Japanese is a bitch to learn . . .

[fyrtenheimer]

I want to learn Japanese, but for now I'll stick with spanish..

Pero muy mal hablo espanol.. u.u;

tienes razón, no es bueno ¡ es sólo un chiste !

yo estudio español por tres años

[gadoo]

kakus ger!

[Rini210]

I want to learn Japanese, but for now I'll stick with spanish..

Pero muy mal hablo espanol.. u.u;

tienes razón, no es bueno ¡ es sólo un chiste !

yo estudio español por tres años

comprendo ... only a little bit of what you said.. but I got that you've studied it for three years!

[Lyrs]

"Love a language, learn it, and keep on learning."

Any language can be learned.

[NicholasDWolfwood]

J'aime l'idée que je sais deux langues parce que ces deux langues sont les langues nationales du Canada!

A mon avis, francais c'est trop complexique. Je deteste "Dr. Mrs. Vandertramp.". C'est ennuit.

Damn canadian laws.

And for all you japanese out there: Watashi wa zasshi desu!

Yes. I know what I said. And I'm learning right now from www.japanese-online.com, as I don't know where I can learn Japanese 'round here.

Yo, Docile! Wazzup? (BTW, incase you don't know, it's me...Jason from AIM...haha)

[ErMaC]

Japanese itself is an absolutely beautiful language. The spoken language itself is incredibly simple until you get into Politeness levels and Keigo after quite a long while. It's just the written language that's extremely complicated for the fact that you have to learn around two thousand kanji characters to be on the same level as high school graduates. But the actual spoken language is very straight forward, albeit somewhat different from English so you have to get used to the new sentence order.

English order: Jane went to the store to buy some food.
Japanese order: As for Jane, for the sake of buying food to the store went.
(Jane wa tabemono wo kau tame ni su-pa ni ikimashita)

I'm convinced that if it wasn't for the writing system holding them back the Japanese would be the rulers of the free world by now.

Regardless, Japanese as a language really isn't that hard to learn the basics of. It's just once you get to the higher levels of the language and into things like Keigo that it starts getting messy and somewhat illogical.

If you like Anime I highly recommend taking a year or two of Japanese in college because it's great for increasing your understanding of what you watch (if you watch the subtitled versions). You can pick up all the nuance of what you're watching and it really adds to the enjoyment of the shows you watch.

[Tsuji Mania]

And not like you actually need keigo for daily life either ^0^ Even reknowned anthropologist Joy Hendry went to Japan to do a study on keigo and found its influence to be minimal so instead she focussed on the wrappings of the Japanese society and culture, which eventually became her life work.

But that's besides the point.

Even though it's not as formal, I find that learning dialects is much more useful as you're more likely to run into dialects as you travel around Japan than you are keigo....unless you attend PTA meetings ^0^

[FirestormXIII]

ErMaC's definetly right about what he said in his post. I took Japanese for a year, and I had a far far easier time speaking Japanese than writing it. There's simply a lot to learn writing-wise; study is a must when learning to write.

[Tsuji Mania]

I think writing is indeed the most difficult aspect, but only because of stroke order. Reading is a cinch.

[ErMaC]

I agree on the dialect thing - Kansaiben is just incredibly cool. I watched part of the first episode of Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai today since we're gonna be showing it in Anime club and I was just oozing at the coolness of the authentic accents. Oosaka dialect is just too cool.

Nan'ya de? Nanimo arahen.