarin- haw ton a
cantonese- how ton (n)a [the n is a nasal sound]

English- Hurry up!
mandarin- kuai den a
cantonese- fuai dii a

English- one o'clock
mandarin- ii den zon
cantonese- ia din zon

[Pierrot le Fou]

I Found enough people that view things differently. Despite what you've said and this thread, I still feel confident and I welcome the challenge of having to "learn again" once I start using it in Japan/around Japanese people.

Only real lesson i've learned from this is

#1 using Japanese and learning it in college is almost like two different steps

#2 don't say things people don't want to here because the majority will take it the worst and most negative way.

Don't know why alot of you did though. And Pierro, i do have experience learning a new language. Even though I forgot my first langauge, I learned english when i was like 5/6+.

Anywho, you're not some guru debator to everyone pierro. Some people realize you flame and blow things out of porportion just as much as others. I could go on at all the things you critisize but do yourself but I"d rather not get into it.

Also...learning a language through textbooks should be alot different than using it. I really don't see why so many people were surprised.

oh and im done killing myself in this thread. carry on as you wish.
As you so aptly showed in the thread on the previous forum, you have absolutely no concept about the theory of language acquisition, you have very little knowledge of what it actually takes to understand a language, and you aren't afraid to prove that you know shit by going off in threads like this.

You're flat out wrong in this case, just like you were in the thread on the old forum. Now you can sit here and whine about my 'flames' and receive little or no sympathy from the people who know their asses from their heads on this issue, or you can simply concede that you are incorrect.

Japanese is not an easy language to learn.

Say with me now, "Japanese is not an easy language to learn." Now wasn't that theraputic? Opinions do not contradict facts. If all of your acquaintances get up tomorrow and state that the ocean isn't actually filled with water, but rather with cement, it won't make it so. In the same vein, all your friends stating that Japanese is an easy language to learn won't make it so either.

So stop wasting all our time with your preposterous belief that what your friends say outweigh the facts of the matter as decided by people who are experts in the field of linguistics and language acquisition.

[Excel-2008]

To anyone who studied in the University of Maryland, how was it? I plan on going there first.

[KujiInRetsu]

Japanese doesn't seem like a hard language at first. It's two sets of kana and then some kanji your first year.

Oh, but it does get worse. Like many have said before, memorizing long lists of kanji is a staple nightmare among students of Japanese, as well as their individual readings and reading exceptions. But what was their response to it? "Damn the Chinese."

That made me feel warm and toasty inside. :rolleyes:

Of course, there are some people that are freaks, and can actually memorize the kanji and then some, spitting it out into class when no one else has the slightest idea what you're writing. This phenomenon I have tentatively dubbed: 漢字の王様。

Seriously, this kid knows and uses more kanji than the average native Japanese does. It's frightening, really, though it's been said that knowing all the aspects of a kanji, including proper stroke order, onyomi and kunyomi, radical origins and somesuch functions much as a measure of one's intelligence, much like knowing the spelling of a word in English, its proper pronunciation and word origins, whether from Middle English or French or some Latin-based language.

I guess he's a hell of a lot smarter in that respect than the rest of the class.

[Vaste]

At the very least, Pierrot is undeniably right in one thing. Japanese got kanji => Japanese is hard. There's no denying that.

[Pierrot le Fou]

What the Hell?

I am parsing your sentence, and it makes no sentence. I never said Japanese was easy, nor did I say that Kanji implies that Japanese is not hard (the logical opposite of what you said). So either clarify what you're talking about, or change the 'Pierrot' to 'kokujin' because he is the one arguing that the language is easy.

[Kragar]

While it's true that "America" has been part of chinese vocabularies for decades only, its two constituents "mei" and "guo" have been in chinese words for a few hundred years.

Maybe you are right about them being mutually unintelligible, for I myself have not really researched into their similarities. I put forward my opinions based only on my own experiences, so I can't say they are reliable.

And I'm not saying you're wrong. I've been trying to be respectful of your opinion, even if I disagree. I'm merely trying to get you to provide more evidence to support your opinions.

[koku]

what's easier cantonese or mandarian? which one is used more for businesses?

[nice gaijin]

depends on where you are doing business, cantonese is spoken almost exclusively in hong kong and most hong kong-made films. Mandarin is more widely spoken (hey, it's the official language of the most populous country in the world) and more useful, but it's a mixed bag in places where people emigrate to (like the U.S.) They both use the same hanzi with the same meaning, just totally different pronunciations. Both are hard languages to master, but Mandarin has more intonations that are difficult for english-speakers to catch or repeat.

