29 replies to this topic

[Fire Blazer]

gotta spice things up, I wouldn't expect you to understand

[Rujio]

QUOTE (Blues @ Jan 14 2014, 08:38 AM)

Oddly I learned Hiragana first, then katakana. I'm just too lazy to learn Kanji, to be honest. I have a real love for the culture myself.

Do most people learn Katakana before Hiragana? I did it the same way you did. I'm still a little iffy on writing kana because of how rarely it's necessary, too.

I hate kanji. The Japanese came up with a perfectly fine writing system themselves. Why did they have to incorporate the Chinese one, too? Why?

?????????While this is all happening.)

[Fire Blazer]

QUOTE

I hate kanji. The Japanese came up with a perfectly fine writing system themselves. Why did they have to incorporate the Chinese one, too? Why?

ditto this

I learned katakana first because

- it's easier--the characters are less complicated, technically an objective thing but I think it's silly to argue otherwise/feel strongly about this opinion
- it's more commonly used for names and other proper nouns which is the most I wanted to get out of Japanese at the time

hiragana has a lot more purpose and has more complicated characters so yeah

[Scrimsax]

Blues intro thread becomes the most active thread on FES.

You'll do just find around here.

[Blues]

@Rujio Yeahhh, Katakana is arguably easier (As good ol' Blazer already has.) but I'm /guessing/ that Hiragana is the base form of the language, because my professor insisted that we learn it first. I'm not too miffed about it.
@Scrim I didn't expect to be this popular (although I can't even call it popularity anywho tbh)
@Blazer (And Scrim again I guess) Neh, I know I'll do it, I just have to take a deep breath and restart the chapter while jamming to Periphery... One of my favorite metal bands, for reference.

[Fire Blazer]

Professor almost definitely knows better + starting hard and going easier isn't that bad + katakana is used for not only names but English words as well so in that regard I guess it's less "Japanesey"... meh what am I saying I don't know any real Japanese I just taught myself some crap so I could play video games don't listen to me

[Mercurius]

I personally found katakana to be harder

mostly because there's more characters that look similar in it

QUOTE

Japanese is cool but it can be pretty hard to learn thanks to Kanji

english is cool but it can be pretty hard to learn thanks to how messed up its pronunciation "system" is (I'd mention the grammar but plenty of people screw the grammar rules all the time) and its ridiculously huge vocabulary(that most people don't use the vast majority of.) also what is with people that speak english which feel the need to use french and latin word/phrases? (and what is with people that speak japanese who feel the need to use all that engrish? lol. I mean I know there's the "exotic" factor but koreans think the same thing and they don't do it so much unless they were in places where english is the usual too often...so I guess it's a matter of who started it)

QUOTE

The Japanese came up with a perfectly fine writing system themselves. Why did they have to incorporate the Chinese one, too?

hiragana and katakana were made after the chinese characters became what they felt like writing (and the hiragana and katakana themselves are made from chinese characters IIRC...or at least some of them were)

and man there are like a billion things that can sound the same in japanese those kanji are important (though I imagine it isn't strictly necessary given how Koreans rarely use it now despite how they have a ton of words which are from same-sounding, non-tonal chinese characters...I think all of those are combination words though)

the thing that REALLY bothers me is getting confused over when to use which reading of the chinese character(it gets worse when puns are involved...and japanese makes puns extremely convenient)

...but seriously, languages are just always hard and require tons of investment if you're not already familiar enough with its style

[Seraphinox]

I'm taking japanese classes at the moment and we learned Hiragana first, then Katakana while learning bits and pieces of Kanji along the way.

QUOTE

english is cool but it can be pretty hard to learn thanks to how messed up its pronunciation "system" is (I'd mention the grammar but plenty of people screw the grammar rules all the time) and its ridiculously huge vocabulary(that most people don't use the vast majority of.)

I agree so much with this, I'm a qualified english teacher (english as a foreign language) and the students usually have a better understanding of the grammatical rules than you, the teacher do, but when it comes to pronunciation they hit so many road blocks.

Thankfully, most nationalities all make the same mistakes so I can usually pinpoint ahead of time what areas different students are going to have trouble with, but it doesn't change the fact that english is needlessly complicated.

[Rujio]

QUOTE (Tenebrae Candidae @ Jan 15 2014, 01:11 AM)

I personally found katakana to be harder mostly because there's more characters that look similar in it

This is my problem. The simplicity leads to very many very similar characters. e.g.???????all have the same base.

QUOTE

hiragana and katakana were made after the chinese characters became what they felt like writing (and the hiragana and katakana themselves are made from chinese characters IIRC...or at least some of them were)

A lot of katakana was pulled from kanji, but I nothing comes to mind now with hiragana. I think that was fairly distinct.

QUOTE

and man there are like a billion things that can sound the same in japanese those kanji are important (though I imagine it isn't strictly necessary given how Koreans rarely use it now despite how they have a ton of words which are from same-sounding, non-tonal chinese characters...I think all of those are combination words though)

It isn't strictly necessary, as you said. I mean, you can't talk with kanji and people speak Japanese to each other all the time. But more than that my problem is that they're so complex. Very small differences between characters that take a bazillion strokes to write (or are super crammed on a computer screen) is not something my brain handles well. Kanji like numbers, ??????and such I have no problem with.

Also there's stuff like "getsu youbi" (Monday) taking twelve strokes to write in hiragana and twenty-six to write in kanji. That's just annoying.



Regarding English stuff: I recall seeing people places say "Oh, learning English is really easy," online somewhere. Then someone asked about pronunciation, and the response was "Oh, I have no idea how to pronounce any of the stuff I'm reading and writing, but as far as reading and writing goes it's pretty easy."

And as far as pronunciation goes, a big part of the problem I would imagine is that there is little consistency within the English-speaking world. Take a word like "laboratory." Some people say "lab-ruh-tor-ee" and some say "luh-bor-uh-tor-ee" and some say "luh-bor-uh-tree" etc.

[Fire Blazer]

English is definitely screwed up, I don't think any knowledgeable person in their right mind is going to argue that. I could go on and on and on about it, don't even get me started. If I didn't grow up speaking English I'd be totally screwed, and I still mess up pronouncing words and such on occasion. *facepalm*