What is hard for you about Japanese?

[Risukopi]

Hi there.

I know you guys are studying Japanese quite hard, and do you have any points that you particulaly feel hard about learning/using Japanese ?


I would like to ask this question as a Japanese teacher.

I notice that yet there are not many good textbooks for Japanese language .
So even it is harder to teach with those texts. Mostly they are bizarre sentences, not natural for daily use, and not so efficient. Plus some of them are 100% in roman ji.

I am teaching Japanese to Europian kids, who are not familer with Kanjis at all and sometimes we have to use roman-ji text books. Its okay for a while for the debutants, but finally they need to know the kanjis -but it seems they are not willing to do so.

Because I believe learning and knowing the language means you can write, read , listen and speak. Like, it is not good if you learn Russian without Russian alphabet because it is not real Russian you are going to use...you see what I mean.

Anyway , about Japanese language...what makes it hard to study?


For example, English for Japanese people, I feel they are quite good at writing and spelling (not me sorry) English, also reading , but they are espacially not good at speaking and expressing themselves, plus there is so much to work on pronounciation. (R and L , V and B etc)


So it was an example.
How about for you, learning Japanese which part you feel most dificult about?


Thanks for your opinion

[Gwen_Goth]

pronounciation is my main problem i think; just simple things even... texts in a mixture of romanji and kanji would be most useful i think, as it may be easier to learn the two side by side...

im just not good at learning languages

[aphrodite]

i would say the symbols

[Vesperd]

putting the words together, is the main problem for me

[Nyororin]

In my personal experience with books - they start out with the most polite forms, and then slowly teach the more common usages... When, quite honestly, I feel that Japanese should be learned in the same pattern a Japanese child would learn it - via frequency. You aren`t going to hear those ultra polite sentences on a daily basis. In fact, hardly ever. "Dictionary" forms (the normal 食べる vs 食べます) seem to cause trouble for everyone because no book I have seen so far introduces them first.

My specialty is actually language acquisition, and it makes absolutely no sense to me that any course would try to make a student learn in such an unnatural pattern. A child`s first words are not going to be polite forms. In the same pattern of thought, it`s worthless to attempt to learn to write before you are capable of understanding what you are writing. Until then, any of the foreign language you are studying should be encountered only through speech. Written stuff is not even really necessary.

[keipuna]

Originally Posted by Risukopi

Hi there.

I know you guys are studying Japanese quite hard, and do you have any points that you particulaly feel hard about learning/using Japanese ?


I would like to ask this question as a Japanese teacher.

I notice that yet there are not many good textbooks for Japanese language .
So even it is harder to teach with those texts. Mostly they are bizarre sentences, not natural for daily use, and not so efficient. Plus some of them are 100% in roman ji.

I am teaching Japanese to Europian kids, who are not familer with Kanjis at all and sometimes we have to use roman-ji text books. Its okay for a while for the debutants, but finally they need to know the kanjis -but it seems they are not willing to do so.

Because I believe learning and knowing the language means you can write, read , listen and speak. Like, it is not good if you learn Russian without Russian alphabet because it is not real Russian you are going to use...you see what I mean.

Anyway , about Japanese language...what makes it hard to study?


For example, English for Japanese people, I feel they are quite good at writing and spelling (not me sorry) English, also reading , but they are espacially not good at speaking and expressing themselves, plus there is so much to work on pronounciation. (R and L , V and B etc)


So it was an example.
How about for you, learning Japanese which part you feel most dificult about?


Thanks for your opinion

Katakana is by far the toughest thing for me. I never know if the foreign word is from English or another language. Kana is so prevalent in written Japanese that I feel illiterate without a strong command of it. I feel like I am expected to know the words but the pronunciation is very different I remember hearing or reading aluminum or refrigerator for the first time in Japanese and I was stumped looking aimlessly through my dictionary while my Japanese friend looked confused.

[JISE]

I just started learning. For me the hardest part is writing the symbols.
These are the books I have been using along with a Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary :
Amazon.com: Jimi's Book of Japanese: A Motivating Method to Learn Japanese (Hiragana): Books: Peter X. Takahashi,Yumie Toka
Amazon.com: Japanese in Mangaland: Basic Japanese Course Using Manga: Books: Marc Bernabe

[RETARDEDMONKEH]

The thing i'm having difficulty is sentence structure and kanji. ;_____;
.. and talking to people. being polite is the most essence of japanese interactions and for a foreigner its really hard to do so.
not that foreigners are not polite but japanese people seem to be really really polite and me, here in america, the case isn't always like that. T___T

[Kuroneko]

Originally Posted by Risukopi

Hi there.

I am teaching Japanese to Europian kids, who are not familer with Kanjis at all and sometimes we have to use roman-ji text books. Its okay for a while for the debutants, but finally they need to know the kanjis -but it seems they are not willing to do so.

Because I believe learning and knowing the language means you can write, read , listen and speak. Like, it is not good if you learn Russian without Russian alphabet because it is not real Russian you are going to use...you see what I mean.

In my own personal experience think the best way to learn is how you said it. To write Japanese or to speak you should be submersed in it. For example you should have the hiragana/katakana on some flash cards but you should have it so that they (your students) can not read the romaji. And then assign a sound to each hiragana/katakana orally. As soon as they learn all the Hiragana/Katakana you could move on to reading sentences with useful Japanese Phases.

Learning all the Hiragana should take about 2-3 weeks if you practice every day for at lest 1 hour. This of course depends on the students abilities. Katakana on the other hand Might take some more time because some katakana look very similar, not only to other Katakana but some Hiragana as well.
(E.g. Hiragana "Se" = "せ" and Katakana "Sa" サ. Even more so with katakana Tsu [pronounced like "ts" in "cats"] ツ and katakana Shi シ pronounced as "she"])

Know you can probably see how this can become confusing.

Originally Posted by Risukopi

How about for you, learning Japanese which part you feel most difficult about?

My grammar isn't very good as well as some long sentences. My Vocabulary is pretty good but I need to learn some more word in general.


Hope that helps. Good Luck.

[heleotrop]

I'd say the toughest thing would have to be memorizing the symbols. writing them isn't the problem for me. It's the memorizing part.