Learn Japanese Quick!

Ha! My wife is a business translator specializing in Mandarin and Japanese. Cool. I can follow a conversation at about the level of a young child, but only if the speaker goes slow. It was much harder to learn than French and I still get all the damn kanji mixed up.

1 Like

Geez. Thatā€™s painful to read.

Iā€™ve been studying Japanese for years off and on. Japanese is hard, but really the pronunciation is the easy part. Thereā€™s really only one way to pronounce sounds which greatly simplifies things (yeah there are inflection subtleties you need to learn but thatā€™s not as important).

1 Like

Well te is hand, so it only makes sense te-koki would be handjob, ne?

@maxp my son is learning Japanese, and he took one look at that and said, "how hard could it be to pronounce hai?"

@benkyo Seriously, he renders toire as ō-tay-Å­h-rye? Thatā€™s not evenā€¦ similar? Parts of this article are so bad theyā€™re not even wrong.

1 Like

My Japanese was infantile until we moved here and it became sink or swim. I can read far more French than I should be able to buy when I try to speak it, Japanese words come out for where I canā€™t remember the right word in French. Hebrew is actually the hardest for me, I struggle to read at normal speed even with prayer book text I deal with every day.

1 Like

@Boundegar, well, heā€™s writing otearai (恊ꉋꓗ恄), not toire (ćƒˆć‚¤ćƒ¬), as ō-tay-Å­h-rye, but itā€™s pretty awful any way you look at it.

Weird, tearai isnā€™t even on the original chart. Maybe toire was too crude for his delicate sensibilities?

I remember in high school French we were warned not to ask, ā€œOu est la bain,ā€ because we would be shown to the bathtub, not le toilette.

2 Likes

Absolutely makes sense. But, if Iā€™d had to guess it would have been along the lines of the verb for ā€œto blowā€, which is ā€œkuchi de suruā€, so ā€œte de suruā€. The noun for ā€œblowjobā€ doesnā€™t help here, as itā€™s metaphoric, ā€œshakuhachiā€ ā€“ traditional japanese flute.

I had awesome Japanese friends in college. lol

2 Likes

I have the same problem with Spanish. I took a few years of it in high school, and donā€™t really speak it at all anymore. But, when speaking Japanese if my brain canā€™t find the Japanese word Iā€™m looking for before it can find the Spanish word, out comes the Spanish word.

ā€œEl Bano wa doko desu ka?ā€

Iā€™ve heard from a few people the third language is the worst. Once you get used to juggling, that sort of mixup almost never happens, and itā€™s all downhill for picking up new languages.

2 Likes

For any English speaker going to Japan for the first time, consider learning the katakana script. This is the script used to write ā€œloanā€ words like ta-ku-shi (taxi). You can learn the pronunciation of the ~50 symbols in a weekend with flash cards. Itā€™s a lot of fun to sound out katakana words you see on signs, magazines, menus, etc., as they are very frequently derived from English.

5 Likes

Iā€™m not sure about downhill but I do know that in our house conversations can sometimes include words from English, Japanese and Hebrew within one sentence just because one of those languages has the most convenient or most accurate word. And yes this gets weirder in a case where she asks me about something in French where I have to guess from context.

2 Likes

This reminded me of this essay by Peter Norvig, ā€˜Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Yearsā€™:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Taking shortcuts when learning a new skill is only a good idea if you donā€™t really want to learn it well.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.