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5 years of 日本語 TAC 13 桜/Schnitzel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4464 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 145 of 436 05 April 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm planning to have a go at German and Spanish after Japanese, so good luck with that. I'd be interested to know if you think Japanese has helped with German word order. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5781 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 146 of 436 05 April 2013 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Ooh, good question! I would say for word order, possibly not so much, except it has primed my brain to be a lot more flexible about differences in word order. I think if German was my first language (or even second after French), I would be going crazy about the different positions a verb can take depending on the sentence pattern. Now I am perfectly happy to accept these things at face value, but they still take a bit of getting used to. I would say a big help has been the way that the use of some Japanese particles seems to map quite well to the use of German cases - obviously the boundaries of usage are going to differ, but being able to relate accusative case to を and dative case to に has been a huge help in understanding what is going on in a sentence. I also find that some other grammatical concepts, like transitive/intransitive verbs, are now so familiar I don't have to relearn how they work, I just have to learn the way it applies to German. And it's such a relief to go back to a language that not only uses the latin alphabet, but also has a pretty regular and predictable spelling system. Not to mention all the shared vocabulary with English. I'm sure with all the grammar idiosyncracies of a natural language it would probably take just as long to perfect German as it does to perfect Japanese, however getting a foothold out of the beginner phase is surprisingly easy in comparison. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5781 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 147 of 436 06 April 2013 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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So the studying German together with my husband thing has hit its first road bump in just the third session. He's convinced he can't pronounce certain German consonants properly and has given up trying. I'm convinced he needs to keep trying because getting these sounds at least approximately right is important. Cue mini row, solved by my cooking of lunch. Well, it doesn't solve the pronunciation issue, but at least we're friends again. I think though, as far as studies are concerned, I may well be back to going it alone again. I've definitely just had a view into how a "normal" person views learning languages though. I guess my image of how people feel about language had been thoroughly blinkered by all the geeks on HTLAL!
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5781 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 148 of 436 06 April 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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This afternoon I watched the first episode from my German Sex and the City boxset. I've also been watching a few cookery videos here on Stern.de. I'm genuinely surprised at how much I can understand. A nagging voice at the back of my head is going "it shouldn't be this easy" - it took so much longer to reach a similar level of comprehension in Japanese. Still got a long way to go, obviously, but I think I'm already crossing into the territory where TV is useful, which is great!
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| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4983 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 149 of 436 06 April 2013 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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It looks like you got a study partner after all XD. I'm glad your German studies are going so well. Based on
my own experience I don't think your studying Japanese is making your next language go faster.. it's just that Japanese is ridiculously difficult. I found that the German rhythm was easy to get a hold of, so simple sentences started clicking, but as for longer complex sentences, the word order was a little frustrating. Not too bad though. Thanks to reading you can get your brain around it faster I think. I'm still plugging at Japanese.. omg the kanji. Seriously, like learning two languages at once. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5781 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 150 of 436 06 April 2013 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Genau! It just took so much longer to get my head around even the basics with Japanese, and then when you throw in kanji and all the vocabulary totally unrelated to any Indo European language that you just have to memorise. I'm not convinced Japanese is intrinsically harder than any other language, but there's certainly a lot more stuff to learn from the point of view of an English speaker, and that just takes time. Edited by g-bod on 06 April 2013 at 9:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6419 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 151 of 436 07 April 2013 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
I don't think any language is intrinsically harder than others. Normal children learn to talk around the same age no matter what their native language is. So difficulty can only be measured in relation to something else. For English speakers, Japanese is usually very difficult due to the lack of common vocabulary, a grammar which although logical is completely different from English, and of course, the very complicated writing system. Germanic and Romance languages are so close to English, that they seem quite easy in comparison. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5781 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 152 of 436 07 April 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I think there's just as much to trip you up in German grammar as there is in Japanese. But the shared vocabulary/writing system provides such a huge boost in comprehension for German it's making things more accessible at a much earlier stage than I was expecting.
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