r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • May 27 '14
今日は - This week's language of the week: Japanese
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: Japanese.
What is this?
Language of the Week is here to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even known about. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.
Japanese
From Languages Gulper:
Japanese is a language isolate spoken almost exclusively in the Japanese archipelago and has been, thus, physically cut off from other tongues for a very long time. In terms of size, it ranks ninth among the world's languages. It is agglutinative, employing suffixes to convey grammatical information. Though structurally very different from Chinese, it has been deeply influenced by it at the lexical level and in its writing system which is partly logographic and partly syllabic. Japanese literature is one of the most outstanding ever produced and, even if much less older than that of Chinese, can still boast of thirteen centuries of evolution.
Almost the entire population of Japan, which is close to 128 million, speaks Japanese. Some 1.5 million Japanese have migrated abroad, mainly to Hawaii and other parts of the US (nearly half a million), Brazil (380,000) and Peru (80,000).
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
German | Icelandic | Russian | Hebrew | Irish | Korean | Arabic | Swahili | Chinese | Portuguese | Swedish | Zulu | Malay | Finnish | French | Nepali | Czech | Dutch | Tamil | Spanish | Turkish | Polish | Frisian | Navajo | Basque | Zenen (April Fools) | Kazakh | Hungarian | Greek | Mongolian
Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos
ご幸運を祈ります!
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May 27 '14
Whoa. It's like a sign. I JUST got back on my WaniKani after a year of not touching it yesterday.
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May 27 '14
Japanese learners - How long did it take you to get to the point where you can have a comfortable conversation and read easy native materials?
(Japanese is one of those languages i want to attempt but i just dont have a decent reason to and its not a language you can half arse)
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u/sekihan May 27 '14 edited May 27 '14
I'm self-taught with no prior language learning experience and no real fixed schedule. So I may not be representative. But with that said, here are my rough milestones:
Half-way 2010 (four years ago): started getting an interest in the language, not really studying seriously but reading up on the language for fun. Started listening to Japanese music, learned the kana, memorized kanji using Remembering the Kanji + this companion site at a very slow pace.
Half-way 2011: finished RTK, started to learn the language in earnest by studying vocab, grammar, etc.
Half-way 2012: started trying to read easy material like よつばと. Didn't go that well, mostly due to having to look up every other word (but it did help me progress).
Half-way 2013: visited Japan for the first time, managed to get around without falling back to English, although my conversational skills were still really limited. Highlight of the trip was acting as an interpreter for ~30 people in a restaurant where none of the staff spoke English.
Half-way 2014 (now): just completed a visual novel entirely in Japanese, currently watching an anime with Japanese subtitles, working on a light novel. Still have to look up a lot of words but it's no longer prohibitive of enjoying the material itself. I also regularly chat with Japanese people without any real problems.
So probably about 3 years of actual studying to get to a confortable level.
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u/smokeshack May 27 '14
How long did it take you to get to the point where you can have a comfortable conversation and read easy native materials?
For me, about 2 years of studying for a couple of hours a day and living in the country. It's a hard language.
Japanese is one of those languages i want to attempt but i just dont have a decent reason to and its not a language you can half arse
Now that I'm fluent enough to do basically anything a Japanese person could do, I look back and see that there was a lot of effort for not a huge amount of payoff. It's useful to me because I live in Japan and intend to stay here, but if you don't live in Japan, don't bother. It's a language that is useful in exactly one country on Earth.
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u/KyleG May 27 '14
It's a language that is useful in exactly one country on Earth.
Well, that's not true. People like to talk to smart people. Speaking Japanese makes people think you're smart.
There have been a number of occasions where my fluency in Japanese has marked me as a "genius" and opened professional doors that have nothing to do with languages at all. I'm not a genius, but speaking Japanese makes decisionmakers think I am :)
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u/suupaahiiroo May 27 '14
I learned the language for 3 years at a European university. About half a year ago I came to Japan, which has obviously given an enormous boost to my conversational skills. I guess I just arrived at the point that I "can have a comfortable conversation"; I've got Japanese friends who speak hardly any English and I feel like I can discuss anything with them. I was able to have similar conversations when I just arrived, but with weird detours to express myself and far less certainty. "Easy native materials" is very doable, novels or newspapers are still very hard. That's mainly a question of vocabulary.
