Do alot of people in japan speak english?

Spanish isn't that hard. It's like a medium on the language scale.

Oh and I have come to the conclusion (from Yakumo's picture) that japanese products fail at English. That package label made me laugh for a good minute.

 

Spanish to me was very easy. Easier than french which I also studied, and its guarenteed to be easier than anything using a non latin alphabet to latin alphabet users

 

Yeah I took french in middle school it is fairly hard to learn I havent studied it for a year and forgot nearly all of what I learned. I never could speak it at all though I only new some phrases and such.

 

Mmm, I find French and Spanish very similar to each other (in fact they are), but then again my Spanish knowledge is nowhere as good as my French.

(I got four languages at high school, Dutch, French, German and English, the first three being official languages in Belgium, the latter being the fourth unofficial language. =) It's great to have so many languages at school. ^^)

 

All European languages are easy compared to Japanese. In fact Chinese apart form the intonation is easier that Japanese thanks to the grammar being the same as English. Japanese is completely reversed. Just take a look at this simple sentence to see what I mean.

ENGLISH = Where do you want to go?

JAPANESE = Doko ni ikitai ?

TRANSLATION = Doko (where) ni (to) iki (go) tai (want)

Japanese often omit personal pro-nouns such as you, I , we, they, he, she etc. The real verb of go is Iku but being Japanese you have to change the verb for different meanings and each change doesn't have the same rule.

Go (casual) = Iku
Go (more formal) = Ikimasu
Go (as in a command) = Itte
Want to go = Ikitai
Don't want to go = Ikitakunai
Can go = Ikemasu
Won't go / Can't go = Ikanai
Went = Itta (Also means that you just had an orgasm )
Went (more formal) = Ikimashita


and there are more as well. Japanese is well harder than any European language. The verbs alone will piss you off for many years.

Yakumo

 

hmmmm Yakumo, since your japanese is the best, what about the "masen" like in wakarimasen ?

sorry i am not the best speller in japanese.

And what does Osu mean ? since i looked it up some days ago in my japanese/danish dictionary. And it told me different things, and not the word "karate-do" word. But at the same i saw a hentai movie (heck i think the drawings are great in the good ones) and there the men said it again and bowed . So i am a bit confused about the word.

 

Well to be honest GaijinPunch is far better at Japanese than me The "masen" in Wakarimasen is just politeness. The more casual word is Wakaranai.

Osu has many meanings depending on the Kanji used. Probably the most easy are PUSH and POST (as in post/mail a letter).

Yakumo

 

Back when I was studying Japanese at university, the thing that annoyed me above anything else was Kanji.... !!You have Hirigana and Katakana, stop using kanji goddammit!!! I learnt about 300 or so kanji before my brain just gave up, and having not used my japanese language skills in the past year they are starting to degrade, haha.

English is a puzzling language in as much as (from my perspective as an Englishman anyway) it apears to have built in error correction, as you can say something completely the wrong way round and quite often an english person will be able to work out what you are trying to say. You mix up a few words in Japanese however and it can change the entire meaning and context of what you are saying.

 

I think learning Kanji is the hardest.

 

thats what im thinking, its a hell of alot more easier than french (or it is for me)

 

Kanji eventually get easy.... easier anyway. You can always teach yourself kanji. It's simple memorization. There are many other shitty parts to the language which will crush your spirit later on.

 

Japanese looks really hard I was reading japenese for dummies in waldens its not even remotly simalair to english at all.

 

Spanish is not hard. The syntactic structure of Spanish, however, is one of the most complex there are. There's a fuckload of unused conjugations, and then there's accentuation, and using the correct tense. Then there's many letters that sound the same and are continually misused, and also, many homonimious words. It's a mess.
What happens, however, is most Spanish speakers don't really use the language correctly and can still make themselves understood. Spanish is so hard, not even us Spanish speakers speak it correctly, much less write it correctly, save a very small amount of exceptions.

Personally, I found french monumentally easy to learn, because it's a Latin based language and therefore it's like reading Spanish. English has a very simple syntactic structure and pronouncing it is fun, so I found that one easier.
Japanese... what kills me is all the god damn kanji. I need to be able to read about 1000 for the JLPT level 2, so I guess I'm not taking it this year.
However, spoken japanese is very easy in terms of syntax, but very hard in terms of context. It's, so far, the most interesting language I've studied. Any of you have any pointers about how to learn Kanji faster? I happen to be Disgraphic, so writing stuff down is not going to work.

Now, about Japanese people speaking Spanish... that's Funny As Hell. I work afternoons in a Japanese school and have studied the language for a while, so I've had contact with many japanese teachers - who, still, have serious trouble with the pronounciation in Spanish. Especially the R/L issue, and lots of syntactic issues (since Japanese and Spanish are almost diametrically opposite in terms of sentence-component priorities in Syntax)
I guess it's give and take. Spanish has funny pronounciation, but we don't have all those horrible little multi-trace nightmares from hell. In short, Japanese is a fuckload harder than Spanish, because of Kanji, but Spanish can be much more complex than most non-latin languages.

And now, for another language... Anyone out there speak Russian? I'm sort of interested in taking classes and I need some pointers.

