[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by steven

Kyle, not that I disagree with you or anything, but just for the record he said he grew up in Hong Kong. I'm assuming you're right about him growing up with English, but he also apparently grew up with Chinese. That might put more truth behind his claim that Japanese is easier, but that doesn't apply to everyone, as you have clearly pointed out.

With that aside, this is quite a generalization, but Chinese people don't have the best pronunciation in Japanese in my experience, suggesting that pronunciation doesn't come natural to them either (us being people from primarily English speaking countries). With that in mind, aside from Kanji and a few words that are similar, I'm not even sure that his claim that Japanese is easier than European Languages would even apply to himself especially seing as how he gerw up with English too.

Out of curiosity, how many languages do you speak (and are actually comfortable with speaking/understanding) Sakaeyellow?

I am comfortable speaking English (highly-educated native), Japanese (conversant), and Spanish (literate). I find Spanish much easier as far as languages go (and I can quite often invent a Spanish word and be correct thanks to my English nativity), but I've devoted a lot less time to it, which is why I consider myself better at Japanese (but I can read scholarly works in Spanish and cannot yet in Japanese, thanks to the marvelous Latin connection between Spanish and English). My spoken Japanese is much better than my Spanish, but that's because I spent a year in Japan speaking only Japanese. Were it not for kanji, my Japanese would be unassailably better than my Spanish.

On a different note, the notion that Chinese does not help dramatically with Japanese because they share few complete words is silly. That's like claiming that because Greek and Latin share few actual words with English that knowing them does not help you dramatically in English.

Kanji work like Greek/Latin affixes. For example, knowing the Greek prefix "pseudo" helps you understand a lot of new words like "pseudopod," "pseudoephedrine," "pseudo-anglicism," "pseudomorph," "pseudonym," "pseudoscience," with very littel addition effort.

Similarly, knowing tele, micro, scope, visio, audio, phono, etc. will explode your English vocabulary. Having studied Chinese and Japanese (my Chinese is atrocious, though), I can attest to the fact that learning new hanzi will improve your grasp of Japanese, too.