I started learning back when vtubers were popular and people would say the English ones were all terrible but the Japs were kino. (This proved to be largely hyperbolic)
I read a few text books to learn the basic grammar stuff and used to actively search out native materials to study, but most of what I know comes from grinding anki decks. I lost all motivation to keep learning over 2 years ago but I still do at least 20 minutes of anki every day because it became a routine.
It takes a long butt time. You can cram for like a year or spread it out lazily like I've done, but it will take a darn lot of hours.
It also depends a whole lot on what you wanna watch. Since you seem less interested in anime I would imagine you're into J dramas or J horror or something, which shouldn't be too bad. Scripted stuff in general tends to be easier to follow than regular speech, especially if you can get the JP subtitles.
Mostly just interested in anything but anime lol. I also just wanna mog weebs who couldn't learn the language. A year isn't that bad of an investment though. I can stomach that I think.
The people who I've seen say they got there in a year were doing like 4+ hours a day. If you think that time investment is worth it to dunk on weebs when 100% of anime and like 95% of manga gets translated, that's up to you lol
I'm mostly in it for old video games. Lots of those bastards don't get translated or when they do it's by some random furry 20 years later. I'd rather just take it upon myself to learn the language and not rely on neurodivergents to translate everything for me.
Well, for video games if they're newer than like the NES you'll definitely have to learn kanji. That's usually the great filter of learning JP so I recommend you start there as soon as possible so you can decide if it's actually worth it.
I also just wanna mog weebs who couldn't learn the language
Buddy you are not the first one to think that way and many have failed doing it like that. I know you wanted to learn it so you can masturbate and not have to rely on translations and be more inmersed in the experience, so to that I reccomend reading and reading until you get tired of it. I knew a buddy who just learnt the language by just reading manga until xe grasped it, but i guess that when you are a NEET and have a goal in mind, nothing can really stop you in achieving that goal. There was also another post in here of a guy who learnt by listening to ASMRs 24/7 until xe grasped the language, so i guess when there is a goal, there is a way
Oh don't worry. I'm taking it seriously, I was just being tongue in cheek. The thing about wanting to play games is true though. I'm not stupid enough to just think I can try without effort.
If you want full understanding (comprehension+production) it can take 5+ years. If you just want comprehension probably a wee bit shorter than that. Japanese is a pain in the butt to learn.
If you don't have a second language I'd recommend literally any other language first. I'm learning because I like it but I know it's pretty much useless outside of Japan.
Arabic and Gaelic are fricking pains in the butt to learn, would you say Japanese is harder? I've been told it's chinese filtered through an poetic opium addict
I can't speak to the other two, but that description is pretty accurate. Japanese has 3 writing systems, all imported from China. The one with the ideograms is particularly r-slurred as some of the characters kept their original readings from Chinese and got new ones from japanese. This is an infamous example https://jisho.org/search/%E7%94%9F%20%23kanji the kun/on parts are how the same character can be read in different words.
Add to that the different sentence structure from latin languages, the regional dialects, the 350 ways of counting things, 3 ways of phrasing the same sentence based on politeness and you end up with a convoluted mess that ruins japanese children for life.
Okinawan is a language on itself. The other ones are just meh, be it the osakan or the kyoto dialect
>the 350 ways of counting things
Same occurs in english, you just don't notice it because you are used to it. Say a flock of geese or a herd of cows, xey are specific words used within that context, which wouldn't make sense used to refer to other objects or things. @X xe can't into classifiers
I feel that having the quantifier change depending on the number of things is specially bullshit. Like goose/geese doesn't really square to ひとつ、ふたつ、みっつ or ひとり、ふたり、さんにん
No Gaeilgeoir actually calls it that. It's Irish, or Gaeilge if you're talking in Irish.
It's a total pain in the butt to learn compared to Japanese (where the grammar rules are super consistent). Irish beyond is cúpla focal is a fricking nightmare. Declension, genetive case, broad and slender consonants, séimhiú and urú, frick me what a nightmare of a language.
