Articles like this push me closer and closer to buying a book to learn Japanese and signing up for classes. My niece speaks Japanese and she suggested if I help her learn Spanish she can help with Japanese. I may take her up on that
I tried in the past. Its harder than you'd expect. Katakana and hiragana are easy. Single words are easy.
The grammar is incredibly difficult to wrap your Western brain around, but if you can get through that you are stuck with fucking Kanji. Which is basically a lifelong commitment to even become kinda okay at.
Then you get the even bigger task of dealing with the Japanese and their love of puns. Fucking every 4th word is somehow a pun or allusion. Often to the point of being complete nonsense until you pick up on it.
What is Kanji? I live in Texas so learning Spanish was easier since it’s very easy to find people to speak with and I’ve had multiple jobs where I had to speak it 70 to 90 percent of the day. Trying to find similar immersion with Japanese short of going to Japan would be tough. Also with Spanish there are a lot of words that are similar to English due to common Latin/Greek root words
Kanji is the main form of writing they use, that they stole from China.
Its basically them combining multiple words or concepts (with their own unique meaning) together to create an entirely new and unique meaning. One example is that the Kanji for adolescence is the Kanji for Blue and for Spring put together because Blue can also mean youth and that age is considered the "springtime of your life."
Imagine basically every single word requires that level of knowledge of the vocabulary. Its almost as if the English language had an alphabet of 2000+ letters, because even native Japanese people have to just memorize Kanji for the most part.
Hiragana and Katakana are basic alphabets that function just like any other, but its considered either "for babies" or "for women" to use, so for the most part its not used in anything that isn't a kid's game or to make a point about how someone is talking being odd. They deliberately use the most difficult form of communication.
Speaking Japanese isn't that bad, relatively. So immersion will help you with that, but if you want to learn Japanese to get around localizers you will be memorizing Kanji out the ass no matter what you do.
Articles like this push me closer and closer to buying a book to learn Japanese and signing up for classes. My niece speaks Japanese and she suggested if I help her learn Spanish she can help with Japanese. I may take her up on that
I tried in the past. Its harder than you'd expect. Katakana and hiragana are easy. Single words are easy.
The grammar is incredibly difficult to wrap your Western brain around, but if you can get through that you are stuck with fucking Kanji. Which is basically a lifelong commitment to even become kinda okay at.
Then you get the even bigger task of dealing with the Japanese and their love of puns. Fucking every 4th word is somehow a pun or allusion. Often to the point of being complete nonsense until you pick up on it.
What is Kanji? I live in Texas so learning Spanish was easier since it’s very easy to find people to speak with and I’ve had multiple jobs where I had to speak it 70 to 90 percent of the day. Trying to find similar immersion with Japanese short of going to Japan would be tough. Also with Spanish there are a lot of words that are similar to English due to common Latin/Greek root words
Kanji is the main form of writing they use, that they stole from China.
Its basically them combining multiple words or concepts (with their own unique meaning) together to create an entirely new and unique meaning. One example is that the Kanji for adolescence is the Kanji for Blue and for Spring put together because Blue can also mean youth and that age is considered the "springtime of your life."
Imagine basically every single word requires that level of knowledge of the vocabulary. Its almost as if the English language had an alphabet of 2000+ letters, because even native Japanese people have to just memorize Kanji for the most part.
Hiragana and Katakana are basic alphabets that function just like any other, but its considered either "for babies" or "for women" to use, so for the most part its not used in anything that isn't a kid's game or to make a point about how someone is talking being odd. They deliberately use the most difficult form of communication.
Speaking Japanese isn't that bad, relatively. So immersion will help you with that, but if you want to learn Japanese to get around localizers you will be memorizing Kanji out the ass no matter what you do.
You forgot the worst part. No spaces. If you don't know the kanji, good fucking luck figuring out where words end or begin.