[Kiljou]

Mandarin is easier by far. There are a few less different tone structures, and the vocabulary is a bit more consistent.

I take Mandarin in my high school, but only because it doesn't have Japanese (fuckers...). Anyway, in grade school, on my second to last day before graduation, our math teacher (bitch!) asked us all what language we were taking. Here is how it went.

Bitch teacher: Carol, what language are you taking?
Carol (slut!): ...Spanish.
Bitch teacher: What about you, Joey?
Joey: Spanish.
Bitch teacher: James?
James: Spanish.
Bitch teacher: What about you, (Kiljou)?
Me: Mandarin Chinese.

There was this weird silence for a few moments as everyone rotated their head from staring out the window to staring at me.

Bitch teacher: ...Why would you do that to yourself?
Me: Because I'm interested in the Far East. Happy?
Victoria (girl who I simply cannot stop from following me around day and night, I hate her): He also is teaching himself Japanese, too!
Bitch teacher (very confused): But, isn't Japanese difficult?
Me (long, long, long silence, probably lasted thirty seconds): No.
Bitch teacher: What?
Me: No, no it's not.

Mandarin isn't easy by any means, but it isn't the suicidal course people told me it would be. Ha! If I can understand Chinese tonal structure, then Japanese is nothing in comparison. During the school year, I forbade myself from doing anything remotely related to Japanese, for fear it would be confused in my brain with Chinese. Damn hard, but I did it. So, after summer started, I picked up a Japanese vocab book... and started looking for an indication of which tone I should use. God, I've been doing Mandarin for too long.

[koku]

yeah I sympathize with you when people assume a class/langauge is hard just because it's foreign or out of the norm. It's very annoying to here constantly.

I think i might possibly take chinese like 2 years from now. I guess if it's for translator/interperter type jobs I'd just pick the area I want to work in & learn the language in that area eh? Hmmmzu

Hong Kong would be kind of fun to work @, then again I don't know all of china. Don't most people learn both? I'd rather learn both I think. Same reading though! whoa, lol imagine if you knew both languages[cantonese and manderina] and you were reading a book. What in the world do you imagine/hear in your mind as you read along?

wow that would be insane to picture. The type of person I am, if i always "in my mind" read in cantonese i'd tell myself it's because "my manderian is no where near as good!" And then like study it more or force myself to read in Manderian.

Then i'd blame it on my poor Cantonese if i picked up that habit. Oh god, i'd never be at peace with myself :P.

[nice gaijin]

I've asked that to my friend who speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, Bahasa Melayu, and English, and is learning Japanese with me. He said that when he reads chinese he doesn't necessarily hear anything, he just understands it. Unlike a language based on phonetics like korean or even latin alphabet-based languages like english, spanish and french, chinese doesn't require you to know how to pronounce the characters to understand them. That's why people who only speak Mandarin can communicate with Cantonese speakers by writing, but not speaking. They just read the characters differently, the grammar and meanings are identical.

and that was my mistake, I had things backwards; mandarin has 5 different intonations, cantonese has 8 or 9. I also asked my friend which is used more for business, he assures me that mandarin is used more by far.

[koku]

I've asked that to my friend who speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, Bahasa Melayu, and English, and is learning Japanese with me. He said that when he reads chinese he doesn't necessarily hear anything, he just understands it. Unlike a language based on phonetics like korean or even latin alphabet-based languages like english, spanish and french, chinese doesn't require you to know how to pronounce the characters to understand them. That's why people who only speak Mandarin can communicate with Cantonese speakers by writing, but not speaking. They just read the characters differently, the grammar and meanings are identical.

and that was my mistake, I had things backwards; mandarin has 5 different intonations, cantonese has 8 or 9. I also asked my friend which is used more for business, he assures me that mandarin is used more by far.


so your friend just imagines the story with the charactars meanings by like picturing what's going on eh?

he doesn't imagine sound when he reads? god that's wierd to set my mind on. Isn't it slower that way? I can see...how you just take the hanzi and imagine what's going on. Does he on purpose not hear anything? or is it like...most people who speak both manderian and cantonese don't try to hear the language when they read?

but lol that's pretty awesome. 2 chinese guys, speak two total different languages...but can just write to each other and the other understands. They both read it differently and sound foreign to each other but through the same hanzi they can comprehend. I don't know why but that seems like a pretty sweet scene to me.

Guess I can't be a translator for Manderian practices who do business with Cantonese lol :P. So do they have like silent meetings when they do business with one another or what?

