Job Discussion Forums

[finy29]

cool, its not bursting any ideas

it was just a idea that popped into my head

1 year is good enough for me if its all i can get

theres plenty more places id like to see and live and i can always my back up plan was always to travel and work while working for a degree from the open university

I will buy a few books to try and learn i think but maybe ill end up learning the basics to help me there but learn a new language

the two i'd like to learn are Spanish and Japanesse. Dont suppose anyone knows if this is a whole lot easier to learn?

[Ryu Hayabusa]

For English speakers, Spanish is much, much easier to learn than Japanese. It's linguistically much closer to English. It shares the same basic alphabet and has quite a lot of cognates with English words of Latin and French origin.

[ShioriEigoKyoushi]

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[finy29]

thats cool you think that. i got put of manderin when i was told about the different characters for every single word.

do you find manderin is easy to also write. i suppose if you had a library of characters and a photographic memory in your head it wouldn't be hard.

so thats kind of confusing that one comment says spanish can be harder visa versa. i suppose it depends on the person.

i would rather learn japanese than spanish although if im being practical, there are more countries in the world that speak spanish and if i want to work abroad, being british i could work in spain without a visa.

i know this is a stupid question but maybe someone can humour me.

how long might it take the average person to learn

1a spanish speaking 1b spanish reading/writing
2a japanese speaking 2b japanese r/w

just a rough idea would be good to try and compare the two

[seklarwia]

I have studied Spanish since I was 11 (but spoken it a little longer) and although the speaking basics are easy enough to grasp, it becomes a whole lot harder once you try to more advanced levels. The grammar becomes ridiculously complex and if you think English is bad for having grammar rules and then a million exceptions, then good luck with Spanish. It's made even harder to learn, because we simply don't have equivolents for comparisons in English. And verb conjugation is far easier in Japanese

So based on the difficulty of grammar, I'd say Japanese is much easier to learn to speak.

But learning to speak Japanese and learning to read/write are completely different ball games.

Speaking is easy enough to pick up. But when reading, if you don't understand a diificult spanish word you can normally consult a dictionary (not always easily, but its not often impossible). But if you come across kanji you don't understand...

What kind of levels are you hoping to achieve? A year for either language will only get you to lower intermiediate in either case.

[Mr_Monkey]

All languages are equally complex. Therefore they are equally difficult to learn. The biggest differentiator is how similar they are to other languages you know, including your native one.

[Mr_Chips]

I learned how to read hiragana and katakana in a weekend with this book: http://www.amazon.com/Kana-Can-Easy-Kunihiko-Ogawa/dp/4789005178

[Glenski]

[ShioriEigoKyoushi]

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[Apsara]

I majored in Spanish at university and minored in Japanese. I then spent a year in Spain studying, and have now lived in Japan for 12 years.

Japanese is far and away the more difficult language, as you might expect. seklarwia, you are right that Spanish grammar can get quite complex at the higher levels, but Japanese grammar is also incredibly complicated at higher levels (I'm studying for JLPT 1 now and the grammar is giving me probably the most trouble). The main difference is that there is absolutely no point of comparison between English and Japanese structures at that kind of level, whereas there are a lot of similarities between Spanish and English at all levels.

I reached a reasonable conversational level in Spanish and was able to more or less make sense of a Spanish newspaper within a year of starting Spanish study (around 5 hours of classes a week- it helped a lot that I had already studied French for 7 years).

Japanese however has taken me much, much longer. How long it would take someone to reach a certain conversational level depends on so many factors that giving an estimate is pretty much meaningless. Reaching the point where you can read a newspaper is easier to estimate- figure on at least 3 years of serious study for that kind of ability, probably more.

[seklarwia]

I guess for me, it is much harder to learn languages that have too many similarities to any of my first languages. Despite being a speaker or more than a couple mother tongues, a linguistics major that specialised in translation and interpreting and knowing very well that direct translation from English or French into Spanish normally gives you horrendous results, I still ocassionally do it quite naturally after all my years of study.

I very rarely make the same basic errors in German though, because it is by comparison a very different language.

To make things worse, living in Spain will improve your communicative skills, but might not do much for your grammar. And if you had the pleasure of living in any of the areas where their local spanish variation is a unifying aspect of their identity, you can quickly find yourself picking up non-standard language and that locals will very rarely correct your grammar if they understand (half the time they understand so easily and don't react to errors, you don't even realise that you made a mistake), but will be very quick to replace your standard vocab with local equivalents because only "guiri" (for all you non-Spanish speakers, imagine being called gaijin instead of gaikokujin) would use the standards, or worse anything from the wrong spanish variation.

Here I know exactly when my grammar or pronunciation is not spot on. I need only look at the locals to see their little cogs powering away as they try to make sense of what I have just said... always a dead give away even if they are too polite to point out my mistakes. And as long as I don't commit too much to memory that comes from one particular female JTE, two of the male sports teachers or from any of my 3F, 3J, or 3D boys or any of the 1st years, I'm quite confident I'm getting standard (non-offensive) Japanese.

I understand what you are saying about the grammar at JLPT 1, but I wouldn't compare that to university Spanish or French. People who major in these languages at uni leave with fantastic language abilities and are easily able to live and work abroad in those countries, but they are no where near native level. I can easily tell a French uni major within a minute or so of speaking to them and can often tell where a Spanish major studied just after their return from ERASMUS. If you are able to pass JLPT 1 though, you are demonstrating a knowleddge of the language that sometimes surpasses that of a native speaker.