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Difficulty of spoken Japanese imaginary? | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5095 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 17 of 37 01 May 2012 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
I think this is maybe the reason. When you feel this way, it creates a mental block, and a feeling of separation from the language...feeling as though Japanese is not truly "yours" and that it isn't natural. You note this doesn't seem to happen with close friends or with your European languages -- could that be because in those cases you feel like you fit into the group more? I have had a mental block, or fear, about speaking Japanese with strangers and meeting new language partners, and this had a lot to do with the reason. I had studied Japanese in a very "bookish" way for too long, and so it didn't quite feel real enough to me-- and this made it difficult to talk in general, even just out loud to myself. It all felt too contrived. I think it can be overcome, in time. But if this the reason, in order to remove the mental block, you have to address the psychological block. Edited by starrye on 01 May 2012 at 12:11am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jellitto Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4901 days ago 17 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: German, Swedish, Japanese | Message 18 of 37 01 May 2012 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think speaking Japanese is more difficult than speaking any other language not related to your mother
tongue. I have not been to Japan and I speak only to myself as practise, but really, I don't see the difference between me speaking Japanese and German what I have studied about the same time. I do mistakes in boht and sometimes my pronunciation fails, but I don't feel the other more difficult than other. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Minya Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4903 days ago 22 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 20 of 37 09 May 2012 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||
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To me, Japanese isn't hard, its time consuming. I have no problems reading it, I think its rather easy once you get the hang of it tbh. Nothing is hard if you really love it. :)
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| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5409 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 21 of 37 09 May 2012 at 10:13am | IP Logged | ||
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It's not "difficult".
Just massively time consuming. Accumulating unfamiliar vocabulary with often no memory "hooks", extremely unnatural word ordering for westerners to get used to, learning the same language over and over again with completely different words because you happen to be talking to child or a friend or a boss or whatever, learning many large tomes worth of grammar "chunks" with various combinations of particles that may have nothing to do with their individual parts, a reading system that takes far longer to use as an aid than with other languages. Some of the regularities are nice regarding conjugations, but sometimes the "lack" of grammar that supposedly simplifies Japanese actually just makes it harder to figure out what's going on. I don't think I spent more than 5 minutes total worrying about word order in Spanish. Learning new words was at least 3 times faster (and half of them come for free almost). All the important grammar rules could probably fit in one book. What do you mean by hard? A hard language to speak in itself, or compared to other languages? Edited by Sandman on 09 May 2012 at 10:17am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kevin Hsu Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4739 days ago 60 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Korean Studies: German | Message 22 of 37 10 May 2012 at 4:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Perhaps thinking in a different word order requires a lot more practice? I find the same
problem for my Korean as well. I can read/write/listen much better than I can speak. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 23 of 37 10 May 2012 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||
When I studied Mandarin, tones were taught right off the bat. The tone system was clearly explained and everytime a new word came up, you could see the pinyin and learn the tone. You still had to remember it, but you knew exactly what it was and you'd eventually get the hang of it (ok, there were some speakers of toneless Mandarin in my class, but still...). When learning Japanese, pitch is taboo. It's a mystery. No one talks about it, it's like a cancer that no one is supposed to talk about. Sure, it's not as crucial as Mandarin, but information is scarce and really hard to come by. This makes it really hard to learn. Everyone that's saying that Japanese is easy to speak is obviously entirely dismissing pitch. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 24 of 37 10 May 2012 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I sometimes catch myself applying German ways to express an idea, despite supposedly knowing better. You will need a lot of time and practice.
Doesn't mean that Japanese is "easy, but taking time", as some people above have stated, in some act of bravery :p 自信満々だね＾＾； Pitch is also an issue, I agree there's not really a whole lot of material out there to learn it. Calling it a taboo is, however, a bit of a stretch, won't you think? The problem lies not in the sentence structure, but in concepts not existent in English (or generally in Western languages). Take for example 私は車だ which does NOT mean "I'm a car", but "(i don't know by which means other people came here, but) I (came by) car.", or ケーキを食べられた which is not "The cake has been eaten", but "(they made me suffer the) eating of the cake" = "oh noes! they ate my cake!". I've seen an awful lot of "advanced" learners getting those wrong, because they never learned them properly in the first place, and some things are pretty unique for westerners. Not so long ago, there has been a thread somewhere here concerning は and が. People seem to have a problem with the fact that topic and omission of the subject go hand in hand and confuse these particles for a lifetime... even though it's really not that hard. Now, stuff like the Kanji is really only the icing on the cake, and there being next to no cognates (let's ignore the raped English words aka. カタカナ語) leads to a world of a difference in difficulty when it comes to acquire a sufficient vocabulary. The fact that Japanese transports LESS information per syllable than other languages, very similarly to Spanish, also leads to the fact that people speak it FASTER (approximately by 21%), so if you want to sound fluent, being slow is not exactly helpful. Doesn't really help with listening comprehension either. There would be tons of more points, but I'm really too lazy to list them all. Just thought I'd show you some of what's there; this alone would make the argument moot. Edited by atama warui on 10 May 2012 at 5:13pm 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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