[nice gaijin]

actually it's much faster to read that way, because you go from "read" to "understand" without having to stop to think about pronunciation. they likely visualize what they read the same way we do; why would pronunciation be necessary to understand? There are a lot of kanji I can understand but can't always remember the pronunciation for them, when I read them I can understand the meaning without reading it aloud; same concept.

regarding your last statement: "that is why every freakin HK business man/woman are learning mandarin now"... these businesses don't need translators, they need interpreters! Translators just translate what's on paper to another language; this is not necessary because Mandarin and Cantonese are identical on paper.

[koku]

actually it's much faster to read that way, because you go from "read" to "understand" without having to stop to think about pronunciation. they likely visualize what they read the same way we do; why would pronunciation be necessary to understand? There are a lot of kanji I can understand but can't always remember the pronunciation for them, when I read them I can understand the meaning without reading it aloud; same concept.

regarding your last statement: "that is why every freakin HK business man/woman are learning mandarin now"... these businesses don't need translators, they need interpreters! Translators just translate what's on paper to another language; this is not necessary because Mandarin and Cantonese are identical on paper.


lol ya. I'm so use to saying translator as a subtitute for interpreter and translator.

can't they just...save alot of $$$ and have the whole conversation by text??

give everyone little laptops or soemthing.

I guess it makes sense how it can be just as fast. wow, that's a wierd idea though to rap my head around.

[nice gaijin]

cause that's just not how you conduct business. it's like two people sitting across from each other having an IM conversation. might be cute for a couple, but it doesn't fly in business. Part of the point of having a business meeting like that is to build repour between the two companies and their representatives, to do that you need real interaction, which calls for a common language.

Again, this is why Hong Kong businessmen are learning Mandarin. Right now Cantonese is probably more popular in America, but my friend and I predict this will change within the next couple decades.

[Frankey-eh]

regarding your last statement: "that is why every freakin HK business man/woman are learning mandarin now"... these businesses don't need translators, they need interpreters! Translators just translate what's on paper to another language; this is not necessary because Mandarin and Cantonese are identical on paper.

yes, but you have to realize HK doesn't use simplified. They stick with the traditional. So even though mandarin and cantonese use simplified, HK doesn't use simplified. Wow. I think that was confusing... let me make it visual.

Most of China- Mandarin, simplified
Canton- Cantonese, simplified
HK- Cantonese, traditional.

[edit]I guess I wasn't being very clear. Mainland China uses simplified CHARACTERS. and HK uses traditional CHARACTERS.

and Mandarin is used in schools and government business in Canton. Cantonese is often reserved for families and friends.

[koku]

cause that's just not how you conduct business. it's like two people sitting across from each other having an IM conversation. might be cute for a couple, but it doesn't fly in business. Part of the point of having a business meeting like that is to build repour between the two companies and their representatives, to do that you need real interaction, which calls for a common language.



i really dont see how SOME OTHER GUY being the middle man and actually dong all the talking builds much interaction/repour between the business.

"tell him i said 5 million"


"he doesnt like that"

WHAT? tell him i said screw you

"he doesn't like that"

DAMN IT, WTF. TEll him to go SHOVE IT!

:P comedy aside. I think writing/typing to each other is just as interaction and repour building as having someone else do all the talking. Infact....i'd deem a direct conversation, through writing or not, to be more personal then the interperter thing.

that's just what me thinks no? Plus they save money. Interperters can be expensive. I didn't say it was the best idea, just playing the what if game. Couldn't they get by? I just think it would be funny, to see 15 people from different firms in one office, and everyone is silent and writing to each other and passing around some peace of paper or something lol. I'm sure it doesn't happen that way though. Even the laptop idea sounds cute lol.

Ahhh....i think too much.

[nice gaijin]

true, that's a big mess between simplified and traditional (traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau)... but I think simplified is edging traditional out of the picture in the business world. Even in Hong Kong and Macau, they are trying to stop using traditional as much as possible, Taiwan is still holding strong against this trend, though.

[nice gaijin]

i really dont see how SOME OTHER GUY being the middle man and actually dong all the talking builds much interaction/repour between the business.

"tell him i said 5 million"


"he doesnt like that"

WHAT? tell him i said screw you

"he doesn't like that"

DAMN IT, WTF. TEll him to go SHOVE IT!

