| darthdevidem01 said: Cool I grew up with English & Marathi. Learnt Hindi through bollywood. The language your write with basically the same for Marath & Hindi. Wow Japanese was the easiest was it...that's very interesting. I have a good affinity for anime...a very good affinity BUT I won't have time to see a lot of it. So in regards to Japanese what level would you say you're at in terms of reading & writing? |
If you won't have time to immerse yourself in anime, then maybe it won't work as well. When I started Japanese, I was basically watching ~15 anime episodes a day (it was summer) so I picked up a lot of stuff. Spoken Japanese really isn't hard. Honestly, right now, I can watch anime and understand ~70% of it already. I can also communicate most basic messages and some slightly complex stuff. The sentence structure is very easy to pick up and it has only a few exceptions for most things in grammar, unlike English, in which there are exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. I'm not joking. There's nothing along the lines of the thousands of exceptions in English to i before e except after c or when sounding like a.
Reading and writing, though is where it gets painful. Japanese basically has two scripts; kana and kanji. The kana are divided into two sets of alphabets that have the same pronounciation; one for when they're using foreign words (like "power", which becomes "pawaa" and juice, which becomes "jyuusu"), called katakana and one for normal Japanese words, called hiragana. There's a little less than 50 different letters that you have to learn to write in both types. This might sound a little confusing, but this much you can completely master within a couple of months at most, I bet, because the pronounciations are horribly simple. Altogether, the Japanese language only has about 120 sounds you have to make. This is compared to some 30,000 we've learned to make in English, apparently. (And who knows how many in Hindi!)
The kanji, however, are basically fairly complicated Chinese letters similar to hieroglyphs in their function. They represent ideas and not pronounciations in themselves so they usually have lots of sounds for each character. Worse still, there's 2000 of them to master if you want a basic level of literacy (most Japanese adults know over 5000 if they read a lot). I'm only at about 200 so far so reading books is outright impossible. Video games are a little easier, but not that much. Meaning my reading level is comparable to a seven-year-old Japanese child at best. My writing is even worse. So if you pick Japanese, don't expect to be able to play video games anytime soon, though talking to Japanese people shouldn't take long at all.
Sorry if I went on something of an unnecessary ramble about Japanese there. Hey, at least you're more informed now, :P.
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