So you want to learn Japanese

[Mag]

well in fact i heard that spanish si one of the most difficult langages because of irregular verbs and tenses

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

For me it is, or maybe I'm just too lazy to learn it in spanish class...

 

but heck, all the students mentioned this is easy cake

[Sturmvogel]

I've taken a few Japanese courses in my day, and this article seems pretty much dead on.    So many anime freaks..  By the end of the class, when all the "deers in headlights" have dropped out, and it's just you and the know-it-alls and the anime freaks... oh god, that's the worst.

 

The writing I liked though.  That is, if they would pick hiragana or katakana and stick with it!  The consonant-vowel combinations make a hell of a lot more sense than English, plus it sounds cool. 

 

And Sturm, it's official, you learned a weird romanization! Tyotto?!    Heheh.. it's probably just newer than the stuff I was learning, but that character has always been "Cho."  What was the name of the book you were using?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Meh...I would almost say I'm an anime freak, but not like the rest of these guys. I listen to Jpop/rock, thanks to anime, and to me the language is beautiful. However...(read my post on previous page about the one guy in my class) I don't wear it on my sleeve like a religion and run my mouth about the Japanese stuff I know to sound cool.

 

Yeah Daeval, the book Sultan and I use is Japanese:The Spoken Language (JSL). It uses an adaptation of the Shin-kunrei-shiki 'New Official System.' The romanization might look funny to you but you can still recognize it hehe. I'm familiar the romization you've learned (and what's on the net) since I listen to Japanese music and try to memorize song lyrics. JSL has "I", watashi, as watasi. So the "shi" as you know it is "si" in JSL romanization. It makes more sense to me the old way. Another slight change is "chi". JSL has it as "ti", as in tiisai, instead of "chi". Utimately though, the romanization is just a reminder and whats important are the actual characters in kanji, hiragana etc.

[Cominus]

I actually found a little soft ware thingy off of kazaa a while back that thought me a little bit of japanese. It was actually quite good at helping you remember word like "inu" which is a dog and the way that you rememebered it was by picturing a dog in your head and be like "a dog that "he-new" he was a dog" and like horse which was "uma" and you had to picture "ooo-ma! can he ride that horse" it was actually pretty fun to learn. They also had you do sentences and stuff like "tori no aoi" if I spelled and worte that right which means "bird is blue" I don't remember what it was called but the file thingy was like 18MB big or so last I remember which was a while back.

[Ryuken]

i just want to say, you go and learn chinese, lol japapese is kool and chinese is kool too , so u gotta learn both

[saiyanfire]

LMAO but totally false, latin is waaaay harder than japanese. Its prolly the hardest language to learn, while spanish being the easiest.

Edited December 18, 2004 by saiyanfire

[Ryuken]

english is the easiest and cantonese is the hardest , and i don't know about africans but i'm sure it's not that hard

[Wizard]

I'm offically lost. What the FSCK is Ryuken talking about.

[Sturmvogel]

LMAO but totally false, latin is waaaay harder than japanese. Its prolly the hardest language to learn, while spanish being the easiest.

 

Obviously Saiyan, when it all boils down. But latin is not much of a spoken language, and does not have the complexities of cultural appropiatness, formality, context etc. We should seperate these into at least two categories, Spoken and Uncommonly Spoken/Dead languages.

[Wizard]

gg dead languages.

[Gryph]

I tried to learn Sankskrit. My teacher beat me everyday. I didn't learn.

[Agozer]

gg dead languages.

Karelian. Now that's pretty much dead, except a few old people that still speak it.