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I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-HARDLANGUAGES-FINAL-WIDE.png
by Jun8 15y ago
I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-HARDLANGUAGES-FINAL-WIDE.png http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-...) and saw that they mix together the language difficulty with the difficulty of the writing system. For example, Japanese (labeled hard) and Turkish (labeled medium) are similar (relatively speaking, looking from a English speaker's vantage, also add Korean to this group). In the explanation for why Japanese is so difficulty they mention the three different writing systems, etc., which is true (some consider the convoluted Japanese writing system to be the most complex in the world, on par with Maya hieroglyphs). But what if you want to learn just spoken Japanase? Similarly, what if you wanted to learn Turkish in the 1910s when it was still using the (modified) Arabic alphabet?
As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters.
- wisty 15y agoGood luck learning "spoken" anything without any decent texts to read. You could listen to the radio / watch movies, but you'll find the dialogue is way too fast and not very coherent (dialogue isn't structured very nicely, it's more free form, so you can't follow it as easily). You won't catch many words. If you have a tutor, they might be able to gradually build you up, but you won't have the hours with them. Reading at your own pace is a better way to build your vocabulary and grammar. You're right about the "thousands of characters" thing - a lot of Chinese writing is pretty simple (in terms of character use - simple characters are usually combined to form longer words, the first thousand goes a looong way), as long as you stay clear of classical Chinese literature (at which point, even some Chinese give up).
- w1ntermute 15y ago> As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters. It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really is possible to learn 20 kanji a day if you dedicate about 45 minutes of time. There's a similar book called Remembering the Hanzi (both Traditional and Simplified versions are available) that you can use to much the same effect. At 20 per day, you can learn the 5000 hanzi that are said to cover just about everything you might come across in day-to-day life in less than a year.
- oohaba 15y agoI used RTK as well, except with the website kanji.koohii.com instead of Anki, to learn 50 kanji a day. Did that for 2 months before moving to Japan, started using Anki for vocab / grammar, and passed the JLPT 1 examination in less than a year and a half.
- mattm 15y agoI'm learning Japanese now. Can I ask you some questions?
- w1ntermute 15y agoHaha, was anyone surprised when they found out you knew all the 常用漢字 even though you'd just come to Japan?
- oohaba 15y agoMy senseis and American coworkers were, but knowing the meaning of individual kanji is still two steps away from learning the actual reading and usage in compound words （熟語）, so I still had no right to show off.
- gurkendoktor 15y agoI am not sure if Chinese and Japanese can be equated like that. I find Chinese much easier to learn than Japanese because Chinese characters have plenty of built-in pronunciation mnemonics that don't help as much with the Japanese pronunciation. When I studied Japanese, I wasted lots of time coming up with stories to remember complex characters. Maybe it also depends on whether you have good pictorial memory or need some kind of analytical system, I definitely belong to the latter camp.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- melvinmt 15y agoThe reason why Turkish is in the same group as Japanese is probably because of the subject-object-verb [1] order they have in common (vs SVO in English). This is why even spoken Japanese is difficult to master for English speaking people. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–object–verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject–object–verb
- Jun8 15y agoTurkish (not just the language spoken in Turkey but spoken on a large swatch of Asia, including Kazak, Ozbek, etc.) was perviously grouped with Korean, Japanese and some other local languages as the Altaic group. They are quite similar. This grouping is no longer widely accepted. I've read that Japanese academics want their language to be treated as an isolate and certainly not grouped with, e.g. Korean, because of nationalistic reasons.