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people that learn it...how long did it take you to know the basics, to be able to put simple word into sentences? i have too much time and i want to do something... |
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I have a pretty good grasp of Hiragana and Katakana now, and I am just beginning to learn Kanji...I think it will take me about another 2 years to be comfortable with reading Japanese. |
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oh, yeah.. they still use that system with several alphabets, don't they? (how do you say "hi! want to go to a love hotel?" in japanese? hahahah!) |
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I have been thinkin the same thing. It is an awesome language. The letters are so beatiful , i would love to be able to write it. |
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how essential is a good teacher? how much can you learn from books? i have no idea about any of this.. |
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It depends on exactly what form of Japanese you want to learn. At a basic level Japanese is based on Hiragana (traditional Japanese writing), Katakana(used exclusively for words of foreign origin) ad Kanji(he picture style words stolen from China). It is common for elements from all three to be used in one sentence. Then you have the fact there are very different ways of saying things depending on who you are talking to and situation. Sentence structure is odd to get used to and there are a whole host of differences to Western language structure in general (no masculine/feminine although they have words only used by females or males etc.) If you are genuinely interested though it can be fun. |
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For formal style Japanese used for business etc there are a number of good sources and stuff you can download that you can teach yourself from. Make sure you back up any text based learning with spoken stuff (you can get decent courses from bittorrent). Also there are some decent forums about if you get stuck. |
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It also depends on how big the language center in your brain is. Some have bigger then others. It degenerates with age. I learn language easy. I liek Japan. |
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about spoken japanese: tonality doesn't count as much as in chinese, right? ("wu" can mean seven or so different things, depending on the tone of your voice). I've been sniffing at japanese for a while now, but I won't have time for it until january.. I think I may study chinese instead, though, since I'm planning on studying one year in china... |
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konbanwa ! genki ? |
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well, i doubt i have a language center of any kind...im going to get some of those sources (if i can find them) and see what happens. but i kind of got the general idea that it takes years for the best so i don't have any high hopes for it...would like to at least get some idea, and if i get it or like it i might try a bit harder :) |
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about how long did it take you to put together sentences of any kind? coz if i understand right you get to know the meaning of words, but it's really hard to put them together so it makes sense...hmm |
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chinese is even harder i hear...although you seem to be good with languages, so it might not be that hard for you :) |
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It's like anything...you can memorise basic sentences but unless you spend time understanding the grammar you are never going to progress past understanding basic phrases. Word order in Japanese is (subject)(object)(verb) rather than the western style (subject)(verb)(object) So I go to the bank in Japanese is "I bank go" |
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yes, I expect chinese to be lots of trouble... I've got one of those "teach yourself chinese" books, and I've already gotten far into semantics and grammar, but that book will NEVER teach me how to SPEAK chinese... and the signs are too small for me to be able to reproduce them, so this far I only know certain rules for word order and that polite phrases are always said twice ("thank you, thank you," "please, please," "come in, come in," and so-on).. and the next one probably applies to some japanese as well.. lots of "word images," like.. "open the door and go in," when translated directly is something like "open enter mouth" or something like that... but I also think spanish has that.. I'm not sure about that, but I remember reading once that "put food on table" is something like "put food in belly of table.." it was either spanish or some spanish/indian mix in one of the countries in south-america... anyway.. I'm ranting. |
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Tolst if you do start learning Japanese steer clear of learning it the Romaji way (using the western alphabet) because it is meant to be very hard to get into using Hiragana if you go down this path, but as Hiragana and Katakana are both phonetic languages it is easy to create Romaji in reverse. |
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maybe you should first explain for them what katakana, hiragana and kanji means ? eh ? baka. |
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I did... ‚Âê‚ß |
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well, the whole thing is kind of a new experience for me really...i mean european languages are all so much alike it's easy to figure out the basics...another thing is that i doubt i could get any japanese learning book in my language so that's another problem. for instance when it comes to english or italian i can usually put them into proper tense, but i don't know any rules - i had to knew them back in high school, but i got through university without the grammar somehow :) i just found some of those learn japanese programs which im going to download to get some idea. dm, when it comes to writing thise signs, there are 37 different lines (bfmp or something like that - their alfabet) which are used for creating all those thousands of chinese signs...apperantly it's quite easy to learn those, but when it comes to putting them into words it where the trouble starts :) |
