Learning new laguages

girls in real life are just bitches.

But, you're right, I don't see why people want to learn japanese just for anime. I'm positive japan isn't anything like what it depicts in anime. I actually think anime is giving people too much speculation of japan. There's no tsundere school girls in japan. People do not give obento, or probably love letters. (Who does that anymore?) School is just normal school. There will be no space alien Double D pink haired woman visiting your place. (I don't think I've ever seen japanese people wear abnormal colored hair) unless they were scene or harajuku. ALSO. Asian people are so small.

so frail and cute. I don't find any asian women attractive for some odd reason. :|

anyways offtopik.

Language is a virtue.

There's no language that is not useful AT ALL. You could use your knowledge of the language to, say, be a part-time translator, or a language teacher. You could always find some ways to make that knowledge of yours useful.

But if you ask me what language would be the most useful to general public, it's Chinese. Roughly one-third of earth's population speaks Chinese. Chinatowns is found at almost every major city in the world. Let's say that you're trapped smack dab in the middle of Moscow. You happened to speak no other language except Chinese. But you know what? Hello, there's a Chinatown in Moscow. You could make your way there, and you, my friend, had just saved your ass from "Lost in Translation" 2. Thx to Chinese language.

Maybe now Chinese still can't shake the domination of English in the language general usefulness hierarchy. But with the Chinese "economic invasion" growing like crazy, i could see Chinese dethrones English in the future.

But if you ask some specific person with some specific needs, of course just about every language in the world could be more important than Chinese. Like in my case, I will be enrolled in a Japanese university soon, so currently learning Japanese is the most important for me.

@loliqon
And as a person who lives in Japan, i will personally answer your statements in your posts regarding Japan.

False. Among my friends here are a Japanese high school girl whose personality resembles a tsundere at times. Although i admit that it's not as extreme as what is regularly depicted in animes and mangas.

False. I've witnessed many friends of mine who makes bentos and give/share it to their respective loved ones. And i once acted as a love-letter messenger.

True. There's no vampire schools or crazy-filthy-rich ass schools a la Ouran in Japan.

True. No need for any explanation.

False. Come to my language school, and you could see for yourself many carrot-tops and pinkheads loitering around.

False. "Asian" is too diversified. It's acceptable if it's "Japanese". But "Arabs" are small? Na-a, think again.

Sorry if my post comes off like a jerk-ish post, but i feel the need of correcting some of your statement, loliqon.

And yeah, off-topic.

excuse me for being somewhat close-minded. >:

but.... really? That's just odd. (for me, at least)

I never thought pure-tsundere could exist in normal school life.

"I-I didn't do it for you.... i-idiot."

Love letters are just too childish. :|

Arab's are small, some are big.

try to learn japanese from singing and read the song lyrics like i do. both my english and japanese arent good enough,but to tell you the truth,i never taking any Language Program in my whole life. all i need is just to learn them from my daily life (the first time i learn english is from playing FF-7 in my old PSone).

until now i'm still learning both language by playing games and reading lyrics (both japanese and english)

Kanji is the most difficult to learn. the japanese also have difficulty to learn Kanji (that's why many of student in japan prefer to skip japanese class).


"変わらない頼ｴは続いている あの日々さえ曇って"
("Once again my eyes stare somewhere out the window")

The whole tsundere thing comes from real life. All over the world, there exist girls who act tough but are really soft. Tsundere girls in anime and manga are usually exaggerated, but it's not just a cultural thing that exists only in Japan. I've known girls in real life, in the United States, that were brash and violent but once you got to know them and got close to them, you could see that they were kind and vulnerable.

If you learn at least a east asian language, learning other east asian language should be easier, I believe that the hard thing about japanese is the kanji which is like chinese hanzi or the korean hangul. Usually a kanji word will have a few different reading making it tough to read. If you are totally new to japanese, I recommend you to learn hirigana and katakana first and then slowly introduce yourself to kanji words ( that's what I am doing :P )

If you are really desperate try doing this, go to google translate... type out all the frequent words you use in english and translate into japanese, then take note of it.

Btw, for your language skills in a certain language to improve you should practise it daily, so if you are in an english speaking environment, learning japanese would be tougher.


Here's a website you can learn the kanji which elementary school kids will learn... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji

That reminded me of Russell Peters XD ....

