Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
Where are you getting this stuff from? Japanese is easier to speak than European languages... for whom? Maybe if I grew up in Hong Kong I could have some empathy for a statement like that, but even so that seems like such a sweeping statement.
I absolutely hate tests like JLPT and don't even want to bother giving them the money or satisfaction they want. I feel like i wasted my money on a couple of their books.
I didn't realize you were chinese and apologize for that. From your perspective why wouldn't Kanji be important? With that said, you were calling my learning experience biased... that may be so, but what about you?
"I was brought up in a pure Kanji environment-Hong Kong. No pinyin whatsoever. Just Kanji. And I can tell you that when kids here learn Kanji, 9 out of ten words are Kanji phrases they have never heard of before. I can guarantee that learning Kanji without first learning how to pronounce or use them is perfectly okay. There are tens of millions of successful examples here and there. "
I'm sure there are billions of successful examples, but have you looked at literacy rates for different countries around the world? There may be a corrolation between that method of thinking and literacy rates, but that is quite an assumption on my part and apologize if there are other reasons.
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The sound elements of Japanese (consonants, vowels, intonation and others) are clearly much simpler than their European counterparts, not to mention the past / non-past tense and gender-free grammar. The world is not fair. It is much easier for English speakers to speak understandable Japanese than for Japanese speakers to speaker understandable English. And from my own experience, if they see that you have different skin color or speak with an accent, they usually will slow down their speech and use textbook Japanese. Actually, when a Japanese does that to me, I know my Japanese sucks. LOL.
Also, if you are an English or Chinese speaker, chances are you are already equipped with 10-20% of the Japanese vocabulary. Many so-called Japanese words are in fact Japonized pronunciations of English words. Maybe because I speak Chinese and English, I find it easy to speak understandable Japanese than understandable German. Of course, it is only my personal opinion. Everyone is different. It is absolutely normal that you have different ideas.
If you take learning Japanese seriously, i.e. with an aim to improve your income instead of just another hobby, JLPT is something you can't avoid. Yes. You can achieve native level fluency. But there are thousands of competitors who also have achieved native level fluency, and with a JLPT certificate.
The illiteracy rate is high in China because many of those illiterate people have not even received any education. It has very little to do with the writing system. Hong Kong and Taiwan also use Chinese (the traditional, more complicated form), but the illiteracy rates in these two places are close to zero.
Steven, my point is: Do not study a lot of Kanji (the Remembering the Kanji way) at the beginning. I think you agree with me on this. But I strongly recommend that when you learn the word かう, you should immediately learn the Kanji 買. It will not only help you with terms like かいもの、ばいしゅう, but also saves you a lot of headache when you encounter the word 飼う. When we learn French, we do the same. When we are learning a noun, we don't just remember the noun, but also its gender so that we know whether we should use "le" or "la", "mon" or "ma". And when I learned English many years ago, I learned "go, went, gone" at the same time instead of individually. In other words, we need to learn things as a set. If the term you are learning can be written in Kanji, then learn the Kanji.