Need advice on refreshing Japanese (Questions About Your Target Languages) Language Learning Forum

Need advice on refreshing Japanese
Tags: Forgetting a language \| Business \| Japanese
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Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages

11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

nhk9
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 6814 days ago
290 posts - 319 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 9 of 11

25 July 2007 at 12:41pm | IP Logged

If you don't have a strong passive vocabularly, you will always not be able to comprehend what others say. Basically you will need just maybe 3000-5000 words in order to get your words across, but you will need at least a knowledge of 10000-20000 words in order to understand what most Japanese people say.

See if you know the Japn equivalent for:

Lock the door
Flush the toilet
Slipping on your slippers
Wearing your glasses
1 person has voted this message useful

rkunz
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
learnthatlanguagenow
Joined 6835 days ago
103 posts - 101 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Japanese

Message 10 of 11

27 July 2007 at 4:55am | IP Logged

metavirus wrote:

Thanks for the great advice, especially Furyou. That is really helpful. In general, I expect that I will need to get up to a level of proficiency that would allow me to carry on in the periphery of a business negotiation, sometimes without dropping back to English. The actual negotiation would likely be in English.

My two strengths back when I learned Japanese were my grammar, pronunciation and intonation and my weaknesses were Kanji and retaining vocabulary (the two more memory intensive aspects, of which my memory is very hit-or-miss). I can still read hiragana and katakana but not too many Kanji.

Let's take for the sake of argument that I spent a few evenings a week and one day on the weekend for the next month and a half studying with a private tutor at Berlitz and a few hours a week during the day with one of the recommended audio courses. Without knowing more, any idea how much my language skills could improve in that time?

Thanks again for the advice.

lol, I hate to say this, but you should seriously forget about it. If you haven't used your Japanese at all recently and only took "5 years way back in high school and college" (which is almost nothing) of Japanese 10 years ago, you probably know a lot less than you think.

Consider this. I've spent about 700+ hours class time (high school and college) studying Japanese (also, that doesn't include time I've spent by myself studying outside of class) and I would probably have a difficult time even being on the "periphery of a business negotiation" where Japanese people are speaking business Japanese at full speed.

If you spent a month and a half studying "a few evenings a week and one day on the weekend", you'll probably be able to say things like "Nice weather, isn't it?", "Have you eaten breakfast?", "I want to go to Ginza".

My advice is to follow what "furyou_gaijin" posted. He has some good advice there.
1 person has voted this message useful

Monox D. I-Fly
Senior Member
Indonesia
monoxdifly.iopc.us
Joined 5145 days ago
762 posts - 664 votes

Speaks: Indonesian*

Message 11 of 11

01 October 2016 at 1:15pm | IP Logged

nhk9 wrote:

See if you know the Japn equivalent for:

Lock the door
Flush the toilet
Slipping on your slippers
Wearing your glasses

Lock the door = To wo kagisuru?
Flush the toilet = Toire wo ...?
Slipping on your slippers = Anata no ...?
Wearing your glasses = Anata no megane wo kisu?

1 person has voted this message useful

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