A question about learning Japanese independently:

Is it possible to learn how to read Japanese without learning how to speak Japanese?

I have a lot of free time on my hands, and I'd like to learn Japanese so I could translate the manga series out there that get ignored (like Akagi and Kaiji and the rest of Fukumoto's stuff). I don't have a burning passion to learn Japanese so I can watch unsubbed anime or one day go to Japan. I just think it'd be cool to have another translator out there willing to translate cult projects.

I recently started using a guide for learning Japanese (called "Japanese is Possible"), but it focuses on speaking Japanese, not on writing it. It has vocabulary words, but nothing is written in Japanese. It's just romanji, and I feel like if I continue with that, after a few months, I'll be speaking Japanese with no idea how to write or read it. And that is the opposite of what I want. I wouldn't mind if I could read Japanese but not speak it or understand it being spoken.

But is that even possible? Or does reading it and understanding it spoken go hand in hand? And if it is possible to learn just how to read Japanese, would that be productive, or would it be akin to tying one hand behind my back?

I say all this as a smart person with a lot of free time on my hands. I say this also as a person who has studied two foreign languages in the past (Latin and French) and had difficulty in speaking and understanding both languages but did alright when it came to reading and writing the languages. Hell, even with English, I do a lot better with the written word.

Any help concerning this topic would be much appreciated.

Yeah, it's possible to READ Japanese without understanding it. Just go learn Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Couple of months and BAM! you could read Japanese WITHOUT understanding it. Do you think so? No sir, Kanjis have many different ways to read, and that alone is complex enough to hold you back from reading fluently for 6 months,minimum.

But in your case, you want to be a translator, so i guess you want to be able to READ AND UNDERSTAND written Japanese. Okay, if this is the case, you would need to learn the characters, vocabulary and grammar then. Now this is a whole different case. Assuming that you're starting from the scratch, it would took 1-2 years until you mastered it. And it takes patience, sheer willingness to study, and dedication. You can be smart, but without all those, forget it.

You are dealing with 1500+ characters that have many different meanings according to the way you stack it and according to the context it is used. AND many ways of reading.

It's not frickin' Latin or French who uses basically 26 characters,maxed (archaic Latin uses less).

Prime example:

出=de=this kanji means "out" or "get out"
口=kuchi=this kanji means "mouth"

put it together and.....

出口=deguchi="exit",the opposite of "entrance"

Yee, the meaning's changed, and so does the way of reading it.
And that's an EASY example.

Yes, it's possible to learn just how to read Japanese, albeit not easy.

But if you want my personal opinion, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME IF YOU ONLY LEARN HOW TO READ JAPANESE. YOU WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF YOU LEARN IT PROPERLY. You want to learn how to read Japanese properly? You need to learn the vocabs, the grammars and the characters then. From my personal experience, all those takes 80% of my studying time to figure out. Speaking and writing comprises the rest.

So, after you've learned 80% of it, why would you stop if there's only 20% left? And those 20% could be very well the key if you want to make your pilgrimage to Japan, go find some lolis of your dream study/work there, or maybe even live there.

So,basically, yeah, you could do what you want, but it would be a waste of time.

And you should ask Raze about this;He's far more experienced than i am.
He's a master, while i'm just a student in the middle of studying process.

I brought up my history with Latin and French not to say that I was good at reading them and thus have an edge over reading Japanese, but to say that I was bad at speaking and understanding those languages when they were spoken and thus would probably be bad at speaking and understanding spoken Japanese. In my French class, for example, by the end of the class, I could write and read some French, but whenever the teacher spoke French, it all either sounded like gibberish to me or I repeatedly mistook words. And I was horrible at pronouncing French words, to the point that the teacher rarely understood a single French word I said. Honestly, I have a speech impediment that makes my English hard to understand, so I doubt I'll be able to fluently speak any foreign language.

But that's all off-topic, I suppose. Thanks for the info. I didn't really get far using the "Japanese is Possible" guide, and it didn't say anything about the relationship between the spoken language and the written language (part of the reason I dropped it and am looking for another guide).

I'm sorry if I came out as arrogant with the "smart person" comment, but I'm just being honest when I say that I'm smart. I'm not a genius by any means, but I'm not going to say that I'm dumb and would have to study for weeks to learn the most basic lesson. I also didn't mean to imply that learning Japanese is something I take lightly. Part of the reason I call myself a smart person is because I am a person who studies hard when I want/need to know something. There's no way I would be able to learn it without studying my ass off and spending many hours on it.

