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Japanese is notoriously hard to master. It's probably not very revealing to use your experiences with Japanese as a benchmark when the blog author is talking a

Japanese is notoriously hard to master. It's probably not very revealing to use your experiences with Japanese as a benchmark when the blog author is talking about his experiences with French, a language very close to English, particularly in vocabulary (for obvious historical reasons).

shuzchen 15y ago
You would have a point if the post author didn't also claim to be having the same success with Russian (also rated notoriously hard to master for english speakers). The tone of the article also implies that the same technique can be applied to any language. That said, I still doubt actual fluency is obtainable for non-mavens even in the romance languages. In my experience, all early learners have a naive view of their own ability, no matter what the target language is.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  He mentions right at the start it took longer with Russian. RTFA. The US Foreign Service Institute makes estimates for language difficulties for native English speakers, and they seem to be spot on in terms of comparative difficulty—Russian seems to be taking twice as long as French did for me, and they estimate languages like Chinese to take twice as long as Russian.
ekianjo 15y ago
Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language. I'd seriously doubt if anyone can claim they can learn Japanese to a high level of fluency in a matter of months or even a few years.
- v0cab 15y ago
  "Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language." I don't agree with this. The way you have to 're-wire' your brain isn't too different from what you do while learning a programming language. The difficult part of Japanese would be all that vocabulary and all those funny symbols and combinations of symbols. As a Korean learner, vocabulary is a mountain that I make great progress in scaling, yet my progress seems insignificant compared to the size of the mountain.
  - ekianjo 15y ago
    No, the difficult part of japanese is not about vocabulary or funny symbols. I have a JLPT level 2 certification in Japanese and at this stage, the wording and kanjis is just about memory and practice. What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. What you are saying is just like : "as long as you know words and alphabet, then you know the language". There's no way it is that simple. And human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
    - v0cab 15y ago
      > What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. Well, that's hard too. But knowing all the words involved makes it a whole lot easier. I haven't had much success with SRS for Korean vocab. There are so many words that are just too similiar to each other. > human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing. I don't claim it's the same thing; I'm just making a comparison. Something like switching from SVO to SOV order isn't particularly difficult for the average programmer. Idiomatic expressions with irregular grammar are going to be problematic, granted.

shuzchen 15y ago

You would have a point if the post author didn't also claim to be having the same success with Russian (also rated notoriously hard to master for english speakers). The tone of the article also implies that the same technique can be applied to any language. That said, I still doubt actual fluency is obtainable for non-mavens even in the romance languages. In my experience, all early learners have a naive view of their own ability, no matter what the target language is.

mattmanser 15y ago
He mentions right at the start it took longer with Russian. RTFA. The US Foreign Service Institute makes estimates for language difficulties for native English speakers, and they seem to be spot on in terms of comparative difficulty—Russian seems to be taking twice as long as French did for me, and they estimate languages like Chinese to take twice as long as Russian.

ekianjo 15y ago

Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language. I'd seriously doubt if anyone can claim they can learn Japanese to a high level of fluency in a matter of months or even a few years.

v0cab 15y ago
"Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language." I don't agree with this. The way you have to 're-wire' your brain isn't too different from what you do while learning a programming language. The difficult part of Japanese would be all that vocabulary and all those funny symbols and combinations of symbols. As a Korean learner, vocabulary is a mountain that I make great progress in scaling, yet my progress seems insignificant compared to the size of the mountain.
- ekianjo 15y ago
  No, the difficult part of japanese is not about vocabulary or funny symbols. I have a JLPT level 2 certification in Japanese and at this stage, the wording and kanjis is just about memory and practice. What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. What you are saying is just like : "as long as you know words and alphabet, then you know the language". There's no way it is that simple. And human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
  - v0cab 15y ago
    > What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. Well, that's hard too. But knowing all the words involved makes it a whole lot easier. I haven't had much success with SRS for Korean vocab. There are so many words that are just too similiar to each other. > human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing. I don't claim it's the same thing; I'm just making a comparison. Something like switching from SVO to SOV order isn't particularly difficult for the average programmer. Idiomatic expressions with irregular grammar are going to be problematic, granted.