Current Events > Day 31 of learning Japanese

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've got a 31 day streak on Duolingo now. I'm at the part where it's teaching me how to ask for help with travel. So I'm learning about asking where the airport / train station / bus stop / subway is.

I'm making pretty good progress. When I speak the phrases I'm learning into Google Translate, it also gives the result I want. Hopefully I'll be fluent in a couple years or so of doing this. Once I get good enough at the stuff on Duolingo, I'm planning to use some other learning tool some practice with actual interactions.

Once I get somewhat comfortable with speaking in Japanese, I'll probably go to a Japanese restaurant and hopefully interact with someone who speaks Japanese there.

Good luck! I use Duolingo for Swedish and have gotten pretty good and reading my family's Facebook posts lol. Also used it in the past to brush up on my Spanish, as well as start learning Korean. Do they have you learn the alphabet first in the Japanese course?

TendoDRM posted...

Good luck! I use Duolingo for Swedish and have gotten pretty good and reading my family's Facebook posts lol. Also used it in the past to brush up on my Spanish, as well as start learning Korean. Do they have you learn the alphabet first in the Japanese course?

No, that's one thing that kinda weirded me out at first. They start out with basic words and then have you practice a few hiragana characters here and there the more you progress. I think it's because there are 3 different writing styles with Japanese (hiragana, katakana, and kanji), so it's probably faster to just start out with learning words and then you can associate the pronunciation of the words to the hiragana characters themselves. I'm just now at the point where kanji characters are getting introduced.

They do include romanizations, though, so it will give the English pronunciation above each character.

I really wish our school system in the US had taken stuff like this more seriously. It would've been nice.

I had a big incentive to learn Japanese and now Korean due to some people in my life. I started on Japanese earlier. Wanted to do Korean and heard it was supposed to be one of the hardest for English speakers to start. Decided to pick back up with Japanese only to hear the same thing. However the method I was using does not make that seem to be the case. Now even though I currently want to learn Korean I am going to stick with Japanese for a bit just because it is going so well.

It is a bit surprising how quick you can learn this stuff. If only I had realized years ago how useful at your own pace courses on this stuff can be. IDC if the courses I take aren't like full on master courses. I figure if I maintain the info from that then harder courses would only be that much easier. I have no issue starting on easy mode for language learning.

I learn small phrases and retain them and move on. I went, I go, I eat, I drink, and as you may know those phrases are basically universal for he, she, and you performed those actions as well.

So far Japanese almost seems like it would be an easier language to learn than English. Hardest part is the damn speaking backwards bit. Am curious to know why English seemed to build their language backwards to most languages.

projectpat72988 posted...

I really wish our school system in the US had taken stuff like this more seriously. It would've been nice.

Yeah... I think it's kinda ridiculous that some people in the US try to insult the intelligence of people who come here from foreign countries just because they have accents. They often speak at least two languages, sometimes multiple. Most people here, myself included, only know one. I'm trying to fix that for myself. The main languages I want to learn are Japanese, Spanish, French, Portugese, and Italian.

projectpat72988 posted...

Am curious to know why English seemed to build their language backwards to most languages.

english isn't really backwards to most languages, it shares sentence structure with most european languages iirc

compariing them to korean/japanese sort of obscures the point since those two languages are actually very similar to each other! (and very different from english)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/8f5b7ef0.jpg

Im up to 408 on Vietnamese.

CableZL posted...

Yeah... I think it's kinda ridiculous that some people in the US try to insult the intelligence of people who come here from foreign countries just because they have accents. They often speak at least two languages, sometimes multiple. Most people here, myself included, only know one. I'm trying to fix that for myself. The main languages I want to learn are Japanese, Spanish, French, Portugese, and Italian.

Good effin luck lol.

I figure if I did somehow become fluent in Japanese and Korean. I would say screw it and might as well add the most used version of Chinese as well. After that I would want to know Spanish for sure.

Korea is shitting on the world with some of their tv and movies. They're all just so much better than stuff I see in the US lately. Haven't watched as much stuff from Japan but have looked at a few. It is a very cool thing when you can understand what they're saying and all it took was a few hours of listening to an audio book.

As for the foreign accent thing. Yeah its funny, it completely changes the perspective when you try to learn these languages. Listening to natvies speak and then hearing myself speak is just....LOL.

It is super handy to know people who actually do speak these languages if trying to learn.

I also use Google Translate as well as the android one. Google is for sure better but they both can get tricky at times and just refuse to accept what I said.