Trying to learn Japanese as a native english speaker gave me a lot of respect for Japanese (and I think Asians in general, since I suspect other languages in the area are more similar to each other than they are to European languages) people who learn to speak even broken English. Our languages are so different, from the alphabets used, to the way words are formed, to sentence structure, and even having formality baked into things like verb conjugation and titles for everyone based on what your relationship is with them (with different defaults based on how the relationship starts).
So assuming going from Japanese to English is a similar difficulty, it doesn’t surprise me that they might have a similar respect for those who make an attempt to learn their language.
After a year of learning (though with admittedly varying levels of motivation), I can still only pick out some words while listening or reading and can barely form my own sentences with a very limited vocabulary. Though I think part of that is duolingo particularly sucking for english - > japanese. My year sub expires tomorrow but duolingo never even hinted at formality being baked into the language and treats kanji as after thoughts.
Mostly just was looking for actual culturally relevant conversations in every day, natural Japanese because it became super apparent early on that DuoLingo was only teaching the most formal way of speaking. A lot of just random kind of family home videos people uploaded and news from Japanese media outlets.
Outside of that, I have a flash card program on my PC but I can’t remember the name off the top of my head (and am not home to look). That helps a lot with learning more vocab.
Yeah, the vocab is where I most feel hopeless. I use an app for learning kanji and it has parts where they build into words and it just feels like I’m missing a ton of cultural context with how some of the words seem so random with the different kanji they string together. It seems more intuitive if you’re starting from there, because their words end up so much more related when made up of subwords rather than English where our words do have roots but they are strewn across a bunch of different base languages and evolve individually as sounds from there.
I pretty much focus entirely on listening since my goal was really to just be able to understand it without using subtitles. Though maybe I should learn to read it better so I can go check out Japanese forums instead of just being able to watch anime in the original language without subtitles… 🤔
I have a friend who is Chinese and he struggles with grammar sometimes like he gets confused by the difference between “he” and “she” and every time he apologizes I’m like “dude you speak English infinitely better than I speak Chinese, you’re good”,
He/she is an interesting special case, as Mandarin didn’t really have those as separate concepts until they were imported from Western languages; even now, they’re pronounced the same. So I can understand your friend’s confusion.
Trying to learn Japanese as a native english speaker gave me a lot of respect for Japanese (and I think Asians in general, since I suspect other languages in the area are more similar to each other than they are to European languages) people who learn to speak even broken English. Our languages are so different, from the alphabets used, to the way words are formed, to sentence structure, and even having formality baked into things like verb conjugation and titles for everyone based on what your relationship is with them (with different defaults based on how the relationship starts).
So assuming going from Japanese to English is a similar difficulty, it doesn’t surprise me that they might have a similar respect for those who make an attempt to learn their language.
After a year of learning (though with admittedly varying levels of motivation), I can still only pick out some words while listening or reading and can barely form my own sentences with a very limited vocabulary. Though I think part of that is duolingo particularly sucking for english - > japanese. My year sub expires tomorrow but duolingo never even hinted at formality being baked into the language and treats kanji as after thoughts.
What resources did you find btw?
Mostly just was looking for actual culturally relevant conversations in every day, natural Japanese because it became super apparent early on that DuoLingo was only teaching the most formal way of speaking. A lot of just random kind of family home videos people uploaded and news from Japanese media outlets.
Outside of that, I have a flash card program on my PC but I can’t remember the name off the top of my head (and am not home to look). That helps a lot with learning more vocab.
Yeah, the vocab is where I most feel hopeless. I use an app for learning kanji and it has parts where they build into words and it just feels like I’m missing a ton of cultural context with how some of the words seem so random with the different kanji they string together. It seems more intuitive if you’re starting from there, because their words end up so much more related when made up of subwords rather than English where our words do have roots but they are strewn across a bunch of different base languages and evolve individually as sounds from there.
I pretty much focus entirely on listening since my goal was really to just be able to understand it without using subtitles. Though maybe I should learn to read it better so I can go check out Japanese forums instead of just being able to watch anime in the original language without subtitles… 🤔
I have a friend who is Chinese and he struggles with grammar sometimes like he gets confused by the difference between “he” and “she” and every time he apologizes I’m like “dude you speak English infinitely better than I speak Chinese, you’re good”,
He/she is an interesting special case, as Mandarin didn’t really have those as separate concepts until they were imported from Western languages; even now, they’re pronounced the same. So I can understand your friend’s confusion.