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Character encoding: Shift-JIS to see what I just typed. |
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thanks for the advice...i wonder when i'll get that far though :) |
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You will...Get the Rosetta Stone Japanese program, it is all picture based and has no need for English in it at all, which means your language problem is overcome :) It's pretty good as it will display the words in any of the three alphabets and it builds so you get an idea of sentences and ow to say them. |
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yeah, I know.. each line is a.. fuck.. can't remember the english word for it, but when you were in childrens school, did you do this thing where you pronounced words bit by bit while clapping your hands and counting the parts? |
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実際に愚かな馬 0575;。 |
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thank! i'll get that...maybe even the original if it isn't too expensive :) dm, my children school days are long gone...can't remember anything really :) |
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私は冗談を言っ 愛を知っている 2390;いた、 i 2290; |
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Your cut and paste isn't working too well on my screen marcin. |
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あなたに話すた で待っている酒 そしてim 2417;に MSN 6896;機 陰。 |
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shame. |
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cool, plenty of those rosetta stone thingies :) let's see.. |
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syllables! I meant syllables! it's so annyoning when you know what it's called, but can't remember it... |
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you're persistent..i bet that comes in handy when you're learning languages :) |
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yeah... I like language.. especially its power... if a language doesn't have words for colors, the person speaking the language doesn't know of colors.. he ca see them and acknowledge them, but until there are words for them they are nothing (however, those languages that doesn't have words for colors just use names of things that have the same color.. "I want a blood carpet, and a skin chair")... if a language has no words for the different days of the week, the person who speaks the language just lives life.. no sundays off, no birthdays.. and to us, these small things are so important, and we stress and run and struggle to "get it done by wednesday," or something like that... too bad most philosophy these days are ONLY about language.. I'll never plow new ground (I never really expected that, though...)... one of the most interesting things to me is alienation... when people justify not liking something by giving it the properties of something they don't like or just inventing new words for it... like soldiers who call their enemies "gouks," "krauts," or the more recent "ali," just to avoid killing "humans." also, computer languages are interesting.. how would a people with "C" as their primary language function? they'd have to declare classes before initiating conversation, and conversation would consist of affirmative or negative responses to logically correct questions... "synthesis" (adding "horn" to "horse" to create the fantasy-animal "unicorn") wouldn't exist, and fantasy would be pretty limited... as I said, these are all thoughts thought before, and I take no credit for them, but I'd still like to know... |
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yeah, definitely, all that is very interesting, but it takes a lot of effort (or a brilliant mind) to understand japanese or chinese which are so different to european languages in that way.. it's an interesting paradox, how apperantly japanese and chinese both started to use some of eachother words. japanese in medicine (something like europeans using latin) and chinese mostly curses :), from the time when they were in war with japan...you only get to know the language properly if you live in the country and learn everything..."too bad most philosophy these days are ONLY about language" - that is probably why most good contemporary philosophers write in english..it's easy to talk your way out blaming the language barrier for it, and how some things can't be explained as good in english (or any other language) as they are in our mother tongue... what are you studying btw? i've noticed before that you seem to know quite a number of languages, but if i remember right it's something else you study.. |
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I was going to wax in this thread, but everyone did a good job of answering your questions already. *claps sortabutdoesnt* |
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yeah..this is a real nice community :) |
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i don't expect to be able to talk japanese in "daily life" until at least 2 or 3 years, and i've already studied all the basics last year in university - of course there is a gigantic quantity of vocabulary like in every language but when they're in kanji it's three times as hard and i don't even count being able to write the words, only to read them is hard enough... ...this said, we don't do any oral at all and now we're translating historical and litterary texts which is just plain fucking stupid as we need 15 minutes for each fucking sentence to search all the vocabulary (and getting it wrong 50% of the time). pedagogically it totally sucks. i don't know if i'll keep on studying it for a long time; anyway i expect to fail this year... |
