Beginning to learn Japanese

This is an interesting debate, as one writer, Jimmy Akin, weighs the pros and cons of learning German or Japanese. What’s interesting is the perceived advantages of Japanese, and also the warnings. The comments are as helpful as the post itself. Somethings I had heard before, such as ‘hai’ meaning yes among other things.

Good news, some pros:

• No inflection, words stay the same
• Much meaning comes from context rather than changing the word; for example, no plurals.

Bad news, some cons:

• Differences such as the ‘postpositions’, function particles after the words.
• The written language with three writing systems.
• Because word order is different, like verbs at the end, it can make comprehension difficult.
• Honorifics; Keigo, which I still have to learn about.

I can see that for native speakers, the double meanings chinese/japanese of certain characters can be confusing; as I saw when Shiho looked up the meaning of the title of the movie ‘Ran’ by Kurosawa.

And he recommends Pimsleur. I’m going to root around and see what people’s experience is with Pimsleur. Might be a good purchase while I’m visiting the states.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Learning Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.