Speaking Japanese?

[Kraco]

This topic reminds me of a funny paper my friend linked me to when I started watching anime. It's entitled "So you want to learn Japanese" and it's hilarious.

Damn, that was certainly a bloody hilarious read.

I never had any illusions of the difficulty level, but I thought I would spend some evenings gazing at a Japanese text book to get a better general idea of what the language is like. But the first pages of the book were filled by the myriad hiragana and katakana letters, and I'm still gathering courage to read past those. I got the book monts and months ago.

[Winged Dancer]

I've been studying Japanese for four years (on and off...) and lived at Japan for three or fourth months, so I can safely say I speak it pretty well....

...which is not to say I understand everything. I can watch anime and,.depending on the series, understand most of it or just about half. For instance, Basilisk is way easier to understand that Naruto because Naruto "creates" all sort of... terms and words that don't appear in every day vocabulary, while Basilisk or, for instance, MONSTER, have a lot of common, normal words.

Manga is different. Naruto manga is way easier to read than Basilisk or MONSTER, simply because it uses furigana, which helps a lot with the Kanji or ideograms.


BTW, LOL @ that essay on Japanese. It's so, so true. So many words sound exactly the same I don't doubt they really used sushi to create the language.