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Is Japanese ridiculously hard? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 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 9 of 60 01 September 2010 at 3:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Same here. I can't compare with French because it's my native language, but compared to Spanish or Italian... After devoting the last 2 years to Japanese, I almost feel ashamed at the thought that I once found Spanish difficult. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 60 01 September 2010 at 4:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's ridiculously fun. And it does teach patience and frustration tolerance, yes.
My own 'method' for memorizing kanji is a hybrid method of laziness - er, I mean, simply learning to read them in context that offers furigana - and a kind of ethymological deconstruction for those ones that simply don't stick, using chineseethymology.org and kanjinetworks.com. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 11 of 60 01 September 2010 at 4:59am | IP Logged | |||||
I think it is easier than IE languages in some aspects. For example, no gender, verb-subject agreement, number agreement, or a/the to think about. The conjugations are regular and predictable. You don't need to pull charts out of your brain or guess wildly and hope no one notices. The pronunciation is also very simple and regular. If you can read it, you can pronounce it correctly (except for the intonation). My boyfriend and some of my friends in Japan have an English level on par with or better than my Japanese level (which I would call 'basic fluency'). We have roughly the same level of vocabulary and the same capacity to express ourselves. Yet, I can write a 2-page composition without making any grammatical mistakes (I will only be limited by the range of my vocabulary), whereas my friends learning English will have several mistakes per page (usually a/the, conjugation of irregular verbs, spelling mistakes, wrong prepositions, as well as being limited by the range of their vocabulary). Outside of this forum, in fact, I probably have never met an English-learner who is immune from these tiny mistakes. Sometimes when I go back to German, although I'm thankful that it's easy to read and their are so many cognates with English, I get really frustrated with the der-die-das-die, adjective endings, and abundance of prepositions.... In fact, if it weren't for kanji, I'd have a hard time saying which is easier. Now, on to the hard parts of Japanese: kanji (not so bad if learned systematically, mostly just time-consuming) casual speech vs. keigo (just takes a bit of getting used to) different word order and way of phrasing things (not objectively hard at all, just different from English) a few alien concepts like wa/ga (same as above) intonation, which is not marked in writing (rarely changes the meaning of words, but like English stress, makes your speech more natural and easy to listen to) in the beginning stages, some grammar points like the conjugations of adjectives and causative-passive might be frustrating, but are very systematic and will soon become second-nature. Of these, I think kanji is the only truly 'ZOMG JAPANESE IS HARD' aspect. But I don't think it really needs to be hard; it's just poorly taught, unfortunately. I recommend Heisig or KanjiDamage.com - although not perfect, they're better than traditional methods (which have little rhyme or reason regarding the order in which they're taught and tend to rely on rote memorization alone). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 12 of 60 01 September 2010 at 6:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know how much it might help you (if at all), since everyone learns differently, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you how I got past that complete beginner stage to an intermediate level and got comfortable with kanji.