:P comedy aside. I think writing/typing to each other is just as interaction and repour building as having someone else do all the talking. Infact....i'd deem a direct conversation, through writing or not, to be more personal then the interperter thing.

that's just what me thinks no? Plus they save money. Interperters can be expensive. I didn't say it was the best idea, just playing the what if game. Couldn't they get by? I just think it would be funny, to see 15 people from different firms in one office, and everyone is silent and writing to each other and passing around some peace of paper or something lol. I'm sure it doesn't happen that way though. Even the laptop idea sounds cute lol.

Ahhh....i think too much.
The way you communicate through an interpreter is to talk directly to the other person as the interpreter translates. Think of it as what dubbing should be...

And if you are brokering a 50 million dollar deal, you wouldn't mind hiring an interpreter. Like I said, most businessmen who don't already speak mandarin are learning it. Almost all the people I know from chinese-speaking countries know both Mandarin and Cantonese, and usually some other dialects as well.

As a non-chinese speaker who has yet to even start learning one kind of chinese, I would not want a job interpreting from one form of chinese to another. I wish to see how well I do with Japanese before I even consider delving into another asian language.

[Ketay]

I started trying to learn Chinese... But I found it annoying because I'm a visual learner... And well... Writing Chinese is annoying without being able to use the characters (which I know VERY few of and only from Japanese xD). So I had to learn using audio things... But the problem with that is I'm a visual learner and stuff... Like I could say "Ni huey shua putonghua ma?" but as you can see I can't spell it. ^^ And theres not many places on the internet that actually use romanized characters to represent them... How annoying...

So yeah... As Kragar said... They need a phonetic alphabet... Please. =( I want to learn Chinese. xD

[nice gaijin]

there is a romanized chinese alphabet, but it's a pain in the ass even for native speakers. Just learn kanji, it is so ridiculously convenient once you get it down. The romanized alphabet is useful just for learning intonation at the beginning, afterwards you should be able to recognize the intonation people use for words. one version of the romanized chinese alphabet makes use of special characters like ê and è to indicated the intonation but it's hard to write on a keyboard; most chinese names you see in english text ignore the intonation, which is one of the reasons most english speakers have trouble with chinese; we just don't think about intonation.

compliments of my friend:
there is a taiwanese phonetic alphabet that looks like this: ㄆㄐㄇㄋㄌㄐ一 ㄒㄏ, adapted from japanese kana (i believe)

here is a sentence in mandarin chinese (simplified),
妈妈骑马，马慢，妈妈骂马
traditional:
媽媽騎馬，馬慢，媽媽罵馬
and the pronunciation in romanized characters:
ma1 ma1 qi2 ma3, ma3 man4, ma1 ma1 ma4 ma3
meaning in english:
the mother ride the horse, the horse is slow, the mother scold the horse

[Frankey-eh]

I started trying to learn Chinese... But I found it annoying because I'm a visual learner... And well... Writing Chinese is annoying without being able to use the characters (which I know VERY few of and only from Japanese xD). So I had to learn using audio things... But the problem with that is I'm a visual learner and stuff... Like I could say "Ni huey shua putonghua ma?" but as you can see I can't spell it. ^^ And theres not many places on the internet that actually use romanized characters to represent them... How annoying...

So yeah... As Kragar said... They need a phonetic alphabet... Please. =( I want to learn Chinese. xD

Learning Chinese starts from looking up every character.
I, like you, started out with Japanese kanji as my basis. And after covering the regular Chinese textbook for first grade, first semester, and two month in China, I can read most of the easier text if I try.

I'm not sure what your problem is, but this might help...
http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict_welcome.php
You can input kanji from IME, and it'll give you a Chinese equivalent, pinyin, and definition. My favorite dictionary.

[koku]

the idea sounds fun. I think being used to japanese kanji should help.

did you ever start mixing up the two? Like you see a kanji in japanese and think of the cantonese or manderian pronucnation instead of the japanese pronuncation?

how off are the on-yumi pronuncation in japanese(is it on or kun that is a katakana subtitute for chinese kanji).

[Vaste]

How difficult is it to learn simplified chars with (japanese) kanji as a basis? It would seem that it's mostly relearning some "primitives", like 隹 in 馬 changing as in 马. Is it that simple? (Although it still takes some work...)

Also, how similar are traditional hanzi and kanji? They seem quite similar (well, identical) in the example.

[Frankey-eh]

How difficult is it to learn simplified chars with (japanese) kanji as a basis? It would seem that it's mostly relearning some "primitives", like 隹 in 馬 changing as in 马. Is it that simple? (Although it still takes some work...)

Also, how similar are traditional hanzi and kanji? They seem quite similar (well, identical) in the example.