Comparatively Japanese is a breeze, especially since immersion is way easier.
DickButtKiss
: that's r-slurred. you can't speak Japaneses so shut your frickin mouth
A language is as easy as the resources available imo. J#p#n#se is one of the easiest languages to learn right meow simply because there are so many soytubers, applications, book, and resources available to learn the language. I don't know about irish, but despite being one of the languages of the EU (I think? I don't know the status of it), it probably has few and far resources, only taught in schools and alike, and a few books, podcasts, essays, etc, one could learn. J#p#n#se is of course different in pretty much every aspect in a language, but you can fully inmerse in it, be it by changing the settings in your phone, or finding pretty much any information in that language, either for children and adults alike. Irish, not so much. ( @MinecraftBee@MayflyAlt-98 )
(Also what is the seimhiu and uru thing? The declensions and cases are not that hard once you get accostumed to it, or know a language that uses it, and the lenght of the consonants seems a little bit tricky, but nothing unsurmountable [see also english, which has kinda the same problem with a distinction of having a different way of how a word is written and pronounced, or icelandic with the unique factor of preaspiration {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preaspiration}, and voiced and voiceless consonants] !linguistics
The word order in Irish is completely different from English.
English is what's known as a "Subject/Verb/Object" language (often abbreviated "SVO"). That's because the subject will generally come first in a simple sentence, followed by the verb, and then followed by the rest of the sentence.
For example, a simple English sentence might be:
Seán [subject] buys [verb] milk [object].
Irish, on the other hand, is what's known as a "Verb/Subject/Object" (or "VSO") language. The verb (including any preverbal particles) comes before the subject in the sentence.
So, if we want to say "Seán is buying milk" in Irish, we'd say:
Ceannaíonn tú im, bainne agus arán. You buy butter, milk and bread. (Literally "Buy you butter, milk and bread.")
It sounds rslured but you could get pretty beautiful turns of phrase from Irish. It's not a coincidence the Irish were always heavyhitters in poetry. Tá bron orm ( I am sad in ) means "Sadness has befallen me"
Completely agree that the ease of a language is directly connected to the ease of immersion. Irish is an EU language, and very sadly that's one of the few sources for quality, new writings.
The declensions in Irish are particularly bad since there are 5 different types that barely follow a pattern and each type has its own exceptions. Séimhiú agus urú are essentially leniation, which isn't that bad except you need to be sure to modify the correct form of the word (So Seán, a name, becomes Seáin in the vocative or genitive singular, or Sheáin except for when it follows na, which case it becomes tSheáin, or Sheán/tSeán if you're not modifying the vocative or genitive singular and they all sound quite different).
Basically everything in Irish is ruled by exceptions. Maybe the only exceptional moonrune verbs being 来る and する made me feel like a foid who just found out that being in a relationship doesn't always mean getting beaten to a pulp. Also jap twinks and girls are cute.
Why would you learn gaelic of all things? And j#p#n#se is not harder, it just has its quirkyness. The chinese characters have xeir quirkyness like having both the old chinese pronunciation as well as the old japanese pronunciation, see also a character like 山, which can be pronounced both yama (japanese pronunciation) or san (old chinese pronunciation, which is the same pronunciation in cantonese, but differs in mandarin, which is shan). you also got characters like 生 which have around eleven (11) or so pronunciations which vary between of different old pronunciations of chinese, and different pronunciations in japanese, specially for names, (which is a clusterfrick in itself, because a character can have so many readings that you could not guess the pronunciation of a name even if you knew all the different pronunciations ). Other than that it's just more challenging than a language like say, german, since you have to grasp honorifics, a different syllabary system, a different semi logographic system, a different word order, different way that clauses are organized in, different way that modifiers affect a sentence in, etc. But if you are convinced of wanting to learn the language in order to be one of those stupid soytubers that are named (add name or hobby) in Japan (or 日本 if you want to be quirky), then go ahead
Women on both my mother's and father's side of the family kept fricking irish men so my middle and last name are irish. My mother also apparently let an irish butcher name me, so my first name is also irish. Thus growing up, most people would assume I was irish and I decided to learn gaelic as a bit because I'm an rdrama.net user.
