Briareos H on 27/9/2007 at 15:02
Quote Posted by RocketMan
-its easier than chinese (i can't learn a language that has 10 ways to pronounce the same word and they all have different meanings)
haha
Rug Burn Junky on 27/9/2007 at 15:20
You know, there's something to be said for intellectual curiosity, and learning a language for its own sake. I'd love to learn German again, because when I tell people I lived there for a year, I'd rather not have to sheepishly answer the next question with "No, I don't really speak German, it's been too long."
Also because one of the places I've long considered moving is Dubai, for career reasons, learning Arabic seems a prudent thing to do. I've looked in to it, but it's on hold for now.
But at this point, if you're coming on to Internets and waxing poetic about learning Japanese because of how much you love the culture? Sorry, but you pretty much have to accept that you're just a stereotypical greasy otaku.
Aja on 27/9/2007 at 16:54
Quote Posted by RocketMan
Aja how good are you? (surely you can say more than that).
No, it's only been about three weeks.
37637598 on 27/9/2007 at 17:25
Watashi-Wa 37637598 desu. or 私の名前は37637598です
catbarf on 27/9/2007 at 18:49
Quote Posted by RocketMan
-its easier than chinese (i can't learn a language that has 10 ways to pronounce the same word and they all have different meanings)
Moola cash bucks dollars greenbacks bills bread dough money Washingtons
are we seeing a pattern here?
demagogue on 27/9/2007 at 20:19
You know, there are lots of Japanese natives that are dying to have English conversation. You can find them on some of those English-learning chatboards. So what you do is conversation trading ... you do 30 minutes having an Japanese conversation, and they'll help you with your grammer and giving you advice, and you do the same thing in English for the next 30 minutes. I really recommend that ... then you know you'll have someone that will stay dedicated to keeping up the meetings and being helpful.
Also, if you don't already do this, I'd recommend you start going through manga with a dictionary, too. Japanese is a rough language to learn, compared to any European language ... so the way I justify it is that you really have to embrace your otaku-side if you're really going to dive deep enough to get this language. :D
But anyway, the advantage of manga is that it has: bite sized Japanese, a picture to give you context, that's not whizzing by like in a movie, and finally otaku or not you have to admit that a lot of Japanese manga are just fucking cool. Lupin has been the best teacher to me because he's witty, and the stories are great ... I can bear through painfully looking up practically every word on a page because Lupin won't let me down.
RocketMan on 27/9/2007 at 20:48
Quote Posted by catbarf
Moola cash bucks dollars greenbacks bills bread dough money Washingtons
are we seeing a pattern here?
What I meant was this:
The word "ma" in chinese has a bunch of different meanings....two of them are "horse" and "mother". Now you don't want to call someone's mom a horse right? So you have to SING the word. The "ma" has a different phonetic sound to it if you mean mother. This is quite common in chinese. We have some words in english like there, they're, their and lets ignore the fact that they're spelled differently. We still don't have to phoneticize them differently. Its the context of the sentence that determines their meanings.
Demagogue: Yeah you're right...I already play lots of those Japanese story games with the full voices and english subtitles...those are very very helpful.
Gestalt on 27/9/2007 at 21:14
I took some Japanese classes back in high school and I'd like to start learning it again. I remember finding the structure of the language interesting, and it was sort of neat to go through the process of learning to read and write again.
Any suggestions regarding language courses on CD or books or anything like that?
RocketMan on 27/9/2007 at 21:30
I'm not learning the right way i guess..I don't use books. Everything I know is off the net or from japanese games....and I can't read/write. Characters are WAYYY beyond my capabilities so I never touched them. I'm just learning the spoken language via Romaji
SubJeff on 27/9/2007 at 21:40
RocketMan, I think you need to go read a bit more about Chinese. It's not as hard as you think. Cantonese has 8 tones (or something like that) but Mandarin, the language spoken by most Chinese people, only has 5 (and one of them is just no tone so really there are only 4). It's not singing a word although I can see why you might think that.
Nevertheless the tones are a little difficult for people who speak atonal languages, but it's pretty much the first thing you'd learn in any class so it's far form impossible.
What is hard is the writing, though if you can read Mandarin you can read Cantonese as the only real difference is the pronunciation - the words and sentence structure/grammar are identical in written form. Kind of like the opposite of Hindi and Urdu (I think it's those two).
On the plus side for Mandarin - simple grammar (and therefore somehow a little stream-of-consciousness to me and very expressive), no verb tenses, yes NO VERB TENSES!, no plurals, no articles. Did I mention the no verb tenses? Man that made my day when they told me in class. In fact verbs never change, not in relation to time or pronoun. Time is handled in a slightly different fashion and in some ways is more precise - there are specific words for the day after tomorrow and the day before yesterday! Give it a go. You'll be surprised.
