Quote: (01-29-2016 11:40 AM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:
Quote: (01-29-2016 10:42 AM)cascadecombo Wrote:
^ What's the point of that? Thread about learning Japanese, oh hey learn Spanish because lots of people around the world speak Spanish.
Fun fact, Spanish pronunciation is quite similar to Japanese.
Not to mention if a guys trying to get laid the types of women vary immensely from Hispanic - Russian - Japanese.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co...nominal%29
It was what popped into my head when I saw the thread.
It doesn't seem like there's much point in learning a language half assed.
So, I looked into time required for professional proficiency, aka the FSI standard.
I was actually surprised by just how much longer it takes to learn Japanese than other languages.
You could knock out German and French, learn salsa or tango, and still have time left over to pick up guitar in the same length of time as learning Japanese.
I'm actually intrigued by people who would choose to do it without a compelling reason such as family ties or a doctorate in oriental studies or something.
Maybe as a demonstration of intellectual prowess or a desire to be different?
Quote: (01-29-2016 10:06 AM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:...h_Speakers
According to the FSI, Japanese is the highest difficulty level, and requires 2200+ classroom hours to learn, with half that recommended to be in country immersion.
In the same amount of time, you could learn two low difficulty languages and one moderate difficulty language.
For example, Spanish (600 hours) + Portuguese (600 hours) + Russian (1100 hours) = 2300 hours.
Personally I think it would be MUCH more useful for pussy, pleasure, and business to learn Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian than Japanese, but to each his own.
Also, by number of native speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la...speakers):
Spanish (405 million) + Portuguese (215 million) + Russian (155 million) = 775 million people
Japanese = 125 million people
I think you're looking at this too much like a video game.
It is not an actual fact, that someone can learn 3 languages by the time someone learns
Japanese. This is just one study, and ultimately one opinion from one accumulated source.
Learning a language is largely up to the individual. Most people in America have been studying Spanish since they were in elementary school, and most people who are not of Latin origin cannot speak Spanish still. Learning a language requires tenacity, which cannot be easily measured.
It doesn't take 2200 hours to learn how to talk in
Japanese. The metrics that you posted take into account fluency in writing and reading, which is disproportionately difficult for an English speaker than writing is. If you want to pick up girls in a club, you will likely not need to learn thousands of Kanji characters.
Unless linguistics is your hobby, being able to pick up 3 languages in perfect sequence would be rather difficult (ie learning Portuguese, Spanish and Russian all back to back). Becoming fluent in a language still does not mean that you are "good" at speaking that language, chances are you're not going to feel satisfied about your grammar even after you have become fluent. Also, one has to take into account practical things like burning out on studying, forgetting the language you just learned, etc.
Ultimately though, the reason why people might not learn an army of Indo-European languages over learning just
Japanese is because of lack of interest. If you don't have a real interest in learning a language, you're probably not going to be able to learn a language. Russia is pretty popular on this board, but in the US I would dare say that most people would have zero interest in ever going there (and I think the same would be true for some other Western countries as well). Without genuine interest in a culture where people speak Russian, chances are you're not going to be able to speak Russian (wanting to put that you can speak Russian on a resume is probably not enough motivation).
125 million people is quite a bit of people, Japan is still a large market. In a vacuum, there are a lot of languages in this world, and
Japanese is still among one of the more popular ones. There are also hardly any people who can speak both
Japanese and English, there are a lot of people who are bilingual in English/French or English/Spanish - so the unique factor has to come into play. To put things in perspective, there are probably about as many native
Japanese speakers as there are German speakers, but there are a significant amount of German speakers who can speak a 2nd language incredibly well (English is what I am thinking of primarily), so
Japanese would probably be a more "valuable" language in a vacuum.
As for me personally, I have a chance to take some foreign language credits at a university. My school just got rid of Russian, and there is only one Portuguese class (I think Portuguese would be the most useful for someone in international business personally).
I was left between more competitive languages like Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish vs
Japanese. I have no interest in going to Arabic countries, I don't care too much to go to most Chinese speaking countries (and I don't really like the Mandarin language much, I've taken lessons in it for business before), and my Spanish is already decent enough (but ultimately, I do not care much to go to Latin American countries at the moment).
Japanese is still useful, there is a lot of resources to help someone get emerged in it (video games, anime, sports, movies, comics), I'd like to live in Japan for at least a few months, being able to talk in
Japanese is something that is unique, and it's also rather challenging (not particularly important for most people, but I want something that I can strain my brain while I'm sleep walking through my bachelors degree). The rules to speaking
Japanese are not complicated and are very consistent (based on what I've been exposed too), and the pronunciation is not difficult.
Sorry for the tl;dr, just trying to give my insight.