Any other languages?

[yukamina]

I'm curious; is any one here learning(or already learned) a another language other than Japanese? If so which one(s)?

I've made small attempts at different points to learn Spanish, Chinese, and Korean... but each time, I stopped to focus on Japanese alone. Japanese really is my favorite language <333

So what about you guys?

[Yudan Taiteki]

I am taking Chinese 101 this quarter; I have to take 2 years of Chinese for my PhD.

[queshaw]

I am studying Thai also. But more Japanese than Thai. I have a Japanese class, and not a Thai class.

Actually, I was studying Thai before I started with Japanese. Some random people at http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html think it's a good idea to learn more than one language at a time...

I have terrible study habits though, and frequent work crisis that make me abandon everything but work for weeks at a time, that make me unfocused studying just one language.

But, learning Thai and Japanese, I should be able to read the text on Pocky packages some day which will be great.

My impression is that Thai is generally a lot harder than Japanese, because of the materials available for learning (lots for Japanese that is well designed, little for Thai that is not well designed), and Thai speech seems a lot harder than Japanese for an English speaker.

The language depends on tones and you have to contort your mouth and tongue all around to speak it. To type Thai you have to learn new key strokes. Thai script is more complicated than Kana. There are marks for vowels and consonants, so one syllable, dipthong or tripthong might be composed of 4 glyphs. If you think of each grouping of gylphs as like one kana, there are a few thousand.
l

[prep_girl_Nessa]

There was a large thread like this a while ago, but since my info has changed anyways...

I'm currently taking a German class, and I hated it at first but it's really grown on me and my best friend speaks some German so I think I'm going to work on that a bit.

I studied Spanish is high school, and I can still read it to a certain extent but when I try to talk it I always end up adding 'desu' and stuff like that xD

I know some Chinese and Korean since I study them when I have breaks at school, but I haven't really studied them formally. I think I'm going to study one of them when my Japanese is at a point where I'm happy with it (possibly next fall after I spend weeks in Japan, depending on how all that goes '')

[richvh]

Psst - there's already a thread for this.

[JaySee]

Here in Holland they tend to emphasize the importance of language learning because no one speaks Dutch. In high school I had 6 years of French and English, and 5 years of Latin and German. In most cases though only English and one extra language are compulsory.

At uni I study Japanese and besides that I also did 1,5 years of Spanish (quite an intensive course) and 1 semester of Korean (which I intend to continue in February). I also did some random stuff like Gothic for Indo-Euopean Linguistics which I kinda sorta study as well.

The problem is that I want to learn too many languages and I'm working on too many at the same time. I first want to get my Japanese to a near-native level though, and then after that I'll probably seriously attempt to brush up on some of the languages I've studied in the past and give other languages I really want to learn a go, like Icelandic (don't ask me why).

[yukamina]

richvh wrote:
Psst - there's already a thread for this.

It's quite an old thread...

[AJBryant]

Good luck with the Chinese. It's what killed me.


Tony

[stevie]

I'm only any good with English. I studied French and German in the past but don't recall much of either. I'd say I know as much after a year of studying Japanese as I did after five years of studying French (though can't speak/understand as well due to lack of practice in those areas). I'm also studying Chinese now for credit, so Japanese has kinds of been put on the backburner (but I still like to practice using what I know so as not to forget it). I'd like to learn more Japanese though, since about a week after I started my Chinese class, I suddenly made a bunch of Japanese friends here. Go figure.

I'm probably going to begin studying either Japanese or Chinese (or maybe both) at University starting next summer.

[gfunk]

I'm fluent in spanish, english, french and german. But most of those languages I learned before I was 6, so I don't recall all the learning struggles. Right now I'm trying to learn japanese and italian (although I'll focus more on japanese). But it's so hard for me to try to learn a language if I'm not immersed in it... It takes a lot more to open a dictionary and learn than just hit up the streets and practice.

[ss]

Tony wrote:
Good luck with the Chinese. It's what killed me.

PAPA, 請用華文書寫，您的華文一定會進步很快。 加油！

PAPA, try to write in Chinese. My pleasure to "mark" them. ^_~

[enji]

Chinese nearly killed me back in elementary school too. My weakest language back then. I had to study 3 languages throughout my school life and can't say that I enjoyed them. Nonetheless, now I stand proud of being trilingual and can't wait for my Japanese to reach native-level.

Thought of picking up a European language but am quite intimidated by all those masculine and feminine stuff, pronunciation etc etc. >.<

[AJBryant]

SS wrote:

Tony wrote:
Good luck with the Chinese. It's what killed me.

PAPA, 請用華文書寫，您的華文一定會進步很快。 加油！

PAPA, try to write in Chinese. My pleasure to "mark" them. ^_~

I have to go back to my old Chinese 101 text book and seriously start again. I've forgotten the proper reading and tone of SO many hanzi. Sigh...

我謝謝你！

Tony

[noviceAnimeFreak]

i took german language for a year and did well for the oral and exams..unfortunately i kinda gave up and now im back to square one....my biggest prob is the masculine, femine and neutral part.... still struggling.....

now im learning japanese cos im hooked on anime...i dun quite like when it's been dubbed...and the mangas i liked arent available in eng where i come from at least.....

so to everyone here, let's work our asses off and master the languages we love

[HeyItsMatt]

enji wrote:
Chinese nearly killed me back in elementary school too. My weakest language back then. I had to study 3 languages throughout my school life and can't say that I enjoyed them. Nonetheless, now I stand proud of being trilingual and can't wait for my Japanese to reach native-level.

Thought of picking up a European language but am quite intimidated by all those masculine and feminine stuff, pronunciation etc etc. >.<

If you can handle Japanese, I don't think French would be too hard (French is the only foreign language I've had any practice with besides Japanese). The masculine and feminine stuff is a pain, that's true, and seemingly pointless, but it don't think it's quite as big a deal as, say, understanding and using appropriate politeness levels in Japanese. Also, even after not having studied French for 4-5 years now, I can still get the gist of magazine articles written in French simply from the little bit I remember + all the words that are similar to their English equivalents.

I took 4 years of French in high school - after 1 year of studying Japanese I would say I'm at the same level that I was after 4 years of French, although perhaps with lower speaking ability since I can only really practice talking in Japanese to myself. I think this is mainly just a result of motivation - If I took up French again now I think I would learn faster.

I haven't been quite as diligent studying Japanese lately though, but hopefully I'll pick it up more soon. I go through motivation phases with most things.