Interesting thing about kanji is, it borrows from both simplified and traditional.

we use traditional horse, bird, etc.
we use simplified school, etc.
and then, there are times when an identical character mean two different things in jpnese and chinese.

and I, personally, have never mixed their pronounciations. There are times when I don't know how to pronounce something, so I substitute it from the other language, but I am consciously aware of that. I am also proud to say I've never mixed up my languages in conversation either. But that's probably because I'm given the opportunity to do so at home. When I'm talking to my family, I often combine chinese/japanese/english into one sentence. You would hear me say something like "jin tian gakkou de substitute ga atta".

[edit]
onyomi vs Mandarin:
tianshi=tenshi (angel)
mei lai=mirai (future)
fengshui=funsui (fengshui in English, I suppose)
san=san (three)

[koku]

Interesting thing about kanji is, it borrows from both simplified and traditional.

we use traditional horse, bird, etc.
we use simplified school, etc.
and then, there are times when an identical character mean two different things in jpnese and chinese.

and I, personally, have never mixed their pronounciations. There are times when I don't know how to pronounce something, so I substitute it from the other language, but I am consciously aware of that. I am also proud to say I've never mixed up my languages in conversation either. But that's probably because I'm given the opportunity to do so at home. When I'm talking to my family, I often combine chinese/japanese/english into one sentence. You would hear me say something like "jin tian gakkou de substitute ga atta".


lol I actually remember doing this as a kid. I remember very few things ages 1-6 but one of the things I did when first learning enlgish was combine aswell. Yeah i was heavily aware. Don't know how...you really can't be. Two different langauges rarely sound alike. It's just when you don't know the word.

but yeah, the kanji thing. That has to get confusing. Especially when they are the same kanji.

lol I was watching a chinese film once. It was set in china and by one of the stores I saw the kanji for Mise/store. and i was like..."wha isn't this a chine-OH."

So are alot of chinese/japanese kanji the exact same in drawing and meaning? Some? Most? Similar looking more stroke order? I mean where do the majority of them fall into?

[Dae_Dae]

In my highschool you can take Japanese has your language class. This would be my 3rd year of Japanese. I know hirgana and katakana. I already know 100 kanji characters and thier meanings. I am much better at writing Japanese than speaking but I still can speak as much as I know. I plan to take Spanish and French courses in college b/c both are very easy (I took Spanish during middle school and French just comes easy to me). I'm not becoming a translator anything I just like learning different languages. Japanese is not easy but it's not hard. You just have to keep up with the studying and it will get easier as you learn more. The hardest part of learning Japanese, to me, is learning kanji. There are so many freakin' meanings for one kanji. It took 2 years to just learn 100. :( But it is a fun language to learn so if you really love Japanese culture then you should consider learning Japanese. :)

[Animeband]

Chinese is a lot easier. It's mostly memorization, and unlike Japanese, most kanji have only one pronounciation.

For me, the hardest part of Japanese was the multiple pronounciations per Kanji, the fact that sometimes they don't mean the same thing in Chinese, and also the fact that the language desperately wants to resemble newspeak from 1984 with all of its shorthand for lots of stuff. I believe that in the future, Japanese people will just grunt at each other with complete understanding.

In regards to difficulty, there are MUCH harder languages to learn out there. Finnish, Hungarian, and Czech come to mind. Czech not only has non-sensical grammar, but also incredibly impossible to pronounce words.

[koku]

lso the fact that the language desperately wants to resemble newspeak from 1984 with all of its shorthand for lots of stuff. I believe that in the future, Japanese people will just grunt at each other with complete understanding.
.


lol that was funny to me.

[BluZytrix]

After two plus years of study at a University, I have to say that it is a difficult language filled with its rewards. I too thought that things were all peachy at first but then I forced myslef to get some Japanese partners through an exchange program at my school. I would meet with them a few times a week and warp the hell out of my brain. Speaking in class and for tests pales in comparison to having to hold an acutal conversation. For the longest time, I would acutually develope pretty intense headaches if I was imersed and tried to speak Japanese for about two to three hours. The work was worth it though. I no longer get those headaches and understand a lot more. Perhaps the biggest turning point in learning Japanese for me is to stop translating things so much in my head. As many have mentioned before, Japanese is not translated in English very well. As soon as I tried to start thinking in Japanese, forming sentences and understanding became much easier. This isn't to say that I don't translate in my head, it's just that I don't try to think of an idea in English and then translate it into Japanese but think of the idea with as much of a Japanese mindset that I have learned.

