LogFAQs > #899398747

You can learn to recognize a few phrases and get a decent grasp of the the grammar in that time if you try hard, but the biggest uphill battle is learning new words and all that kanji. That takes even Japanese students years and years to master. Then there's getting a hold sayings or idioms in Japanese, because a lot of English metaphors or sayings don't translate at all. Consider the phrase 'tourist trap.' There's no phrase in Japanese that effectively conveys the idea of popularity married to commercial vapidity, fakeness, and disappointment. To describe something like a 'tourist trap' you would often have to illustrate all of those ideas separately and then relate them to one another. To even grasp that understanding requires a level of fluency in the language.

You should still try though. Learning another language often clues you in to ways in which the language we speak literally changes the way we think. If you've never studied a high context language before Japanese might be a good place to start, because in someways the grammar is a bit closer to English than Chinese or Korean and might be easier to pick up. It's also not tonal like Chinese, which still has kanji btw, and that might make it easier to speak too.
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Whatever happened to standards? Whatever happened to bare minimums?
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