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"Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because

"Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work." Great answer, thanks! Just for some context, I speak read and write about 7 languages (4 Indian languages - 3 contemporary, one ancient - Sanskrit) and 3 European languages (English, French and German) fluently, (fluently == I can read and write classical works, can be airdropped into a country speaking the language and be fine, but no one really speaks Sanskrit anymore of course :-D ) and can speak (but not read and write) a couple more Indian languages. From my experience of learning all the languages I do know, I know that they are "work" to learn and don't have any illusions of learning Japanese being "easy". I took 3 plus years of classes in both French and German for example, but I can imagine someone who puts in serious self directed effort (and knows a language in the "family" already - Sanskrit grammatical structures are close to the the ones in German, for example with the verb coming at the end of a long sentence,and several word "running together" and so on) learning either of these from instructional material (books + cds), listening to radio/mp3/videoclips/ newspapers + dictionary +grammar book + Internet discussion and so on, to the point where they may have strong accents, but they can read, write and listen to radio broadcasts etc. Now I've learned only languages within the Indo European (English, French and German) and "Indian" langauges (though the South Indian languages belong to a different family than Sanskrit and Hindi which are "North Indian"). I enjoy learning languages and was considering learning a non-European, non-Indian language "just for fun". So yes, the motivation was "for fun" but without the illusion of learning languages being easy, or with an anticipated "giving up" before a few years of effort. So anyway I was considering Arabic or Hebrew or one of Chinese/Japanese. Unfortunately I don't have teachers/classes nearby and I think Japanese/Chinese etc may have additional difficulties than say, French or German due to their scripts and tonality and general mind-bendingness(at least I think they are mind bending!). I was just asking you whether you think the combination of all other possible resources (books, cd, dvd, internet discussion, video clips etc) could get one to a point of reasonable, non-perfect-pronounciation-but-can-read-and-write-and-understand fluency in Japanese, effort over a few years being a given, for someone gifted at languages. I take it you are saying "no, not likely". Fair Enough! Thanks again! The great thing about HN is that it is so easy to tap into so many knowledgeable people.

tel 17y ago
Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language. That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled. So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.

tel 17y ago

Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language. That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled. So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.