<p>English is my 4th language, and I want to learn more! I’ve got Korean and Japanese on my list (I knew Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien before English)</p>
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<p>That’s freakin’ awesome! I want to learn a bit of Swedish. I might take the self-studied route myself.</p>
<p>Currently I’m studying French and Spanish. I want to get fluent in both of them. And if I have the time, I would love to study a bit of German and Italian. </p>
<p>I know this is not a foreign language, but I’m going to take classes next summer for American Sign Language. I was always fascinated by it and with the field I plan to study in graduate school, Speech therapy, it is pretty handy!</p>
<p>But hey! I’m fine with just French and Spanish :D</p>
<p>^My junior college is one of the few in the area that offer a certificate in ASL, I took the 1 and 2 courses and I’ll tell you that it was one of the /best/ classes I have taken. It was so awesome. I wish I had time to complete the program! I definitely wanna go back and finish it though.</p>
<p>Dude, learning Japanese from scratch seems like a b$@tch. Unless you’re fluent in Chinese (giving you no problems with kanji) or Korean (which is extremely similar in grammar and quite similar in pronunciation).</p>
<p>I mean, it has two sets of alphabets (that each has over 50 letters), about 10,000 kanjis JUST in the general use (and almost each has two ways to read it), three ways of honorific speech (one to show respect/humble/be polite), dozens of ways to write pronouns (over twenty ways to say “I”), countless ways to express units (for example, saying you have “one” book and saying you have “one” pencil will require a different word for “one”), words that’s same in hiragana but different in kanji and meaning, unreasonably huge sets of onomatopoeia and morphemes…
idk. If you have passion, then take it. It’s absolutely a fascinating language to study. But if you think it’s just kinda cool, I suggest you take another language…and by another language I don’t mean something like Chinese or Arabic.</p>
<p>It’s not 10k Kanji, it’s 1950~. And most of the ways to refer to I are pretty straightforward and actually give you more information, so they’re helpful. Counters and levels of respect are just as hard as you imagine and worse.</p>
<p>And to Cherryapple: there is absolutely 0 0 0 chance you will be fluent in Japanese by the time you graduate, even if you were to spend time in Japan. Unless you did full, total immersion for a year or more. You should aim for conversational aptitude, advanced level japanese. Fluency is a word far too often abused by American language learners.</p>
<p>Daughter unit is continuing with Hebrew and Spanish and adding Arabic.</p>
<p>Arbiter, So is the concept of actually being adept at a language. So many people I know thought they “knew” Spanish or German, while they could barely read beyond a 1st grade level (if that), let alone say anything other than “The apple is red.” </p>
<p>I don’t get the dishonesty. If you can’t hold a conversation in the language, you can’t speak it. You’re learning it. Nothing wrong with that.</p>
<p>It’s tricky. I’m technically “Advanced-intermediate” Japanese. That means I could pretty easily live in Japan, but barely am literate (middle school at best). I would say and feel comfortable saying I speak conversational Japanese, because I can carry on almost any day to day conversation with little trouble (albeit I’m a little rusty atm), and have excellent pronunciation. I’d say that’s adept, and most Japanese (the people) would likely back me up.</p>
<p>Now if you swapped that with French… I doubt they’d agree.</p>
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Actually, to pass the First-Level Kanji Aptitude Test (which is like the level for top college graduates who are natives) you need more than 6,000. And that’s not even all that’s in use…and btw Chinese has over 100,000. But yeah, you should be fine if you know around 2,000. Just not fully literate, as in not able to read technical or classical texts.
I actually think it’s impressive you speak that well. And I know a plenty of Japanese/Chinese/(to a lesser extent, since they abolished Chinese characters)Korean learners who can hold up a conversation pretty well but cannot read/write/speak formally at nearly the same level. Apparently, East Asian languages are beasts if you wanna master them.</p>
<p>@SnowMoonFlower: Yeah, I did a bit of self studying over the summer and so I have Katakana and Hiragana as well as the first chapter of Genki I (required textbook for the course I’m taking) under my belt. (I’m also using a Korean<->Japanese textbook supplementarily because I find its explanations more understandable.</p>
<p>I’m fluent in Korean - and yes, I have noticed great similarities between the languages in terms of grammar and conversational uses but I’ve also been warned of “false friends” as well! (The KR<>JPN textbook flags a lot of warnings on this). Most Koreans don’t know alot of Hanja (I don’t know any; my parents know some) but Japanese know A LOT of Kanji! So Kanji is what scares me most! ^^;</p>
<p>@arbiter213: Oh, I see! I understand what you mean. I would be happy with that as well! (:</p>
<p>@Pathetique: I’ve found that true as well. I’ve also found that there are some native speakers of a language (Spanish for instance, because there were Spanish speakers in my Spanish class) that can hold conversations but aren’t very fluent on paper (grammar, writing, reading).</p>
<p>Actually the adverage everyday person in japan only knows about 2k of japanese.</p>
<p>The alphabits aren’t hard, its the friggen kanji. And don’t say if you know chinese it will make it easier, it won’t. They may look the same but they mean entirely diffrent things.</p>
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<p>i promise it’s not hard! give the characters one month…after that reading gets easier!! you’re really smart too so it should be easy for you :)</p>
<p>im self studying Portuguese cuz i want to go to brazil and it doesnt fit in my schedule</p>
<p>About to enter my third semester of Chinese. I had every intention of keeping up my speaking skills over the summer, but I’m afraid they’ve badly atrophied. And I live with a native speaker of Chinese, too, so I have no excuse :P</p>
<p>When the semester starts next week, though, it’ll be wonderful having her around.</p>
<p>Estudio espa</p>
<p>Is anyone taking Italian? How’s that going?</p>