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if you're just beginning to learn kanji, 2 years is very optimistic in my opinion!! : ) |
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I just mean being able to read japanese news sites etc and understand basically what is going on. |
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this thread is awesome. i took a greek class for 4 years, so im able to do some basic translation of old texts (the ilias, odysee and other homeros / plato stuff), so im comfortable with strange word orders. however, a lot of words are very similar to those in western languages, which makes learning the vocabulary easy japanese on the other hand, sounds rediculous to me. at least theres a consistant alphabet in western language. |
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how many hours per week did you have classes? and did you notice big difference in how particular students get it? i mean when it comes to western languages everyone is able to learn at least the basics..im affraid it's not that simple with japanese.. jaroen, you are one of those ppl here that seem to have no problem with languages, so i bet you would learn the japanese in no time :) |
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The best way to practise is by total immersian, ie: going to japan. The second best way to learn is to find some japanese friends online to talk to. If you need a Japanese penpal, check this site out: Under the personals section. Rob Pongi is the man. Is name is a play on the word Roppongi, which is the name of the largest foreign district of Tokyo. |
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I must mention the following site, since I read it everyday when I was in Japan: Japanese news and culture from the gaijin perspective. |
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i think it helps a lot if you learned languages when you were small, that is, not just one language. it helps developing the language centers in the brain. i don't have a hard time learning new languages imo since i speak 3 icelandic, english, danish and my spanish isn't that bad but i haven't used it for some time, it all comes back when you got to spain though. having an interest for languages in general helps a lot too of course. the european languages, or most of them at least, all sound pretty simular and it doesn't take too much time to get into one if you're european. i've heard japanese people say that learning european languages is easy because they're "all alike". |
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i don't know, like ten hours maybe? |
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yes, very probably. |
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omg, 10 hors is a lot!! :/ atli, definitely! best starting as a kid! |
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european languages ARE all alike... if you have slight knowledge of german, english and french, every other language around here makes perfect sense right away... tols: I study philosophy, but I'm very interested in language, so I've read a few books, and I often dissect spoken versions while watching films, so while I may not exactly learn the language, the small "eccentricities" of each language is easily deciphered... however, there are many word-melds nowadays, like the japanese who have lots of misspelled english words... like ringu0, which is called ringu0 - baatsuday, which anyone can see is "ring 0 - birthday," and the polish "restaurancja" which must derive from - if not directly from it, then from some other derivative of it - "restaurant." And then there are the things in my own language that are seldomly contemplated by people who speak it... like our word for breakfast - "frokost." It makes no sense, because "fro" isn't a norwegian word.. I'm pretty sure it's from germen "früh," which means "early," and then "kost," which is, at least semi-norwegian, since it on its own means "food" (more or less). I'm ranting again, but I get caught up in this... |
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so, how many languages do you people speak? i speak norwegian, english, portuguese (brazilian) and german, and i know a little spanish. i'm pissed because i learned german in school. in norway most kids learn german as a second language afther english in school, but who needs german? it sucks, and itæs not useful other than in germany. another thing is that you can get a long way by just speaking english in germany. spanish on the other hand, or any other latin language is a much more useful since they are spoken all over the world, often in countries where peoples englishknowledge is poor. |
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there are so many words we use that derivate from westeren european languages, that if i'd try hard i could probably talk with foreigners just using those words :) although, it's not official slovenian ofcourse, but old people use that a lot...we only have our own country for 14 years...slovenian is really rich regarding vocabulary, but very unpractical for foreigners to learn...although younger people seem to be able to learn quite fast. it's good to talk to people who moved here years ago, and still make same mistakes when they use structure which is normally used in most western europe languages.. i saw two films without subtitles last week...one was spanish and i could understand about 70% of what has been said although i have never learned any spanish...i learnt italian for 5 or 6 years though so that surely helped (it's funny though how italians and spanish don't understand each other!?!). other film was spoken in mandarin...appart from some english words i couldn't understand a single word..i think that says it all :) |
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