You're overstating the difficulty. Especially since you get a free pass as a foreigner if you frick up.
Keigo is pretty hard and workplace Japanese is very different from normal day to day Japanese. Multiple readings are helped by context (just like the word 'set' is overloaded as frick in English), honorifics are no more difficult than English titles, sentence order isn't that hard once you grasp the main particles which basically always get dropped in casual speech anyway.
The lack of gendered words, plurals, and finite distinct sounds help a lot. And trying to figure out what the katakanized version of an English word is, only to guess and say it in a comedy racist accent and be totally correct is always funny.
I'm already ahead of most Americans since I already know two languages. So I have familiarity with language acquisition. I'm just more looking at time frame so I can keep track of where I'm at.
It'll depend a lot on the effort and time you put in. I studied on my own for a bit and this year I started taking classes. I benefited a lot from the more structured learning of a class but even after 2 years of study I still feel super shaky and I can grasp about 60% of any conversation.
To learn basic grammar and achieve a first grade level is about 40 minutes a day, 20 grammar and 20 vocab or so
It goes up exponentially when you want to reach closer to fluency as reading/watching actively take up lots more time.
Polar Bear Cafe is actually really good for learning, the show goes out of its way to teach you unfamiliar/new kanji and there is a lot of conversation
Also NHK easy or whatever its called where they show the furigana for each kanji.
I would recommend starting with a radicals deck on anki (or DM me and ill send you a spreadsheet I made). If you have a reasonable grasp of the 215 radicals then kanji becomes a little simpler. Not entirely necessary tho
Genki is rly good as a textbook tho and it's available for piracy pretty easily
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I'm not that good at it, but probably qualified to answer your stupid r-slurred questions.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Did you learn just because you like anime or do you actually like Japanese language media besides anime/manga. How did you learn?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I started learning back when vtubers were popular and people would say the English ones were all terrible but the Japs were kino. (This proved to be largely hyperbolic)
I read a few text books to learn the basic grammar stuff and used to actively search out native materials to study, but most of what I know comes from grinding anki decks. I lost all motivation to keep learning over 2 years ago but I still do at least 20 minutes of anki every day because it became a routine.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
How long did it take you to reach a level where you felt comfortable watching native materials?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It takes a long butt time. You can cram for like a year or spread it out lazily like I've done, but it will take a darn lot of hours.
It also depends a whole lot on what you wanna watch. Since you seem less interested in anime I would imagine you're into J dramas or J horror or something, which shouldn't be too bad. Scripted stuff in general tends to be easier to follow than regular speech, especially if you can get the JP subtitles.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Mostly just interested in anything but anime lol. I also just wanna mog weebs who couldn't learn the language. A year isn't that bad of an investment though. I can stomach that I think.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
The people who I've seen say they got there in a year were doing like 4+ hours a day. If you think that time investment is worth it to dunk on weebs when 100% of anime and like 95% of manga gets translated, that's up to you lol
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I'm mostly in it for old video games. Lots of those bastards don't get translated or when they do it's by some random furry 20 years later. I'd rather just take it upon myself to learn the language and not rely on neurodivergents to translate everything for me.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Well, for video games if they're newer than like the NES you'll definitely have to learn kanji. That's usually the great filter of learning JP so I recommend you start there as soon as possible so you can decide if it's actually worth it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
Buddy you are not the first one to think that way and many have failed doing it like that. I know you wanted to learn it so you can masturbate and not have to rely on translations and be more inmersed in the experience, so to that I reccomend reading and reading until you get tired of it. I knew a buddy who just learnt the language by just reading manga until xe grasped it, but i guess that when you are a NEET and have a goal in mind, nothing can really stop you in achieving that goal. There was also another post in here of a guy who learnt by listening to ASMRs 24/7 until xe grasped the language, so i guess when there is a goal, there is a way
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Oh don't worry. I'm taking it seriously, I was just being tongue in cheek. The thing about wanting to play games is true though. I'm not stupid enough to just think I can try without effort.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
"I could learn Japanese! Why would I want to"
"I could learn to speak my native language, but I won't because it is a waste of time."
