|
 |
The Asian 3 - Japanese easiest? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5690 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes  Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 25 of 43 20 December 2009 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Or if you are good - when you watch people who know dictionaries look things up it is just as fast as any English speaker looking up a word in an English dictionary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| elvisrules Tetraglot Senior Member BelgiumRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5468 days ago 286 posts - 390 votes Speaks: French, English*, Dutch, Flemish Studies: Lowland Scots, Japanese, German | Message 26 of 43 20 December 2009 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
To summarize: it all boils down to learning differences for each person.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6293 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 27 of 43 20 December 2009 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Totally. The problem is (ok, the problem used to be) when you are just starting out and are not good at looking characters up and are overwhelmed with the sheer number of characters. With iPods, dictionary scanner pens, electronic dictionaries you can write on, etc. things are so much easier it is hardly worth complaining about. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nhk9 Senior Member Canada Joined 6803 days ago 290 posts - 319 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 43 21 December 2009 at 9:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Japanese is quite an easy language to learn if you are just aiming for getting by in Japan, or picking up girls in roppongi hills etc.
On the other hand, it is quite a tough language if you use it in business. Basically you will need an immersion environment (ie. working in a Japanese-speaking office) to be able to do that. The answer differs depending on how you plan to use the language, and which form of the language you would want to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 29 of 43 21 December 2009 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I am unsure whether you are addressing me specifically or whether you are using "you" in a universal sense as it is often used in English. If you are addressing me specifically, I am in Japan now. I am fully immersed to the extent that this site and a few emails here and there with my family is the only activity I have in English. Everything else is in Japanese. And that is the way I like life to be. As for characters, I made a point of learning them in context as functional combinations. On top of that I made a point of spending several hours every day reading all kinds of essays in Japanese and trying to get as much exposure as possible. My reading comprehension is rather functional. Anyway, I agree with your point that learning any of these languages is a major challenge which necessitates living there for a prolonged period of time. Without this real fluency cannot be attained in any language in my opinion. Maybe you can get passive fluency if you spend lots of time watching tv and reading books, but to get active fluency, it is necessary to live in the enviromnent of the target language. I also agree with your point about people on this forum claiming to be fluent in many languages with their rather boastful profiles. It takes a considerable amount of effort to maintain one or two languages, so I am always in disbelief when I see people who have profiles boasting 10 or more languages. I have to say that JBI is right on this one. I personally believe that the forum should revise its criteria on what counts as "fluency" with regards to member profiles. By the way, I am a firm believer in quality over quantity. 2 or 3 foreign languages to really high levels of fluency in my opinion is much more preferable than 7,8,9,10 at intermediate level including half-forgotten ones. I understand that I made reference to the cactus system in my original post. I think that was foolish of me because I dont even believe in that system anyway. That cactus system is just based to peoples subjective opinions and lacks consistency. For example French and Persion are both 3 stars! Whats all that about! Persion is way harder for an English speaker! I understand that taking on Chinese will be a difficult task, but I feel the need to ask about its difficulty because some of its features are really alien to me. Namely the tonal system owed to no previous experience with tonal languages. As for learning Chinese characters, I dont even find the task daunting. I am already used to it and even can say that I enjoy them a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 30 of 43 21 December 2009 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Learning languages is time-consuming. It most certainly does not require physically setting foot in a country where the language is natively spoken, however. It's not difficult to find non-native English speakers on this forum who write and speak English extremely well or at native levels, but have never lived abroad. I agree you need to -produce- the language, at least occasionally, to reach active fluency; this doesn't require that you leave your room. There's no magical barrier to fluency because one uses skype instead of struggling to ask the price of apples in a store in the target language's region (of course, this doesn't help as much with culturally-specific non-verbal communication). Even historically, some people learned several languages quite well without or before traveling outside of an area where their native languages were spoken (Kato Lomb would be an obvious example); modern technology has opened up even more opportunities to do so.
Are we on the same forum? I see plenty of reasons to believe, say, Iversen's claims.. similarly, the administrator is extremely competent in 6 languages. Why maintain disbelief in the face of clear evidence? It's as foolish as blind belief that can't be shaken by counter-evidence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5582 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 31 of 43 22 December 2009 at 5:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Of course there are some people on this forum who have real fluency in 6 languages, Mr. Iverson being an excellent example. What I wanted to say in my previous post is that it seems that there are also a lot of people who are too lenient with what regards "fluency". As JBI mentioned, there is a difference between surviving in a foreign country and being able to express yourself eloquently both in speaking and writing. I agree with JBI on that point. If we talk about this in more concrete terms, I personally believe that level C1 is more like what JBI would consider survival while C2 or the equivalent is the latter, eloquent expression. That is because I believe that there is a considerable difference between C1 fluency and C2 fluency. I personally would rather have 2 or 3 foreign languages at level C2 than 6 or 7 at level C1/B2. Also I personally have an interest in learning distant, unrelated languages as opposed to families. Maintaining several of these is considerably harder that maintaining several languages for the same language family, for example Romance or Germanic. Edited by hombre gordo on 22 December 2009 at 5:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chanjhj Bilingual Diglot Newbie Singapore Joined 5448 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 32 of 43 24 December 2009 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
For Chinese, you don't have to literally memorise every single Chinese character. You
only learn those common ones, then if you ever come across an unfamiliar word, you look it up in a dictionary. By the way, looking up a word in a Chinese dictionary is similar to finding a word in an English one. There is a certain method to finding the word. About the fluency thing, I think its possible to be fluent in a language without setting foot into the country. Still, to be able to speak like a native, I feel you need to actually go to the country as different countries, even if they speak the same language, use different terms for different things and then there's the issue of accents of course. On a side note, if you are good in Chinese, you have a pretty good base for Japanese kanji. Also, learning European languages is very different from learning Oriental languages. Although arguably, the most different is English. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
