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Cactus difficulty from Japanese perspective

  Tags: Difficulty | Japanese
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
14 messages over 2 pages: 1
zhiguli
Senior Member
Canada
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Russian, Mandarin

 
 Message 9 of 14
06 February 2010 at 9:44am | IP Logged 
I don't understand why people are putting Turkish or Finnish in the same category as Korean or Chinese. The former languages are quite far away from the latter and Japanese, geographically and culturally speaking.

The only similarities they have (with Korean/Japanese) are in the grammar, but even here the actual mechanics of the cases/verb conjugation are quite different. Not to mention that the former languages also have vowel harmony. And there is almost no common vocabulary (apart from a handful of words that could just as easily be coincidence). Turkish, for example, gets about 30% of its words from Arabic/Persian, half that amount from European languages (mostly French) and next to nothing from Chinese.

hombre gordo wrote:
Even speakers of Hungarian (a distantly related language) would still find many languages much easier that Finnish.


This I doubt. Though it's true that the amount of cognates between the two languages is a good deal less than, say, between Romance or Germanic languages.

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Captain Haddock
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
kanjicabinet.tumblr.
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Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek

 
 Message 10 of 14
06 February 2010 at 12:13pm | IP Logged 
I may have been wrong about Finnish (I don't know much about the language), but I know both Japanese and Turks
who have studied each others' languages and say they're quite easy to learn. I know a Turkish student who passed
JLPT-1 after only two years in Japan.
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Izual
Diglot
Newbie
Poland
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Speaks: Polish*, English
Studies: Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 11 of 14
06 February 2010 at 2:20pm | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
In your example, it's actually "come" that is the subjunctive verb. (The indicative mood would be "comes".)


Umm, I just wanted to mark a word that indicates subjunctive mood (I was taught at Uni this way).
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hombre gordo
Triglot
Senior Member
Japan
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184 posts - 247 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese
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 Message 12 of 14
06 February 2010 at 4:14pm | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
I may have been wrong about Finnish (I don't know much about the language), but I know both Japanese and Turks
who have studied each others' languages and say they're quite easy to learn. I know a Turkish student who passed
JLPT-1 after only two years in Japan.


Yes, Finnish has a reputation for being majorly difficult.

However, I think passing JLPT-1 after 2 years in Japan is normal for just about any language background. That is not such a surprise. JLPT-1 is realistically quite passable with 2 years of study in the country as long as the learner doesnt neglect Kanji.

My point is that I dont think Turkish speakers have a major advantage for learning Japanese (not compared to Koreans or Chinese), but they still find the grammar easier than more Europeans. However Turkish and Japanese share virtually no lexical similarity (except maybe a few coincidences) making vocabulary memorisation a difficult task.


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Captain Haddock
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
kanjicabinet.tumblr.
Joined 6773 days ago

2282 posts - 2814 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek

 
 Message 13 of 14
07 February 2010 at 9:27am | IP Logged 
Quote:
However, I think passing JLPT-1 after 2 years in Japan is normal for just about any language background.
That is not such a surprise. JLPT-1 is realistically quite passable with 2 years of study in the country as long as the
learner doesnt neglect Kanji.


I must be stupid then. I failed JLPT-1 after 3 years of daily study living in Japan. (I passed the kanji parts, but that's
the easy part of the test.)
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hombre gordo
Triglot
Senior Member
Japan
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184 posts - 247 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese
Studies: Portuguese, Korean

 
 Message 14 of 14
08 February 2010 at 6:02am | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
Quote:
However, I think passing JLPT-1 after 2 years in Japan is normal for just about any language background.
That is not such a surprise. JLPT-1 is realistically quite passable with 2 years of study in the country as long as the
learner doesnt neglect Kanji.


I must be stupid then. I failed JLPT-1 after 3 years of daily study living in Japan. (I passed the kanji parts, but that's
the easy part of the test.)


Failing a test like that doesnt make you stupid. It is possible to pass it with two years of study. However, with a test like that, no matter how much you study, nerves can screw you up. JLPT is a very nerve-racking test. This is especially true of the listening comprehension part.


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