1. My father said learning Japanese was the hardest thing he's ever done, and he's done some hard ass stuff. (The cool thing is, he learned it to break codes while he was in the precursor to the NSA during WWII.)
2. My brother spent a great deal of time there over the past two years and wanted to learn -- he said the people he worked with there told him not to bother, it's just too hard.
3. While I taught myself kanji a long time ago, all that stuck was how to read the date in the newspaper and what the symbol for yen is. Time and money -- always important.
I dabbled a bit in Japanese a few years ago, and I didn't find it quite so hard as the article described. In fact, it's a reasonably structured language, and its rules make sense if you remember to throw out all the basic assumptions that you'd make while learning a European language. It has fewer silly rules, and fewer exceptions to the rules, than English or German.
That's true for the spoken language, anyhow. The written language is pretty messy, and trying to learn the kanji characters is thought to be the primary cause of the high suicide rate in Japan. Many young Japanese are solving that problem today by simply not leaning kanji. You can spell anything with hiragana, although this is considered sort of a wimpy solution, like the automatic transmission or central air conditioning.
The descriptions of the fellow Japanese-learners really hit home, too. I recognize some of those types from the classes that I took. Of course, my own motivation for studying Japanese was to understand anime and Kurosawa movies, so you can guess which category I fell into...
Comments
1. My father said learning Japanese was the hardest thing he's ever done, and he's done some hard ass stuff. (The cool thing is, he learned it to break codes while he was in the precursor to the NSA during WWII.)
2. My brother spent a great deal of time there over the past two years and wanted to learn -- he said the people he worked with there told him not to bother, it's just too hard.
3. While I taught myself kanji a long time ago, all that stuck was how to read the date in the newspaper and what the symbol for yen is. Time and money -- always important.
Posted by: Liz | July 12, 2003 12:07 AM
I dabbled a bit in Japanese a few years ago, and I didn't find it quite so hard as the article described. In fact, it's a reasonably structured language, and its rules make sense if you remember to throw out all the basic assumptions that you'd make while learning a European language. It has fewer silly rules, and fewer exceptions to the rules, than English or German.
That's true for the spoken language, anyhow. The written language is pretty messy, and trying to learn the kanji characters is thought to be the primary cause of the high suicide rate in Japan. Many young Japanese are solving that problem today by simply not leaning kanji. You can spell anything with hiragana, although this is considered sort of a wimpy solution, like the automatic transmission or central air conditioning.
The descriptions of the fellow Japanese-learners really hit home, too. I recognize some of those types from the classes that I took. Of course, my own motivation for studying Japanese was to understand anime and Kurosawa movies, so you can guess which category I fell into...
Posted by: Jimcat | July 14, 2003 9:11 AM
It's all one love in this world, and with the help of Gaijinfinder, more bridges will be built across the cultural divide...
Posted by: Greffier | July 18, 2003 8:07 PM