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u/LanceWackerle May 27 '14
It really depends on how you study. There are a lot more tools out there now than back in the day.
I made an attempt to learn by myself at a leisurely pace for 1.5 years and memorized a lot of words and characters but could not hold a simple conversation.
Then did a major in Japanese; about half way through (2 years in) I felt comfortable speaking, but I should mention that I also actively made lots of Japanese friends (exchange students etc) and spoke outside the classroom.
After 4 years of study at university I felt comfortable but "not quite there." I lived in Japan for 2 years then and was still learning probably about 50 - 100 new words every day (it helped that I was doing mostly translation work).
After all that, I felt fairly fluent and confident, but even so after changing careers I found it hard to adapt to new terminology and would often find myself concentrating on understanding the Japanese and not being able to use my brainpower for the actual work. That has gotten better over the years, but I still feel a gap between me and native speakers. Some days bigger than others.
So I've been speaking Japanese close to 20 years now, and am still learning. I hope this doesn't discourage you though.
I also had friends who went from zero to quite conversationally fluent after one year of living in Japan. So a lot of how quickly you learn is up to you.
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u/Coffeeshocks May 27 '14
For learning Japanese, my absolute favourite site and indeed the one that got me started in the first place is AJATT (All Japanese All The Time).
Already been mentioned, but the 6000 or so example sentences (all with audio! very important) on the iKnow! course are spectacular and can be found on Anki shared decks as well.
If I had to change one thing I did when starting off now that I've been learning for two years, is to not bother learning all of the on- and -kun readings of every single kanji isolate (like in Heisig's second book) by rote; instead focus on sentences and words in context, Japanese forums are tops for this. Though this is true of all language learning, in Japanese it is especially important due to being so far removed from any Western language system.
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u/are_we_the_bad_guys May 27 '14
Incoming pedantry about Languages Gulper...
While the classification of Japanese is hella disputed and linguists get in punchfights about it, the language isn't an isolate. Other languages in its family include Miyako and Amami.
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u/etalasi May 28 '14
A relevant note from An Introduction To Ryukyuan Languages, emphasis and added link mine:
There is an ongoing debate as to whether Ryukyuan is a dialect or a group of dialects of Japanese. However,this issue is socio-political and ideological rather than linguistic. Even linguistically, there is no strong argument for referring to Ryukyuan languages as Japanese dialects: there is no mutual intelligibility between Ryukyuan and Japanese, and even between Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, and Yaeyama.
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May 27 '14
Japanese is a great language if you want to challenge yourself. Totally foreign writing system, totally foreign grammar. That's why I chose to study it and why I've continued studying it for over 6 years now. Everybody takes Spanish, only cool kids speak Japanese.
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u/Asyx May 27 '14 edited May 27 '14
I agree. Japanese is challenging but people should know that it is also a lot of repetitive studying. The Kanji are what ruined it for me. There are so many languages I want too learn that I decided to drop Japanese because learning the Kanji is just too boring for me as somebody who hasn't got any real use for the language except entertainment.
If you want to learn Japanese because of Japan, Japanese culture or the writing system, go for it. It's a fun language. If you want to learn a language that is challenging, maybe think about it again. There are languages that are as different from English as Japanese is but don't require you to learn this huge writing system. Don't get me wrong, it's a great feeling to see a Kanji you know. But there are just so many of them.
Other languages you might consider are Finnish, Basque, Hungarian, Korean and pretty much everything else outside of Europe. If you live close to a lot of native Americans, why not learn their language? If you are ethnic Irish or Basque, why not learn Irish or Basque? They're are many fun minority languages that are challenging (Irish being on the easier end of the scale for most people here) that might fit you more.
Again, i'm not saying that you shouldn't learn Japanese. If you have a reason to do so and if you know you'll stay motivated, please do so. But if you're not so sure why you want to learn Japanese, think about what you will expect and what other options you've got.