I have also found some interesting problems with learning a new language. Seeing as how this is my second langauge, I often find that I can't communicate certain things in one langauge or the other. I skimmed the surface of honorifics in Japanese. I often wish to convey the status that is included in using honorifcs when speaking English that isn't there. I still have a long way to go and hope to intensify my learning in the next two weeks before I go off to Japan for a year to study. Only 18 days till lift off!

[nice gaijin]

and that's the difference between 分かる and 理解する

your sig is a bit weird though, what are you trying to say?

[truce]

そう、さっぱりワカラン。

[Kragar]

I know what you mean. Before I learned Mandarin, I couldn't understand a single word. It all sounded like music. But now, I can actually recognize some mandarin words because they are similar to Cantonese, and you have no idea how happy I was. It's like being able to hear again after you've gone deaf for a several years. (I think...)

I had the same experience after learning both French and German. At first they're jsut strings of sound, and then you start to hear things that are like English, only "badly" pronounced. It's like getting glasses for your ears.

more examples of how they're similar (because you asked):
English- It hurts!
mandarin- haw ton a
cantonese- how ton (n)a [the n is a nasal sound]

English- Hurry up!
mandarin- kuai den a
cantonese- fuai dii a

English- one o'clock
mandarin- ii den zon
cantonese- ia din zon

Thanks!

[Pierrot le Fou]

Understand versus absorb/acknowledge.

Roughly in my opinion. Wakaru is more of a personal understanding thing, whereas rikaisuru is more disconnected.

[Nancy]

Japanese is very simple. It's only hard when you're constantly comparing it with English.

[nice gaijin]

でも黒人のような人が「分かる分かる」と言っても、実は理解してないかもしれません。

[houkouonchi]

Well I would have to say that English is quite a bit harder than japanese in my oppinion, though it is easy to learn(in my oppinion) if you are a native speaker. Japanese I would say is a fairly easy language spoken, and difficult langauge generally because of the reading/writing. I do not, however; think that any language is easy, but I do think some are easier than others.

On a side note: Learning japanese in a college, if that is all you learn from, is utterly useless. I would say that probably 5% of my vocabulary was learned from college and other words from watching anime/dorama/reading manga. A lot of the time they teach you words that often times arent all that usefull, and at that level you should be learning more common words.
I am currently on my sixth semmester of japanese(final one at my school) and plan to countinue my studies on my own. I must say that it has been usefull to learn japanese at college, but i know a guy who is taking 1 level below me, it is a combined class and he lived in japan for 2 years. He only scored 6 out of 10 on our review test and i scored a 13, though I am sure his level is much higher than mine. The problem is that in College they just teach you useless Japanese that you will never use in Japan. Luckily from watching quite a few dramas/anime a lot of them raw I would say i have a decent(don't flame me for using anime/dorama as a source) of the slang/dialects used in japan. I know that even in the manga/anime/dorama they don't speak like they do in japan, I have a couple pen-pals, one of them is an older woman and some of the stuff she writes me shows me the difficulties of formalities and such.


On a side note, anyone else learning a foreign language find themselves forgetting english words now and then? I am not joking; sometimes i know the japanese and it takes me a long time to remember what the english word is. I don't actually forget the word I just can't think of it for some reason. This seems to have been hapening to me more and more lately. Like one time i couldn't think of the word criticize. Another time i could rember ゼロ反テープ　(not sure on the kanji) which is kind of like translucent tape, kinda like scotch tape, maybe i would call it clear tape? but i would say it is close to scotch tape and for some reason i couldn't remember the word scotch tape. Weird eh? anyone else have problems like this?



On a side

[Vaste]

Perhaps the biggest turning point in learning Japanese for me is to stop translating things so much in my head. As many have mentioned before, Japanese is not translated in English very well. As soon as I tried to start thinking in Japanese, forming sentences and understanding became much easier. This isn't to say that I don't translate in my head, it's just that I don't try to think of an idea in English and then translate it into Japanese but think of the idea with as much of a Japanese mindset that I have learned.I think constantly translating is a mistake. (Unless you're planning to become a simultaneous interpereter.) I never tried to do that with Japanese, probably because I never do with English (a foreign language). You don't really have to reconstruct and reiterate the thought in another language (be it your mother tounge) to understand what's being said.

What about the rest in this thread? Do you/have you done this? (often translate to your mother tounge)

[Monkey]

I only translate when I am practicing my Japanese alone. If I'm just speaking normally then translating is a really bad thing to do. It slows down your comprehension of what the other person is saying, because you translate their sentence into english, then it slows down your response, because you think of a sentence in english and then translate to japanese.

