I dunno man. I spent 7 years in the Philippines and married into a Filipino family. It’s taken me a lot of stop start work to get to my middling tagalog, but it’s definitely useful to have.
If you are gonna stick around, it’s worth doing even if you never get fluent.
Do you agree with the opinion that Italian is the easiest to learn among the Romance languages?
Also, knowing just a little basic Spanish is helpful sometimes, knowing just a little Japanese is kind of useless. Occasionally you understand a phrase in an anime but you’re basically illiterate without knowing lots of Chinese characters, which takes real work.
Yah, I would say so.
Spanish has the simplest pronunciation rules and is an entirely phonetic language. So you have an easy time guessing how words are written and figuring out the correct pronunciation.
Italian is also phonetic, but the pronunciation is a bit more confusing b/c there are consonant clusters that are counter-intuitive, some consonants that change sound based on which vowels follow, and a few other pronunciation quirks. But once you learn all those rules, I think pronunciation is fairly straightforward.
The big difference is in listening. I still struggle with Spanish from time to time b/c most native speakers are speaking at breakneck speed. There is also huge variation in accents based on country or even sometimes regions within a country.
Italian has a slower rhythm and more natural pauses. When spoken by a native, I believe the speed of Spanish is about 7.8 syllables per second compared to 7 for Italian, or about 11.4% faster with Spanish.
Incidentally, I believe Japanese is the only language faster than Spanish, but I don’t have much experience with that. I would’ve liked to learn Japanese, but I was put off by the different alphabets. If it had an alphabet as easy as Korean’s hangul, I probably would’ve stuck with it b/c I enjoy Japanese culture so much.
Anyway, back to the original point. I’m not that far into learning Italian yet, so I’ll wait to give a more definitive answer, but my gut feeling is that the difference in listening between Italian and Spanish would make Italian the easiest of the romance languages to learn. Unfortunately, Italian is not really all that useful unless you’re planning to live in Italy, but Spanish is pretty important and unlocks a ton of different countries to visit.
One other note is that Portuguese and French have nasal vowels, which are annoying for learners whose languages don’t have those, whereas IT/SP do not. I think those add quite a bit of difficulty, and French is a whole different ballgame from the other 3 in terms of writing, pronunciation, listening, etc.
I’ve learnt some of all 3, mostly French.
Italian def the more straightforward; more mechanical. As FK said, Spanish is all over the place depending on country/region; and French is just a bitch anyway.
Not syllables per second as you’re defining, but definitely interesting
I wonder if that also holds true for regional dialects within languages. It seems to me that, on average, New Yorkers speak more quickly than Texans, but does “Southern” vernacular convey more info?
Illiterate without knowing the kanji, yes, but there are plenty of gaijin in Japan who are quite fluent, albeit functionally illiterate having never mastered the written language.
So while being able to read is desirable, it’s certainly not a prerequisite to attaining verbal fluency.
My stepbrother got sent to Thailand with the Air Force. They sent him to Thai language school for I believe two years before he was even deployed.
I’ve traveled with him in Thailand and been with him when he bumped into Thai people in LA and Iceland of all places. It’s always fun seeing the looks on their faces when the big gawky white dude whips out his conversational Thai. I wish I had something like that.
Are there courses that teach Japanese without kanji? Or do they just absorb the language by watching a shitload of anime? Either way, it seems like it would suck to live in a country and be illiterate.
Missed this thread.
Re Japanese without Kanji. In most of the learning apps you can set what sort of stuff you want to see RE: Japanese. As in you can see the romanji (english alphabet version), the katakana only, or normal Japanese with the Kanji/Kata mixed or to display all 3. And lots of Manga has the Katakana displayed along side the Kanji. So it’s def possible.
I just started learning Japanese with the goal of being conversationally basic in 4 years when we plan to visit for a vacation if we can swing it. Going slow for now.
I don’t know how to qualify my French learning but I’ve been going pretty hard at it for a tiny bit over 2 years now. I started an online group conversation course like 8 months into it and am still doing that, plus another movie club thing (both 100% in French). There is no place close to take any of the official tests near me, but I feel like I could easily pass the B2 test based on some of my classmates who have taken and passed it. It’s been really fun. It’s so much easier to get inputs and I read and watch stuff in French with no problem now, native stuff made for natives. Been watching HPI recently without subs and not having problems at all. So I understand a lot and my passive vocab is pretty good. Still make mistakes speaking but fewer and fewer and mostly minor ones and obv can’t express myself as well as I can in English while speaking off the dome. The mistakes I make are types I notice non-native English speakers make speaking English even though they speak very well and are easy to understand.
I’ve been trying as much as possible to get resources for Japanese in French to kind of piggy back. No doubt Japanese is going to be way harder, mainly due to the Kanji and how one Kanji can have so many different pronunciations and that it doesn’t share as many words with English, whereas French I can often guess a new word that looks close to an English word. . But some of it is very logical and I really like the “particle” system it uses.
Most college textbooks and whatnot gradually introduce the writing system, and so if you complete, say, four years of college Japanese, you will have the bare basics of reading & writing under your belt.
Unfortunately, that alone will not be enough to become truly literate. You’ll be able to read and recognize some words here and there, but for all intents & purposes you’ll still be functionally illiterate. I’d say the majority of gaijin in Japan fall under this category, and very few actually put in the work to become truly literate.
As for courses that teach without kanji, you can probably find a bunch of stuff online, such as the Japanesepod101 stuff, that doesn’t require you to learn kanji.
But the ones who become fluent without learning kanji, mostly just come to Japan, learn to converse through daily interactions, while never bothering to learn to read & write.
That online group convo course sounds interesting. I haven’t really spoken and French at all since 2018 so I’m sure it’s gone to complete shit.
Also I tend to get lazy once I get to like a low B2 level where I can manage in most scenarios except highly technical ones, but I’m still making quite a few intermediate level mistakes. I guess I just find the process of going to 0 to low fluency a lot more interesting than fine-tuning things. As a result, my peak in Spanish and French were both at this level, but if I could someday get to a point where I had Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese at a low B2-ish level and then just maintain that via watching series or convo groups, then I’d be ecstatic.
One thing that sucks for me is that I’m 5x more likely to remember a word if I can see how it’s spelled and understand why it’s spelled that why. That’s why the Asian languages (except maybe Korean) are a nightmare for me.
Even when I’m listening to Coffee Break Italian while walking my dog, I’ll want to look up any new vocab I’ve heard and see how it’s spelled, then it just clicks better.
The one good thing about Japanese kanji characters is that once you learn each associated meaning, you can make educated guesses as to what words mean even if you can’t actually read them.
Something tells me that guy didn’t find his way into Japan via anime.
The man is literally a Jojo character, of course that guy watches anime.
Became a salaryman who works 100 hours a week and bangs whores at office parties while your miserable wife takes care of your children, then die of karoshi.
You’ve introduced a very dark energy into this Jojo weeaboo fantasy.
There’s actually a popular manga of this theme, except instead of dying of karoshi the hero became company president.