I work at a company in Wisconsin that is owned by a Japanese company. Our president is Japanese, and there are several other Japanese in lower management positions with whom I interact daily. I was given the standard text in Japan for foreigners learning Japanese (Japanese for Busy People), and I’ve worked through some of it. My coworkers have also taught me some objectionable things to say (“Watashi-no chimpo-wa oishi desu!”).</P>
Japanese is apparently the easiest Asian language to learn because it’s not tonal at all, and the grammar isn’t too difficult. Moreover, it’s a very simplified language conversationally, where articles and pronouns are simply dropped if the context is clear.</P>
Someone pointed out that there is almost no common vocabulary between English and Japanese: this isn’t totally true. English is effectively a required second tongue in Japan. It’s taught in all the schools, and children go to “cram” schools to brush up. Consequently, the Japanese are incorporating English words into the language at a furious pace. According to the Rosetta Stone Japanese language CD I bought, the Japanese word for ball is “booru”, for table, “tabru”. I asked my brother, who’s fluent in Japanese, how to say “blow-up doll”, and he replied “brow up dorru”. It’s the same linguistic phenomenon that happened to English during the Roman and Norman occupations of England; as a consequence, English vocabulary is 80% latin in origin (thought the remaining teutonic 20% is used the most).</P>
There are actually four ‘alphabets’. There’s the classical Chinese alphabet of kanji, with its thousands of ideographic characters. There’s hiragana and katakana, two phonetic alphabets of around 110 characters each, roughly corresponding to Japanese and foreign languages. And then there’s Romaji, which is the previous phonetic alphabets in roman characters (used for computers, and increasingly dominant in schools).</P>
I lived in Montreal for four years, and failed to learn French properly, in part because Quebecois don’t really like helping a learner. The Japanese I know, however, get just too excited when I can spout a new phrase. Overall, I’ve picked up what Japanese I know more easily just because it’s basically foreign: without similarities upon which I can rely, I have to use it functionally. “Kore-wa nan desu ka?” means “what’s that?”. “Ohaiyo-gazaimasu” is “good morning” (literally, “damn, it’s early”). I’ve been told the wrong approach to learning a language is to build a dictionary in your head; the right way is to learn how to use it, and the grammar will follow. If that’s true, and my experience bears it out, then Japanese might be easier than a language like French, which is tantalizingly similar, but has a million grammatical corrections waiting in the wings.</P>
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