To be honest there are quite a few words in japanese that I don't even know the english translation of but I use them all the time anyway. I'm sure I've been shown the meaning of the words at some point, but they just don't translate.

[koku]

ummm... actually translating it into english IS a bad idea. Sure it works...but it just handicaps your learning. You should think of it as almost going into "japanese mode" and thinking purely that way. Once you get the hang of it, things get more natural and you do learn better.

For begenners though, can't relaly help not doing that. As much as possible try not translating in your head or thinking in english at all.

Even if you want to be a translator/interpreter you'll still need a VERY solid knowledge of Japanese and I think that requires you to first off learn it in completly Japanese.

that's what I think at least. University Japanese really that useless?? .....What about the 2k Kanji? Aren't there alot of vocabulary in those that you use?? I guess when I get longer into the year I'll ask my Japanese teacher or tutor for words they think I should also be learning outside of the things taught in class.

[Frankey-eh]

Since we're talking about translation...
I've had this question in mind a couple pages back, but:

Is it possible that machines will eventually replace human translation/interpretation?

I personally think that's impossible, because like you've all been saying, translation has limits, and not every word always has the same English equivalent.

[Henjin]

It would take some kind of monster AI to do it. For the forseeable future, human translators have relative job security.

[BluZytrix]

I agree with what all of you have said about translation. Since this is my first time really trying to learn a second language(je ne parle pas le francais), there are lot of things about learning another language in general that people don't teach you in college. For me, translating was one of them. Although, that gets me into trouble sometimes. Have you ever heard of a phrase in one language on not been able to translate it but you can understand it? I never got that. Recently, I have been talking to a girl from France who is on her fourth language to pick up tips about how she learns so many languages and effective methods for doing so. If ya'll have an words of knowledge, drop em on down.

[Monkey]

The only tip I have about learning languages (japanese was my fourth), is immersion. It's by far and away the best way of learning a language. I learned french for 6 years before I went to france to live for 3 months at age 13. Six years taught me a heck of a lot, but I didn't really understand it until I lived there. I'd say those 3 months did as much for my french comprehension as the six years before it.

Same with when I went to Germany and Japan. Immersion is the best tip I can give.

The only other tip is to never forget a word. If you come across a word while reading or listening that you don't know, lodge it in your mind and when you get back home, look it up in a dictionary. Or if you are lucky just ask a friend :D

With Japanese the main thing for me was to learn the verbs. You generally know the subject of any conversation form the start anyway, you just need to know the verbs to be able to decifer the meaning.

[koku]

well alot of times people would do the immersion but no $$$$ :P

I think the best tip is...just love the culture/using the language. Once you do and have a passion for "ooh oooh i want to learn [isnert langauge] really qucikly so I can go use it!!

Find movies, shows, friends that use the language. Books too. It's alot more motivating when you watch a movie completly in that language and realize you just understood the gist of it. Conversations with people is amazing too. Even in year one I couldn't stop smiling when I had like probably the dumbest/most simple converstion with this guy who didn't understand english. Because you see it working!

That's what i think, is the funnest thing about languages. You can learn something in one day and see it work. With other classes...it's really hard ot make the transation of what you learn to how you use it.

[Kragar]

I think constantly translating is a mistake. (Unless you're planning to become a simultaneous interpereter.) I never tried to do that with Japanese, probably because I never do with English (a foreign language). You don't really have to reconstruct and reiterate the thought in another language (be it your mother tounge) to understand what's being said.

What about the rest in this thread? Do you/have you done this? (often translate to your mother tounge)

Most every day coversation isn't worth translating. :-)

No, but I have a Russian friend when I was in school who complained that there wasn't enough translation. He thought that you needed to practice translation because it's a separate and difficult skill in its own right.

On a side note, anyone else learning a foreign language find themselves forgetting english words now and then?

Yes. There's a word that I always remember in Chinese (guli), which I'm blanking on in English. Encourage. That's it. Every single time I try to thing the word, the Chinese comes up and I can't think of the English.

Since we're talking about translation...
I've had this question in mind a couple pages back, but:

Is it possible that machines will eventually replace human translation/interpretation?

Considering the difficulties we have in training humans to translate, I think it will be difficult to program a computer to translate anything except the most literal of conversations. Then again, people might be able to create a "machine translatable" version of their language, used when it has to be translated, which is more restricted and simplified than free conversation. It's kind of like the English I use with my Taiwanese friends -- it's not quite like the English I use with Americans.