Finally, if I am able to learn Japanese and do some translating, I wouldn't try to tackle actually translating manga right off the bat. I'd probably try translating stuff that already has a well-respected translation and then compare my translations to the good translation. I'm saying this so people won't think I'm some loser otaku who wants to learn the bare minimum and immediately start translating; that's not me at all. And I'm not planning on being able to translate anything for a very long time. Unless my brain gets sapped with some genius ray. But in that case, I wouldn't worry about translating anything. I'd worry about taking over the world. :twisted:

Again, thank you, mnx, for setting me straight about Japanese.

I don't think latin has roots within logogram languages.... do they?

I don't really find anything similar with arabic and latin. Except pronunciation.

But, uh, I settled on this little gem from a blog; I always thought english was pretty damn easy, but then I realize that when I showed my friends they said they had real trouble with it. I only had two incorrect after looking it up. lol.

:
http://mississippitokorea.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

22 Reasons Why English Is Hard
I found this little gem while searching for an old George Carlin/Gallagher bit about English pronunciation. I read through these and actually had to stop and slow down on a few of them! Have fun!

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail
18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) He decided to comb the tomb to find the bomb.

What mnx said is pretty much it, but since I was also asked the same question in a PM by another user, here goes.

It is entirely possible to be able to read/write Japanese and not be able to hold a conversation. You will need to master the writing system of course: the kana (which isn't that hard), and have a good grasp of at least several hundred kanji (which is, obviously hard) to become literate enough to not have to use a dictionary every couple pages or so. I had the advantage of having Chinese as my first language, and so did not have to memorize kanji. You might want to ask others, who've had the experience of cramming them, for help there instead. You basically need to get to at least the point where you know your kana so well you don't even need to think about it, and get to the same level with most of the more common kanji.

Most importantly, however, you need to have a very, very good command of grammar. Japanese verbs are similar to Western verbs in that you change them slightly to denote different tenses and so forth, and there are also conjunctions. But there are also things that are unique to Japanese (almost all of which are borrowed from Chinese), such as counters (eg. one sword "一枝剣", one rabbit "一羽兔", one cow "一頭牛"). A good grasp of how the language works will get you very far in being able to read Japanese, especially in your case, since with reading/writing you have the leisure of pulling up a dictionary should you come across a word you are not familiar with (you obviously cannot do that during a conversation). Reading won't be quite so bad. Writing, however, will be extremely difficult, and I suggest not even trying to go there if all you want is to be able to translate; however, writing stuff out is a very good way to impress kana/kanji into your memory, so it's up to you.

In any case, you have a long road in front of you should you proceed to try. I still suggest taking lessons, as guidance is very important if you want to get anywhere with a new language. Many people complain that they do poorly in classes and they don't get anything from them, but if this is the case then Japanese is not for you. I recommend taking classes because by learning how to read/write Japanese you've already gone about 80-90% to learning the whole of Japanese, so why not go the extra mile and learn how to speak/listen as well? Furthermore, each aspect of Japanese (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) complements and enhances the others, and you will get much more out of it with all four than learning how to read/write only.

About translating being good practice, yes and no. I wouldn't call it practice so much as putting your skills to the test. As a translator you have a duty to preserve as much of the original language as possible, and thus a good translator should be able to think in both Japanese and English, and not have to keep referring back to his/her main language (ie. reading Japanese in terms of English). So while translating is possible without such mastery of Japanese, it will be very difficult, take lots of time and effort, and even then, your translation may be incomplete and/or contain errors (this is especially true if your understanding of how the language works, such as grammar, is inadequate). I wouldn't attempt translating until a certain level of mastery is reached, for the simple reason translation is not as simple as is commonly thought: a good translation preserves not only the meaning (and even here it is difficult, since Japanese and English are quite different), but also the spirit of the original, not to mention you also have to make sure the lines flow/work in the product language (English). To know if you've reached this point or not, see if you can translate English into Japanese. I daresay most of the translators out there can easily go from Japanese to English, but not the other way round, because what they are good at is translating, and not Japanese itself. Translating and mastery of Japanese are two entirely different things.