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The future of Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 9 of 46 27 September 2010 at 7:31am | IP Logged | ||
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If you don't love the hell out of Japanese -- and love it for what it is, not what it can do for you -- you will never learn it successfully. So, whether or not it's an "important" language doesn't even matter very much. I'm in the video game industry (albeit the outermost fringes right now) and Japanese is obviously good to know in that industry, but if my interest in Japanese didn't extend beyond video games, I'd have given up long ago.
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| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 10 of 46 27 September 2010 at 8:09am | IP Logged | ||
Hey, I'm in the games business also -- but so far my main use for Japanese has been skulking around conferences while trying to eavesdrop on Japanese guys. I have run into a few others who work in the games business in Japanese classes -- so I have to admit, maybe there is something to this. The game business lifestyle and language studying both require a lot of time. So far for me it's difficult to make everything work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 11 of 46 28 September 2010 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Japanese and importance...
Bare in mind all the stuff they're saying about China today- omg the west is doomed, they're just too good, they're going to overwhelm us all,etc.... was said about Japan in the 80s. True, China is a very different beast to Japan. Its strengths are more in brute force than finesse (a hell of a lot of people vs. a small number of highly skilled and efficient ones) but still...This recent huge upsurge in Chinese will likely be somewhat of a fad. China's economic growth is seriously overestimated and a lot of it is just a fascade. Though most GDP rankings put it 2nd its actually quite a bit lower than this. China will be a important nation in the future certainly, in terms of utility Chinese is of course more useful than Japanese- even ignoring China's growth theres a lot more people in a lot more of the world speaking Chinese than Japanese. But I don't think there's much to the whole "We'll all be speaking Chinese in 50 years" scare mongering. Especially considering the Chinese government themselves support English as a international language in Asia. Also a point- Japan quite a insular country. It very much does things its own way. There's not so much of the vibe from Japan as from China that you need to speak English to get anywhere in the world. So in some ways it could be of more utility.
I dunno. I think the majority of people who take to learning Japanese have liked anime and manga before hand. Where there could be a difference however is that those who just like Japanese because of the cool drawings drop it before getting to too advanced a level, those whose interest goes beyond this however and into actual Japanese culture and liking the language and all that will be the ones who stick at it. Edited by Tyr on 28 September 2010 at 2:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 12 of 46 28 September 2010 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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By mid-century, Mandarin will be the lingua franca of East Asia, but English will remain
dominant in most of the rest of the world. You heard it here first. 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 13 of 46 28 September 2010 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Except for the part of Asia where Hindi will be the lingua franca, of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 14 of 46 29 September 2010 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
I can definitely see that happening one day, but things haven't even started to move in that direction yet so I'm pessimistic that it will happen by mid-century. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hanekawa Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5173 days ago 30 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 15 of 46 29 September 2010 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||
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For people who say "They learned Japanese because of animu, manga, gaming, etc" Yeah,
they may have started learning it, but they didn't even reach basic fluency because they are weaboos. >8C 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 16 of 46 29 September 2010 at 9:01am | IP Logged | ||
Bahh. Well, I haven't reached basic fluency yet, though due to accident of birth, I'm basically immune to the weaboo label, and yet I've met plenty of Anime fans who are really quite fluent at Japanese. It's just not true that there aren't anime fans who learn Japanese -- they are out there. Really, this whole 'weaboo' business gives me the creeps. Japanese is already hard enough, and the whole process seems to requires some amount of sounding ridiculous and other uncomfortable moments. Not everyone gets there. I may not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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