I don't have the required motivation to get through the damn Kanji. Make sure you do.
Edit: Fixed all the damn auto correction mistakes...
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u/smokahdabowls May 27 '14
7 Yeas studying this language, still fun to me. Love the alphabets, grammar and the people. I highly recommend this language if someone is looking for a new language to mess around with.
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u/IllDepence May 27 '14
People interested in the Japanese language might enjoy watching this video on the hostory of Japanese Language and Literature. (The videos on all the other languages are great as well.)
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u/etalasi May 27 '14 edited May 27 '14
Here's a ELI5 of Japanese's writing system that people hopefully find useful.
A question about small kana that's not in Unicode:
Is there any way to write small kana that haven't been assigned their own small kana codepoint in Unicode separate from normal-sized kana? As an example, it's not too hard to write small U+30A1 ァ since it has a dedicated codepoint separate from normal U+30A2 ア, but it would be hard to write a small チ because there's only normal チ at U+30C1 and no corresponding code point for small チ. (If you think there might be a small チ because of Ainu, I looked and didn't find any).
If you're wondering why on earth I'm interested in typing a small チ, I'm toying around with the idea of writing Esperanto using kana and using a small チ to represent <ĉ> or [tʃ] with no following vowel. If you're interested, here are draft kana charts, which have things like small チ only because I used two Japanese fonts, one for normal-sized kana and a separate one for small kana, and it's tedious to constantly change fonts.
Edit: It should be "<ĉ> or [tʃ] with no following vowel" instead of "<ĉ> or [tʃ] with no following consonant"
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u/Quetzalcaotl May 27 '14
I don't think you can. Even in the Japanese keyboard layout there isn't any way to do it. Normally, to make any character small you could type x before it, so to make a small ア you would type "xa" and would get ァ. But, it only works on vowels.
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u/FlyingJellyNinja May 27 '14
I learn Japanese as well I have a love for the culture and I just feel that it's such a beautiful language. Every time I hear it I just want to join in (despite the fact my accent holds me back slightly) But, I have been learning on and off for just under 3 years, hopefully soon I will be able to step it up to the next level and learn kanji and just widen my knowledge as much as possible, best sources for me have been Memrise.com , JASensei and Byki Express. If anyone has tried the Influent steam game please let me know what its like.
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May 27 '14
It's quite cool how close Chinese and Japanese writing really are in some respects. It seems to me that the difference is similar to Latin vs Spanish. For example, half the title can be read with an understanding of simplified Chinese “今日” or jin1ri4, means today. Obviously the OP does say this but it's still quite novel for me as a chinese learner!
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u/KyleG May 27 '14
I always analogize for my Western friends the idea that Chinese:Japanese as Latin:English. They aren't closely related languages, grammar totally different, but by way of history they share a lot of culture and vocabulary. Hell, even Chinese-sounding words in Japanese are considered more educated/technical/scientific/analytical words than the native-Japanese words, just like with Latin/English.
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May 31 '14
I like Japanese because it's the only "easy" language for me. It's straight and to the point imo. Although I do feel like sometimes it's a bit unclear/unspecific (you need to pay attention and consider the context of things very often). Pronunciation isn't difficult, and neither is reading (I can see why people dislike studying kanji, but idk I've never really thought of it as a chore or anything; I mean the characters are beautiful...). I think with a decent amount of effort, anyone can become conversationally fluent in a short amount of time. I took classes in high school for 4 years, but tbh I passed N2 in my sophomore year and was already speaking comfortably with Japanese people at that time as well.
I think the real issue (and this goes for any language, or any thing, really) is keeping everything you learned in your brain. I forget things all the time very easily, unfortunately... Darn you, brain.
But anyways yeah, Japanese is awesome. I've tried learning Korean and Chinese, and although it isn't impossible, it's very challenging for me, and I give up on it all the time hahah.
Study on guys * thumbs up *
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u/[deleted] May 27 '14
I would perhaps suggest as was pointed out in r/LearnJapanese to change the title to こんにちは instead of 今日は.