Scots Taffer on 28/9/2007 at 05:41
I can't retract that shit, it's intractable, motherfucker.
Spaztick on 28/9/2007 at 05:43
Quote:
Re: Chinese vs Japanese, my opinion is it's sort of a wash, Chinese wins on grammar and keeping it simple; Japanese on writing and pronunciation. To me I guess it comes down to prefering reading comics and doing business in Tokyo (where I have lots of friends) than reading sutras and doing business in Beijing.
By the way, I made a mnemonic chart for the first about 1000 kanji. It's on my other computer, but I'll upload it somewhere for you to look at, and anyone else if they want, when I can get internet access for it. It was helpful for me.
I'd actually love to have that, the biggest problem I had was burning out on kanji. After I got to know about 600 or so I started feeling overwhelmed.
Kroakie on 28/9/2007 at 10:10
Quote Posted by RocketMan
The word "ma" in chinese has a bunch of different meanings....two of them are "horse" and "mother".
Actually "mother" and "horse" in Chinese are two different words. They just sound similar.
TJKeranen on 28/9/2007 at 10:21
I studied Japanese for 3 years back in university and got to the level where I could easily keep up in most conversations with and between Japanese people. Kanjis were the biggest obstacle on the way, but I guess I managed to learn 1000+ of them, thus being able to read most shonen-type manga without a dictionary.
Haven't touched the language much in the past 2-3 years.
I'm now living in Beijing studying Mandarin full-time. My Japanese language background has been an incredible help for the reading/writing part, and as Chinese really is a laughably simple language from grammar point of view, my "only" big challenge is speaking/listening: words in Chinese are short, similar to each other, and the tones really burn my ass. I am getting there, though, and if you want to get fluent in Chinese, living here is really the best - if not the only - way; your ears require plenty of rape, before they flex enough to understand, what they are hearing. (And enlisting to Chinese universities for language studies is dirt-cheap compared to the western institutions.)
RocketMan on 1/10/2007 at 02:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
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.
A very good idea. I did a quick search on the net today for such sites....I must have been using the wrong search strings because I didn't find anything except more mentions of these sites. Do you have a link?
Any chance of Demagogue or Scots providing contact info for the odd convo in the future?
zombe on 1/10/2007 at 05:36
Quote Posted by 37637598
Watashi-Wa 37637598 desu. or 私の名前は37637598です
...の名前... (... no namae ...[which is missing from the romaji counterpart]) - is hardly ever used. ("my name is ..." vs "i am ...")
... yes, i shut up now.
Thelink on 1/10/2007 at 09:19
Nihongo ga scoshi wakari masu, soshte hanashi masu... daimo... jodzu ja arimasen! Tonikaku, Jon desu! Hajime mashte!
Jeez my spelling is awful. Don't go by my Japanese... I can barely speak English.
:thumb:
Koki on 2/10/2007 at 12:07
Quote Posted by aguywhoplaysthief
What exactly is the point of learning a language if you don't know anyone who speaks it? Language was necessitated by the need to communicate with others, so unless you seriously plan on using it (by serious I mean doing international business with people who speak the language, or living in the country where people speak the language), why waste all that effort?
Especially if the language is archaic pictographs with no grammar rules at all.
Only language you need to know is english. If you're in english-speaking country, lucky you. If you still want to learn a language, try spanish(Supposedly a lot of people speak it) or chinese(To properly welcome your new overlords).
Spaztick on 2/10/2007 at 23:13
Quote Posted by Koki
Especially if the language is archaic pictographs with no grammar rules at all.
Only language you need to know is english. If you're in english-speaking country, lucky you. If you still want to learn a language, try spanish(Supposedly a lot of people speak it) or chinese(To properly welcome your new overlords).
Listen to this man.
demagogue on 3/10/2007 at 01:33
Yeah, but then you'll never know when you've just been insulted in the foreign language everyone around you seems to be speaking.