I sort of stumbled into learning Japanese. I have been interested in it since I was a kid, when I watched a few anime series with my brother. During high school, I didn't have any exposure to it at all, and became less interested in Japanese culture. In college I had a Taiwanese roommate who loved Japanese things and was taking a Japanese class. That made me a little curious and I started to reconsider some things about it (it's too hard, why should I bother learning it if I'll probably never even go there, etc.). The next summer, I was bored and decided to learn the kana, more as a sort of game than a serious attempt at learning the language. I found a site (realkana.com) that let me practice them in a quiz where you have to type in the romaji equivalent, which was a lot more fun than the other flashcard- or multiple-choice type quizzes I found on the internet. Eventually, I knew them all very well and got bored with it. The same site has an analogous version for kanji (realkanji.com), so a few months later I thought I might as well go back and do some of those. (This was in November 2009). I chose the "Genki 1" section, with 429 basic nouns and verbs. Not having the textbook, I ended up entering each word into JWPce (a Japanese word processor you can find online) in order to look up the definition and build a vocabulary list. To my surprise, I finished learning all the vocabulary and kanji in that set by the end of the month. (I also studied some grammar around this time). At this point, I felt encouraged by the progress I had made, and yet still ambivalent about the project, considering that I still couldn't make out the majority of things written on an average Japanese website. Then, I found a short book that explained the origins of the characters and gave some etymological information for about 300 of the basic ones. (pdf here: http://www.mediafire.com/?aawa1x7avyqlhn1) That helped me see the structure of the system, and it didn't seem so overwhelming anymore. Since then, I've been doing A LOT of listening, and I haven't studied any kanji individually, instead learning them as parts of vocabulary words. I've been using readthekanji.com to do that, but it's a lot easier to remember kanji compounds after I have heard the word used in normal speech a few times and/or seen it used in writing. At first, I mostly just watched anime and dramas, as well as whatever I found interesting on KeyholeTV (just google it). When my comprehension improved, I started listening to drama CDs, which are basically acted-out audiobook adaptations of manga and novels. I prefer those over television dramas because it forces me to focus on the speech, and they have a much higher concentration of dialogue per hour (no time wasted on slow-panning shots or visual exposition). The added benefit is that I can then use the source material as reading practice. I also regularly visit Japanese websites, follow Japanese blogs, listen to Japanese music, and watch documentaries and cooking shows. I haven't been able to practice speaking properly yet, except for a few voice chats. I know my accent is good, probably because of the similarities with Spanish, but I think I need some more time to get comfortable with composing thoughts and sentences. I practice by making up conversations in my head, and that helps me find holes in my vocabulary knowledge. I also keep a journal to practice writing. I think that for me, it was good to skip things like language-learning podcasts and textbooks and jump right into native content. I think I would have gotten bored and given up otherwise. I do have a grammar book, and enjoy reading explanations for things, but that hasn't been my main focus. It helps that much of Japanese online culture is aimed directly at my age group, and that most things Japan-related have large fandoms that distribute media and do translations. It's ridiculously easy to get any sort of thing you want in Japanese; I doubt I would have gotten very far with a smaller language with less material available. Anyway, it is really hard for me to believe that it's only been ten months since I started studying it seriously. It used to seem intimidating and impossible, but now it doesn't really feel like a foreign language anymore. Basically, at some point it becomes a self-sustaining learning cycle: the more you learn, the more you enjoy the things you read/listen to, and the more you read and listen, the more you learn. I would say that at this point, I know all the vocabulary used in normal day-to-day conversation. The other things I know are from a somewhat random assortment of fields, because of the stories I've listened to. I learned a lot of keigo from stories set in offices or bureaucratic systems, some medical jargon from stories set in hospitals, quite a bit of police- and crime-related words from detective stories or yakuza dramas, etc. And of course lots of internet slang. I'm sorry this was so long; it's late and I'm kind of rambling. I just wanted you to know that it's not as impossible as it seems at first, and that it is extremely rewarding when you finally start understanding things that used to look like random little lines. I would recommend reading alljapaneseallthetime.com for some inspiration, although I don't agree with the all the parts about RTK. Just find some things that interest you and do them in Japanese. Don't turn it into a chore, because then you might give up before you get to the part where you understand more than you don't, and everything starts being a lot more fun. Don't stress about the kanji, because it's really more about learning vocabulary and then getting familiar with the kanji used to write it. After the first few hundred, it won't seem like a big deal anymore. (It starts getting a bit harder again further on, but by then you'll be able to deal with it). It does take a lot of effort, especially at first, but it's not ridiculously difficult. I'm not that good at memorizing things, but I don't have a problem with kanji. As long as you can find a good source of motivation beyond "I wish I could speak Japanese," you should be able to stick with it and have a great experience. Good luck! 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vexx Groupie Australia Joined 5219 days ago 81 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 13 of 60 01 September 2010 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you all so much!