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
When I learned you have to re learn everything basically to speak everyday japanese i wanted to kms
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
If you want full understanding (comprehension+production) it can take 5+ years. If you just want comprehension probably a wee bit shorter than that. Japanese is a pain in the butt to learn.
If you don't have a second language I'd recommend literally any other language first. I'm learning because I like it but I know it's pretty much useless outside of Japan.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Arabic and Gaelic are fricking pains in the butt to learn, would you say Japanese is harder? I've been told it's chinese filtered through an poetic opium addict
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I can't speak to the other two, but that description is pretty accurate. Japanese has 3 writing systems, all imported from China. The one with the ideograms is particularly r-slurred as some of the characters kept their original readings from Chinese and got new ones from japanese. This is an infamous example https://jisho.org/search/%E7%94%9F%20%23kanji the kun/on parts are how the same character can be read in different words.
Add to that the different sentence structure from latin languages, the regional dialects, the 350 ways of counting things, 3 ways of phrasing the same sentence based on politeness and you end up with a convoluted mess that ruins japanese children for life.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Okinawan is a language on itself. The other ones are just meh, be it the osakan or the kyoto dialect
Same occurs in english, you just don't notice it because you are used to it. Say a flock of geese or a herd of cows, xey are specific words used within that context, which wouldn't make sense used to refer to other objects or things. @X xe can't into classifiers
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I feel that having the quantifier change depending on the number of things is specially bullshit. Like goose/geese doesn't really square to ひとつ、ふたつ、みっつ or ひとり、ふたり、さんにん
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
what
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Kagoshima dialect can be wild too. This clip always makes me laugh my butt off.
https://x.com/kanta5013/status/1032664495288508417
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
chinese is so much easier lol the japs really fricked it up esp. in the writing department
its much more like english
characters p much have one pronounciation and meaning
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
No Gaeilgeoir actually calls it that. It's Irish, or Gaeilge if you're talking in Irish.
It's a total pain in the butt to learn compared to Japanese (where the grammar rules are super consistent). Irish beyond is cúpla focal is a fricking nightmare. Declension, genetive case, broad and slender consonants, séimhiú and urú, frick me what a nightmare of a language.
Comparatively Japanese is a breeze, especially since immersion is way easier.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
A language is as easy as the resources available imo. J#p#n#se is one of the easiest languages to learn right meow simply because there are so many soytubers, applications, book, and resources available to learn the language. I don't know about irish, but despite being one of the languages of the EU (I think? I don't know the status of it), it probably has few and far resources, only taught in schools and alike, and a few books, podcasts, essays, etc, one could learn. J#p#n#se is of course different in pretty much every aspect in a language, but you can fully inmerse in it, be it by changing the settings in your phone, or finding pretty much any information in that language, either for children and adults alike. Irish, not so much. ( @MinecraftBee @MayflyAlt-98 )
(Also what is the seimhiu and uru thing? The declensions and cases are not that hard once you get accostumed to it, or know a language that uses it, and the lenght of the consonants seems a little bit tricky, but nothing unsurmountable [see also english, which has kinda the same problem with a distinction of having a different way of how a word is written and pronounced, or icelandic with the unique factor of preaspiration {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preaspiration}, and voiced and voiceless consonants] !linguistics
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
The word order in Irish is completely different from English.
English is what's known as a "Subject/Verb/Object" language (often abbreviated "SVO"). That's because the subject will generally come first in a simple sentence, followed by the verb, and then followed by the rest of the sentence.
