Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 21:30:02 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: masao@nf.enveng.titech.ac.jp (UEBAYASHI Masao) Cc: mavery@mail.otherwhen.com, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: First interview hits the web.. Message-ID: <199906042130.OAA15823@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990604095830X.masao@nf.enveng.titech.ac.jp> from "UEBAYASHI Masao" at Jun 4, 99 09:58:30 am
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> We think it as usual that foreigners cannot speak in Japanese > correctly. Japanese is too difficult to learn, even for us. :D Formal written Japanese is hard (Kanji); kana less so. Japanese is not as hard as Russian, German, or Greek (IMO). Written Japanese has somewhat in excess of 30,000 Kanji characters. A Japanese University PhD is lucky to know 10,000-12,000 of these after achieving their degree. The average newspaper tends to have 300-1200 different Kanji, depending on the target market. I think the biggest barrier to an English speaker attempting to learn Japanese is the lack of English text written in Japanese word order. After discovering that Japanese was SOV instead of SVO (Subject Object Verb), the pace really picked up rather quickly. The SOV order of Japanese should be the first thing anyone is told about the language in a Japanese class, IMO. Someone needs to write a bunch of English text in SOV order so that words don't need to be transliterated for the Japanese equivalent. This would definitely accelerate anyone trying to learn Japanese. The best resource I found for English with Japanese, both in Japanese word order, is "Mangaijin" (A pun on "Magazine" and "Gaijin": foreigner), which has things like "Dilbert", "The Far Side", and "Calvin and Hobbes" translated into Japanese. Unfortunately, it's no longer being published, after less than 100 issues. 8-(. The next best source (IMO) is "Let's Learn Japanese!", which is an NHK production of video tapes and workbooks. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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