 

You just described English... sort of. Any language spoken by such a wide audience is going to be bastardized and cut to pieces. I hear people from places in Mexico far from the border (perhaps Guadalajara, Mexico City, etc.) have troubles w/ the Tex Mex horseshit the hispanics in Texas speak. The sad truth is, the majority of people in America really speak pretty crappy English... they just don't know it. As people in Europe, Central America and South America speak Spanish, it's going to get... err... crazy.

My theory after my 1 year of high school spanish, and some reading around in a text book I bought a few years ago:

The reason you found French easy is b/c it's a romantic language, not latin, no? For the most part, grammatically the romantic langauges stick to their rules... in their textbook theory, anyway. There are rules in conjugation and tenses, plurals, genders, etc. that make it pretty structured. Now, just like anywhere else, this only holds up in speaking textbook langauge. Go talk to a real person, and you may not (probably won't) get anywhere.

The shitty part about English is that the rules are often broken by other rules. THis is traditionally what makes it a "hard" second language. There's no genders, and not as many effed up tenses like Spanish, but verb conjugation sucks, especially if you're coming from a non-latin language. Questions and answers have the word ordered completely jumbled... something which is very easy in Japanese. The pronunciation, of course, is like Japanese (kanji), in that the pronunciation depends on the context. Example: Say the word "read".

I think the main reason why people say Spanish is easy to a latin-based speaker is b/c of the roots, and there are a LOT of people, even non-hispanic, in America that speak pretty shit-hot Spanish. Shit, I can look at written Spanish and make at least SOME sense out of it. I even sold games to a guy in Spain that spoke no English. I had to use a dictionary, but I got by. Japanese, on the otherhand, isn't nearly as widely spoken, and usually the people that say "Japanese is easy" are the anime dorks that can't really say shit.

Anyways, here's Gaijin Punch's breakdown of the good and bad of langauges I have at least some clue about:

English:
---------
-no genders (good)
-latin-based (good?)
-crazy word order (bad)
-lots of irregular verbs (bad)
-pronunciation doesn't "stick to the rules" (bad)
-ebonics (bad)

Spanish:
-----------
-genders (bad)
-tenses not found in English (bad)
-romantic... helps learning the other 3 (good)
-hot pussy on the spanish channels (good)
-structured pronunciation (good)
-that "rrrrrrr" sound (very bad)
-speed that people talk (bad)

Japanese
-----------
-no plurals (good)
-no gender (good)
-keigo and levels of politeness (crappy)
-kanji (bad until you learn them, then very necessary!)
-very structured -- grammar isn't that hard once you learn it (good)
-very vague langauge (bad)
-lack of words / implication (bad sometimes)
-speed people talk (good I think -- especially old people)

GL w/ the JLPT 2. I passed that one a while back. It's got some useful stuff in it. I'm going to Tokyo in September and will be heading by Kinokuniya. It seems you can't get any good Japanese text books in the US. Advice? Flash cards. Believe me, they work. If you can't draw them, you can cheat and do what I'm doing. Stick them in a database, then write a Perl script to display them randomly.

 

English isn't based in latin, it's Germanic.

 

O-T
Speaking of Anime dorks, is that where the term "Fanboy" originated? Some people say it was with games, while others say it was aimed at Anime dorks first. :/

You know, the kind of Anime dorks that call everything Japanese great, and everything US sucks, dream of living in Japan but live in a basement , can sing anime lyrics, but know no japanese.

 

GaijinPunch - Yeah, you got it, I have a hard time with understanding Tex-Mex and Telemundo Spanish, as I'd like to call it. Romanic languages are called Romanic because Romans spoke Latin. They are sort of derivates of latin. However, German does use many structures from Latin as well, even if it uses ancient Germanic words as sources. English is a Germanic language. Neither English nor Spanish is used correctly by the people who speak them, I'm afraid.
French is easy to read for Spanish speakers - as ar Portuguese, Italian and Romanian to some extent.
Thanks for the JLPT advice. I think I know a website for what you're suggesting.

Mister Casual - I might be wrong but maybe Fanboy comes from that character in Freakazoid, who went to comic conventions and collected but also was fairly annoying and elitist... you know, he was actually the textbook fanboy, and therefore given the name. Remember that guy?
Together, we can rule the universe as Fanboy and Son!

 

First place I heard "fanboy" was in anime circles. God knows what those people are like.... I guess I used to be one of them, but only in spirit and body size, not in fashion and hygene if that makes sense.

The beauty/curse of langauges is that they're organic, and are constantly changing. I guess this is why they're so bastardized now... especially English, which has stolen words from many langauges... like Japanese has been doing this past century or so.

 

IS that a cartoon show? I saw pics of Freakazoid, and he looks like Dr. Drakken a WHOLE lot.

 

Japanese use some really stupid English in their daily speech. Sometimes I wish they diddn't. EG: They now say "Happing" which means some sort of big deal or not so in most cases is going on. You have no idea how stupid japanese sound when they say this. There are many more too which just makes the Japanese people look as if they haven't got a clue about English which I guess is true anyway. they have no idea how stupid they sound.

Yakumo