Japanese is Nerdy
Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2016 2:04 pm
I got the book "Japanese for Busy People" from the library and I just started trying to study it. The book uses Romanji, hiragana and katakana, but it only briefly shows the pronunciation charts of the later two, and you really need to be able to read them in order to follow along with the lessons well. The book comes with a CD which I will rip so I can easily navigate the spoken examples. I'm more interested in being able to understand the spoken language than to be able to read or write it at this point, but the different written forms make a textbook a difficult media to use for teaching that.
Anyway that is only one of the reasons that Japanese is considered such a difficult language to learn, the other is that the grammar and sentence structure is quite different from European languages. It took me a while to try and wrap my head around some of the first sentence examples, and then it hit me. English is like using a "TI" calculator, Japanese is like an "HP" calculator. I always liked Hewlett Packard's 'reverse polish' system better!
The basic English language structure is "Noun" "Verb" "Adjective", while Japanese seems to be a "Stack like" language, "Noun" "Adjective" "Verb" with some additional "connective words" inbetween. Now how nerdy is that?
Anyway that is only one of the reasons that Japanese is considered such a difficult language to learn, the other is that the grammar and sentence structure is quite different from European languages. It took me a while to try and wrap my head around some of the first sentence examples, and then it hit me. English is like using a "TI" calculator, Japanese is like an "HP" calculator. I always liked Hewlett Packard's 'reverse polish' system better!
The basic English language structure is "Noun" "Verb" "Adjective", while Japanese seems to be a "Stack like" language, "Noun" "Adjective" "Verb" with some additional "connective words" inbetween. Now how nerdy is that?