I agree with what all of you have said about translation. Since this is my first time really trying to learn a second language(je ne parle pas le francais), there are lot of things about learning another language in general that people don't teach you in college. For me, translating was one of them. Although, that gets me into trouble sometimes. Have you ever heard of a phrase in one language on not been able to translate it but you can understand it? I never got that.

Sometimes your brain is slow. Translating is a different skill. Sometimes you run into a sentence in a foreign language that makes sense, but you don't quite know how to frame it in your native language. You can describe the meaning, but it takes far more words than the foreign phrase does.

Recently, I have been talking to a girl from France who is on her fourth language to pick up tips about how she learns so many languages and effective methods for doing so. If ya'll have an words of knowledge, drop em on down.

Keep at it. Do something with it every day. Don't act like you can learn it just in class. Languages are a perfect reflection of the time you've put into them. If you put a lot of time in, your language will be better.

At the same time, you have to find things in the target language that you enjoy in your native language. If your language is good enough, try to find a book you enjoyed in English and read it again in the target language. If it's not that good, look for shorter things.

Look at online websites or newspapers for articles in things you're interested in.

Try to find a book of jokes, and abuse it with a dictionary.

Find movies in the target language, especially broad comedies and action. Drama relies too much on the fine points of conversation, and would be hard to follow.

Finding a friend to help you is nice, but it's hard to force yourself to use the new language sometimes. I was talking about this with my Russian friend just last night, because I don't speak Russian with him and his Russian-speaking friends, and he doesn't speak German with his German friends. When you're with friends, you just want to communicate, and you pick the language that's most effective to communicate in. That's the best part about immersion -- you'll meet people that don't speak English, and you'll be forced to speak the target language. It's really nice when they're cute.

[StormShadow]

[QUOTE=kokujin]
Find movies, shows, friends that use the language. Books too. It's alot more motivating when you watch a movie completly in that language and realize you just understood the gist of it. Conversations with people is amazing too. Even in year one I couldn't stop smiling when I had like probably the dumbest/most simple converstion with this guy who didn't understand english. Because you see it working!

That is so true. What I find really helps starting out as well, find childrens books. It might seem lame, but the books have very little difficult words, and you get practice reading it. I try and speak Korean to everybody I know that knows it, even if every other sentance is, "Wait, slow DOWN!". You came away feeling a million bucks.

[koku]

[QUOTE=kokujin]
Find movies, shows, friends that use the language. Books too. It's alot more motivating when you watch a movie completly in that language and realize you just understood the gist of it. Conversations with people is amazing too. Even in year one I couldn't stop smiling when I had like probably the dumbest/most simple converstion with this guy who didn't understand english. Because you see it working!

That is so true. What I find really helps starting out as well, find childrens books. It might seem lame, but the books have very little difficult words, and you get practice reading it. I try and speak Korean to everybody I know that knows it, even if every other sentance is, "Wait, slow DOWN!". [b]You came away feeling a million bucks.[b]


lol that's true. The conversation i refered to as dumb/simple was this...

In my Japanese class, there was this guy named mori-san that was a friend of the teacher. He'd stop by every now and then and I'd always see him in the tutors room. He'd always have a suit on and i never saw him speak english just Japanese. Obvouisly i wondered who the hell he was. So like one day we were studying Kanji in the tutors room, and the tutor wrote something on the board. Well Mori-san decided to like jump in on the conversation on everyone way out. He said a whole bunch of stuff and I looked over to my friend like

".....did you get all that??" lol

Then i said dumb things like "are you friends of muro" and all that. He said yes asked my name. I said stuff like pleasure to meet you etc. Then he held the door for me and I bowed and thanked him.

It was that simple but, crap, I was cheesing for a long time about it. Also, thing about a langauge(i'm starting to do it now) don't be afraid to use it even when you realize how little you know. Have to make mistakes infront of people to learn soemtimes. :P

is korean hard??

[Kragar]

That reminds me of the time I was working with a number of Philippinas, and they decided to start teaching me Tagalog. This was right before I was coming to Taiwan, so it did make a sort of sense. They would teach me a sentence or two a day, and I'd go back and practice when I was supposed to be working. We didn't have Internet access, so I had to do something with my time.

Anyway, about a week before I left, I wound up having a minute-long conversation about some work project I was doing for one of the ladies in Tagalog. It wasn't much except that two months before I didn't even know what Tagalog sounded like. It was a really cool moment. What was even better was another co-worker that I was good friends with saw the whole thing, so I had a witness. It just gave me such a cool ego boost.