Many words in Japanese are borrowed from other languages. Many from Chinese, and quite a few from English and Portuguese. A smattering from other languages as well. The interesting thing about Japanese, though, as opposed to many other languages, is that the Japanese language doesn’t have the syllabic structure to
There are two pillars to success when learning any language: vocabulary and grammar. The thing about them is, they are actually rather orthogonal to each other. Even in Japanese, as long as you learn the dictionary form (or to some degree even the polite form of the word) you don’t
As I have been learning Japanese, one observation keeps coming to mind, one I can’t shake: Japanese is incredible, amazingly, spectacularly biased against beginners. What I mean is this: when you start learning Japanese, there is a hump. The hump seems almost insurmountable. You have to learn an entirely new
Perhaps one of the most challenging things about learning Japanese is that it does not have an alphabet – but it appears to have an alphabet. So we, as English speakers, try to overlay what we know about alphabets onto Japanese, and then it simply doesn’t work. Japanese, instead, has syllabaries –
I’ve tried several different approaches to learning Japanese. Some work better than others. The first thing I looked at was duolingo. I then trashed that very quickly, as I didn’t think it would do well at teaching me what I wanted to know. I looked at Rosetta Stone and tried it