Job Discussion Forums

[Tiger Beer]

This goes out to all in Japan. Have you ever studied another language? Most importantly, how was it compared to studying Japanese?

I've studied Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish and Korean. Obviously Spanish was the easiest and Korean was the hardest.

I've recently been getting into Pimsleur Japanese, and finding much easier than Korean anyways.

Actually I'm most curious if anyone has studied Mandarin (a 4-tone language with relatively simple grammar) compared to their Japanese studies.

Anything linguistically added would be interesting though.

[AndyH]

Spanish.
Japanese was more difficult.

[Apsara]

French, Spanish and Chinese.

Pronunciation of Chinese tones still eludes me, but the grammar is simple and there is only one pronunciation for each kanji (within Mandarin I mean here), whereas Japanese kanji have at least 2 readings per character and often many more. Japanese pronunciation is simple as almost all of the sounds also exist in English. The grammar is more complicated than Chinese but easier than French.

[Gypsy Rose Kim]

Tiger, I think what you're after is just being able to get around and have a chat, right?

You'll be fine.

There are plenty of other threads on here in which people have gone into great detail. Check them out.

[markle]

I speak Thai fluently and read and write enough to get by. I never actually 'learned' Thai as in I've never had formal lessons. But I was an exchange student for a year and have spoken it pretty much on a daily basis ever since.
Japanese, on the other hand, I first started studying at university 15 years ago. I stopped after a couple years of doing poorly at it and even after 3 years here I don't speak more than basic instructions and pleasantries.

Both are as as 'hard' as the other is 'easy'. Thai grammar and basic vocabulary is fairly simply but pronunciation is anything but. In fact I'd say that Thai pronunciation can't be 'learned' it has to be 'lived'.

My experience therefore has made me a firm believer in the more communitive, functional approaches to language acquisition.

[ssphinx]

I speak and write Korean at an intermediate level and I used to be able to do the same in Vietnamese.

I would say that Japanese isn't much different than Korean grammatically. So, with a sound foundation of Korean grammar you should be able to understand the meta-linguistics (big word from the MEd, lol) of Japanese.

Personally, I have found knowing Korean extremely helpful in learning Japanese. Sometimes, I will just plug Japanese words into a Korean grammatical structure and it works most often than not.

If you are good with Korean, than I would suggest learning vocabulary, particles, verb tenses/forms and collocation.

The only difficult thing is becoming functionally literate in Japanese. It took me about two months to do that in Korean, but my Japanese functional literacy is still a work in progress.