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Cactus difficulty from Japanese perspective | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5585 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 1 of 14 05 February 2010 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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We all know this forums cactus rating system dont we? It is from a native English speakers perspective itsnt it.
For example, Spanish, Italian, etc - 2 cacti Turkish, Persian, etc - 3 cacti Hungarian, Slavic languages, etc - 4 cacti Chinese, Japanese, Korean - 5 cacti I know several Japanese friends who study foreign languages. I have a Japanese friend who studies Spanish. I know several people who study Korean and Chinese. I even have aquiantances who study Czech and Russian. How would the Cactus rating system look from a Japanese persons perspective? From what I gather, Spanish is more difficult to learn than English because of its more complex grammar (gender, several past tenses, subjuntive mood! Need I say more!) Naturally Slavic languages with complicated nominal declension are even harder in difficulty. I wonder how Korean and Chinese are? Apparantly Korean is said to be the "easy language" for a Japanese person. However, I personally believe that is exagerated. A lot of Japanese people have a tough time with Korean. Also some people seem to suggest that Japanese people can learn Chinese easily because of the Characters and lexical similarities. However, several Japanese people have told me that Chinese is much harder for them that western European languages. Can anyone suggest any 1-5 cactus rating system regarding the difficulty of foreign languages from a Japanese persons viewpoint? Edited by hombre gordo on 05 February 2010 at 2:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5962 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 3 of 14 05 February 2010 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Korean - 2 cacti
Chinese, Turkish - 3 cacti Vietnamese - 4 cacti Everything else - 5 cacti
At the beginning when they are struggling with the pronunciation, I can see how Chinese might seem harder than western European languages. But after that point, Japanese have a very clear advantage. It's nonsense to suggest that Chinese is harder for them than western European languages. Consider that Japanese can start (attempting to) read Chinese newspapers from day 1. They usually still can't read an English newspaper after 5 years.
A lot of English speakers have a tough time with German and French. That doesn't say much about the relative difficulty of those languages for English speakers. When you're asking these kind of questions to the learners themselves, it's important to factor in their biases based on which language is "cool". The uncool languages often seem harder than the cool ones. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 14 05 February 2010 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If I consider grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, I would suggest this order, but it's really just a guess:
1 Very Easy — Okinawan 2 Easy — Turkish, Finnish, Korean (2.5 due to pronunciation) 3 Medium — Spanish, Italian, Persian, Chinese (3.5 due to pronunciation) 4 Hard — English, French, German, Thai 5 Very Hard — Russian, Arabic Although Chinese is hard to pronounce, it lacks declensions, ablaut, and all the fiddly bits English has (articles, plurals, etc.), and most of the vocabulary as well as cultural aspects are familiar. Romance verbs offer some initial difficulties, but Spanish and Italian I judge to be easier because of their phonological similarity. Highly fusional languages with large phoneme inventories written in unfamiliar scripts go in category 5. Edited by Captain Haddock on 05 February 2010 at 3:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6779 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 14 05 February 2010 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Japanese people would likely say that learning a western European language is easier than Chinese for them because they have studied English for 10 years in school. If they hadn't already done all of that English vocabulary study, then they would be saying Chinese is easier because, in fact, Japanese writing uses a large amount of words borrowed from Chinese, which you already know.
I met one Japanese man who said he could speak Chinese and Korean, but he couldn't speak English. When I said to him, "Oh, you can speak Korean?" He immediately spouted a few sentences of Korean. Here is my Cacti suggestion for Japanese learning languages: Listening - 5 Cacti Speaking - 4 Cacti Writing - 3 Cacti Reading - 2 Cacti 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Izual Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 5927 days ago 16 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 14 05 February 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, there is subjunctive mood in English (for ex. 'I demand that he come'.). However, I since I don't know any Spanish, I can't tell if it's different from Spanish one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 7 of 14 06 February 2010 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
In your example, it's actually "come" that is the subjunctive verb. (The indicative mood would be "comes".) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5585 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 8 of 14 06 February 2010 at 6:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, a remnant of the subjuctive mood still exists in English. Most people are not even aware of its existence. However, in Spanish it has a lot more usages and takes a lot more complex inflexions (with irregularities included) than the remnant of a subjuctive that English has. It also works in several tenses. In older texts you will even find a future subjuctive. Its use today however is very limited. Mastering the subjuctive can even be quite a tought time for Europeans. I believe that Spanish grammar is considerably more complicated that English grammar. For that reason I believe that for Japanese speakers Spanish is more difficult than English. Pronunciation and spelling is a different issue though. Japanese people seem to pronounce Spanish beautifully. I think the same goes for Italian. Grammar more difficult than English, but pronunciation easier. By the way Captain, Finnish - 2 cacti!!! I think Finnish is crazily difficult for absolutely everyone except for speakers of a closely related language like Estonian! Even speakers of Hungarian (a distantly related language) would still find many languages much easier that Finnish. Edited by hombre gordo on 06 February 2010 at 6:47am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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