(no subject)

[ysobel]

...there is a part of me that thinks I'm crazy -- and asking for disappointment -- in trying to learn Japanese. Because three writing systems, because very different language, because I have no real use for it and I could be spending my energy on languages that are useful (Spanish, Russian to a lesser extent) or languages that I'm more likely to succeed with (Spanish, German). That I came across a DW entry from a few years back where I was stopping doing German duolingo because the words weren't sticking, and *i used to be pretty close to fluent*. I don't have the same background with Japanese, and aside from the basics (konnichiwa, sayonara, arigato, hai, iie, 1-10) and English-adopted loanwords (sushi, samurai, haiku, etc) I have no prior knowledge, and the few words I've gotten so far aren't sticking. (I'm sort of remembering the alternate 4 and 7. Duo has also given me a few colors -- red white blue (aka shiro ao?) -- and the learn Japanese app has given me "half, half past" and "o'clock" both of which I'm blanking on -- but I just. I'm not really retaining, and I'm kind of worried about trying to get katakana as well as hiragana, and the voice in my head is going on about how stupid this all is and how I should just give up and stick with something easy or useful or sensible or whatever.

I know that some of this is brainweasels. The "you are going to mess up so why bother trying" non-logic is pretty signature. But I can't tell if it's also telling the truth...

Comments

[mathemagicalschema]

I've actually had a lot of success at learning Japanese vocabulary and grammar by... watching too much anime. It also helped a bit that my sister was studying Japanese at the same time I was in my major anime phase :P. I'm now learning Chinese using Duo and a few other apps and resources, and watching Chinese and Taiwanese dramas has been a very helpful adjunct. It's made it much easier for me to wrap my head around how tones sound in natural speech compared to the precise, stilted pronunciations in my lessons.

I think I wouldn't try to learn a language without using both. I need natural speech - subtitled TV being best - to passively pick up vocabulary and to get a more intuitive sense of grammar and pronunciation, and I need lessons to give me a structured, accurate understanding of the language and help me deduce more from natural speech. Plus, of course, with Japanese and Chinese learning to read and write is a different beast entirely.

I don't know if you'll feel the same way as you keep going, but I found Japanese grammar to not be too complicated. It's a highly synthetic language, much like German, and once you can identify the different components of a word and get a sense for how to build a valid word, it gets a lot easier. If Duo is mostly teaching you vocabulary as entire words and not as morphemes with some rules for how you can combine them, picking up on the grammar is going to be really difficult.

I hope some of this is helpful; it's possible that Duo doesn't teach Japanese in a way that makes much sense to you (or perhaps anyone...), but I would be very surprised if Japanese were just straight-up too hard for you to learn, with you being familiar with so many languages.