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Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:06 pm
by EternalLurker
That's the case for virtually any language. Just gotta find the right classes. Rosetta Stone's usually pretty good about teaching conversational language.
EDIT: You ninja'ing bastard.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:10 pm
by The Commissar
Silentcook wrote:...you just made me want to facepalmvandalize that Wikipedia page into oblivion. Shame it would do nothing. LolWikipedia indeed.
Anyway, Sicilian is in a half-assed bastard position, a limbo inbetween dialect and minority language, and not even natives necessarily speak it, though they might well pick up the "accent" and use it when they speak Italian.
Therefore, going back to my original "wat", that's a bit like saying that SOME of the citizens of a capital - say, those of a particular quarter - MIGHT have an easy time learning Japanese because ONE of their phonemes is close to a Japanese phoneme.
No.
Apologies for double post, but you are correct, I should restate my earlier statement, as it was false. It shouldn't be SUPER easy for them, but just easier to pronounce a few sounds.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:22 pm
by EternalLurker
Oh, I see how it is. First you ninja me, then you don't even acknowledge my post's existence. "Double post"?! Well, I hate you too.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 7:33 pm
by The Commissar
EternalLurker wrote:Oh, I see how it is. First you ninja me, then you don't even acknowledge my post's existence. "Double post"?! Well, I hate you too.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 8:24 pm
by cpl_crud
Most Japanese classes start with the polite forms for a couple of reasons.
1) It's easy to conjugate tense in the polite form
2) When you're speaking to a shop attendant/train guard/etc (as you most likely will if you go to Japan) or are involved in business (as the majority of Japanese Students are) then you will have more contact with the polite form than with the casual forms. You'll only use the casual form in conversation if you're talking to friends/random strangers that you want to turn into friends.
3) Almost all of the intermediate classes teach the casual forms of the language; you just need to stick at it for more than 3 months.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:01 pm
by Captain Niggawatts
The Commissar wrote:Not really. English isn't easy to learn unless you already spoke a Germanic language. Japanese is easy for people who speak a Romance language because their pronunciation is similar, and super easy for Sicilians because the Sicilian double l is pronounced exactly like the r in Japanese.
Also Arabic was here, learning everything else is a cinch.
That's not really why Japanese is hard. The pronunciation is a bit different, but it's more the fact that it is an entirely different alphabet, especially Kanji.
Fuck Kanji. fuck it in the ass, that is an even more masochistic system of language than English grammar.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:04 pm
by Xuan
I've always thought that Chinese ranks one of the top for being hardest language to learn since it has SO MANY DIFFERENT WORDS (Even for a Chinese like me, but I always have good natural affinity with it somehow). However Japanese aren't easy at all. There are plenty of similar looking words with slight variation in just one sentence indicating a different way of pronunciation with few actual Chinese words (Since Japanese language deviate from early Chinese or something like that). And I sure as hell can't read Korean.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:25 pm
by The Commissar
Captain Niggawatts wrote:The Commissar wrote:Not really. English isn't easy to learn unless you already spoke a Germanic language. Japanese is easy for people who speak a Romance language because their pronunciation is similar, and super easy for Sicilians because the Sicilian double l is pronounced exactly like the r in Japanese.
Also Arabic was here, learning everything else is a cinch.
That's not really why Japanese is hard. The pronunciation is a bit different, but it's more the fact that it is an entirely different alphabet, especially Kanji.
Fuck Kanji. fuck it in the ass, that is an even more masochistic system of language than English grammar.
More masochistic than English's enormous vocabulary?
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 10:44 pm
by Bara
The Commissar wrote:More masochistic than English's enormous vocabulary?
Hmm, I never considered that english had a larger vocabulary than any other language. But it is kind of a "tar-baby"; english tends to stick to all other languages it comes into contact with and leaves pieces of itself while picking up all kinds of bits of other languages.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 1:26 am
by EternalLurker
The bigger issue with English's vocabulary is that the vast majority of its more commonly used verbs are irregular. Most languages don't have half as many irregular verbs used half as often.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 2:11 am
by Pimmy
Raging weeaboo here, lernin' some nihongos. I've been casually picking stuff up for a few years, but I want to get more serious. Having a general comfort with the language and bits of it's grammar really helps, as well as a base understanding of kanji and stuff. I probably still read the speed of a first-grader, though.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 3:17 am
by Bara
EternalLurker wrote:The bigger issue with English's vocabulary is that the vast majority of its more commonly used verbs are irregular. Most languages don't have half as many irregular verbs used half as often.
Any idea to explain why english has so many irregular verbs compared to other languages; are they hold overs from the germanic roots, accretions from other languages, english speakers are nucking futs?
While I may pick up the occasional word in japanese I have no intention of learning it. I'm having too much fun abusing and tormenting Standard American English to give that up and start molesting a foreign tongue.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 4:11 am
by The Commissar
Bara wrote:EternalLurker wrote:The bigger issue with English's vocabulary is that the vast majority of its more commonly used verbs are irregular. Most languages don't have half as many irregular verbs used half as often.
Any idea to explain why english has so many irregular verbs compared to other languages; are they hold overs from the germanic roots, accretions from other languages, english speakers are nucking futs?
While I may pick up the occasional word in japanese I have no intention of learning it. I'm having too much fun abusing and tormenting Standard American English to give that up and start molesting a foreign tongue.
English words come from about 5 different roots, Latin, Old English, Germanic (Norse, Dane, and German), Norman French, and everything else. None of them follow the same conjugation rules I believe, so yea.
Also, a lot of words I see with weird changes are of English roots, such as man becoming men.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:05 am
by Nightdragon
Peronally I would love to learn Japanese. For many reasons, of course one of them being how I'm stationed in Japan. Another is because the Corps will pay me an extra couple hundred a paycheck just because I would know a foreign language. However, that requires me to be fluent in it in everyway, and to take yearly tests on my proficiency with it. Needless to say I'm very far away from reaching that stage.
Re: Learning Japanese.... Who is into it?
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 4:55 pm
by Caesius
I'm speaking out of my ass right now, but I think learning vocabulary is easier than learning grammar. The few Frenchmen I've come across over the Internet seem to have a much worse grasp of English than Swedes and Germans, even though English vocabulary has more borrowings from French than Germanic languages. Moreover, I've heard that Finnish is one of the hardest European languages to learn for other Europeans, because the only other European languages it has anything in common with are Hungarian and Estonian. The vocabulary probably isn't so bad, but the grammar is apparently a nightmare.