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. Thatās painful to read.
Iāve been studying Japanese for years off and on. Japanese is hard, but really the pronunciation is the easy part. Thereās really only one way to pronounce sounds which greatly simplifies things (yeah there are inflection subtleties you need to learn but thatās 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 Å-tay-Åh-rye? Thatās not evenā¦ similar? Parts of this article are so bad theyāre 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 canāt 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, heās writing otearai (ćęę“ć), not toire (ćć¤ć¬), as Å-tay-Åh-rye, but itās pretty awful any way you look at it.
Weird, tearai isnāt 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, āOu est la bain,ā because we would be shown to the bathtub, not le toilette.
2 Likes
Absolutely makes sense. But, if Iād had to guess it would have been along the lines of the verb for āto blowā, which is ākuchi de suruā, so āte de suruā. The noun for āblowjobā doesnāt help here, as itās metaphoric, āshakuhachiā 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 donāt really speak it at all anymore. But, when speaking Japanese if my brain canāt find the Japanese word Iām looking for before it can find the Spanish word, out comes the Spanish word.
āEl Bano wa doko desu ka?ā
Iāve 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 itās 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 āloanā words like ta-ku-shi (taxi). You can learn the pronunciation of the ~50 symbols in a weekend with flash cards. Itās 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
Iām 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, āTeach 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 donāt really want to learn it well.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