This has definitely been encouraging. I may just start to learn how to speak/understand spoken Japanese, before i jump into learning the characters though. Is this a bad idea? Will it be harder to learn to speak/understand if i don't know the written? What's the best way to do this, i think if there's a good way to learn spoken then i'll definitely want to do it and then have an idea of the language before i start the written. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hangdog Newbie MalaysiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6013 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Studies: French | Message 14 of 60 01 September 2010 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Vexx, from my experience it is easier to learn to write than to understand and speak.
I may be wrong but I believe some people who learned languages would agree with me because I experienced this same problem for two languages that I learned. The problem was I tried to learn to write and read rather than to listen and understand first. So here goes the problem, later you will find that you have difficutly understanding the spoken language even after 2 to 3 years of learning the language because you did not spend enough time listening to it. When that happened you would feel that you have failed in your attempt to learn the language. You could hardly converse at all apart from the some simple greetings and some phrases. But if you start off learning to listen all the time to the target language and then later learn to speak when you feel you could do so. If you want to learn a language fast you have to give up your job and do a full time study then you could achieve something within a shorter time that usual. Spend a lot of time listening to the target language can be boring because you will not get much in the first few months. But try to be patient and also read some simple children books but do not attempt too hard just read them for fun. The written part is actually easy for japanese because you have the romanised alphabet to help you with the pronounciation and the chinese character is diffiuclt but not impossible. The trick is to just keep repeating the same characters for quite a while to get it. Start with simple ones to build up your confidence. If you start writing and reading too early it would slow down your listening and understanding part, because you don't have enough time for both at the same time. Good luck to you. . 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5208 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 15 of 60 01 September 2010 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
You probably won't get very far with speaking if your vocabulary knowledge is based on romanized versions of Japanese words. The reason it's useful to learn kanji as parts of vocabulary words is that it lets you see how compound words are made, so when you see a new word you'll know how it's read (based on how you've seen those kanji used before) and approximately what it means. Many compound words sound very similar (or exactly the same), so they are hard to memorize unless you can see the components that they are written with. I do think it's better to start with listening, but when you are learning basic vocabulary you should learn the kanji for them too. I promise the first 500 or so will not be hard at all. You don't even have to learn to write them; just read a little bit about stroke order and radicals so that you understand how they're put together. It's easy to put them into your passive memory (able to recognize them and know what they mean when you see them, but not always able to recall them from memory and picture them perfectly). After you've gotten used to them, it's a lot easier to move them into active memory; that's when you'll become able to write them from memory with some practice. The part where it gets hard is when you move on to more abstract words that are harder to connect with the kanji that are used to write them. That does require some rote memorization, but it still mainly depends on exposure; you'll start seeing and hearing the new word in various contexts, and after forgetting and relearning it a few times, it'll become part of your passive vocabulary. Transforming it into active vocabulary, that you can recall easily when you speak, takes longer. Some random words will jump to that level as soon as you learn them, and others will have to be bouncing around in your head for several months before you know them well enough to use them at any time. When I used to read other people write about how to learn kanji before I knew any, the whole thing sounded like a huge project and like it would be very hard. So advice about learning kanji will make a lot more sense after you've already learned a few hundred. By then you'll have a better idea of which method will work for you, and you can look for advice specific to that. Really though, it feels VERY rewarding when you start understanding how to read. Even just being able to read Japanese comments on Youtube videos was exciting. So yes, it's harder than learning a language that's written with an alphabet, but it's not as crazy and complicated as it seems. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vexx Groupie Australia Joined 5219 days ago 81 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 16 of 60 01 September 2010 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Awesome thank you.
Okay, i guess I will try and learn to read too then.. But how does it teach me to speak at all if just learning the kanji, as i saw that some resources are simply knowing what the kanji mean in English, but not how to say them. So how should i learn to speak/listen/understand then? Hehe everything seem independent.. How should i learn Japanese then, if my primary focus is to be able to listen/understand, and some reading (maybe development this further later on though)? Is Assimil followed by Remembering the Kanji book a good idea? With perhaps some Pimsleur along the way? Or what else did you use/find useful? Edited by vexx on 01 September 2010 at 6:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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