For example, a simple English sentence might be:
Seán [subject] buys [verb] milk [object].
Irish, on the other hand, is what's known as a "Verb/Subject/Object" (or "VSO") language. The verb (including any preverbal particles) comes before the subject in the sentence.
So, if we want to say "Seán is buying milk" in Irish, we'd say:
Ceannaíonn [verb] Seán [subject] bainne [object]. Literally "Buys Seán milk."
Or
Ceannaíonn tú im, bainne agus arán. You buy butter, milk and bread. (Literally "Buy you butter, milk and bread.")
It sounds rslured but you could get pretty beautiful turns of phrase from Irish. It's not a coincidence the Irish were always heavyhitters in poetry. Tá bron orm ( I am sad in ) means "Sadness has befallen me"
!chuds I'm not fully fluent yet
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Completely agree that the ease of a language is directly connected to the ease of immersion. Irish is an EU language, and very sadly that's one of the few sources for quality, new writings.
The declensions in Irish are particularly bad since there are 5 different types that barely follow a pattern and each type has its own exceptions. Séimhiú agus urú are essentially leniation, which isn't that bad except you need to be sure to modify the correct form of the word (So Seán, a name, becomes Seáin in the vocative or genitive singular, or Sheáin except for when it follows na, which case it becomes tSheáin, or Sheán/tSeán if you're not modifying the vocative or genitive singular and they all sound quite different).
Basically everything in Irish is ruled by exceptions. Maybe the only exceptional moonrune verbs being 来る and する made me feel like a foid who just found out that being in a relationship doesn't always mean getting beaten to a pulp. Also jap twinks and girls are cute.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Get r*ped cute twink
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
I typed in gaeilge but phone auto completed to gaelic and my lazy butt didn't feel like fixing it
should of bought that shitty fursuit back in 2007
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Why would you learn gaelic of all things? And j#p#n#se is not harder, it just has its quirkyness. The chinese characters have xeir quirkyness like having both the old chinese pronunciation as well as the old japanese pronunciation, see also a character like 山, which can be pronounced both yama (japanese pronunciation) or san (old chinese pronunciation, which is the same pronunciation in cantonese, but differs in mandarin, which is shan). you also got characters like 生 which have around eleven (11) or so pronunciations which vary between of different old pronunciations of chinese, and different pronunciations in japanese, specially for names, (which is a clusterfrick in itself, because a character can have so many readings that you could not guess the pronunciation of a name even if you knew all the different pronunciations ). Other than that it's just more challenging than a language like say, german, since you have to grasp honorifics, a different syllabary system, a different semi logographic system, a different word order, different way that clauses are organized in, different way that modifiers affect a sentence in, etc. But if you are convinced of wanting to learn the language in order to be one of those stupid soytubers that are named (add name or hobby) in Japan (or 日本 if you want to be quirky), then go ahead
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Women on both my mother's and father's side of the family kept fricking irish men so my middle and last name are irish. My mother also apparently let an irish butcher name me, so my first name is also irish. Thus growing up, most people would assume I was irish and I decided to learn gaelic as a bit because I'm an rdrama.net user.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
You're overstating the difficulty. Especially since you get a free pass as a foreigner if you frick up.
Keigo is pretty hard and workplace Japanese is very different from normal day to day Japanese. Multiple readings are helped by context (just like the word 'set' is overloaded as frick in English), honorifics are no more difficult than English titles, sentence order isn't that hard once you grasp the main particles which basically always get dropped in casual speech anyway.
The lack of gendered words, plurals, and finite distinct sounds help a lot. And trying to figure out what the katakanized version of an English word is, only to guess and say it in a comedy racist accent and be totally correct is always funny.
The hard part is persistence.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
I don't know what you said, because I've seen another human naked.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I'm already ahead of most Americans since I already know two languages. So I have familiarity with language acquisition. I'm just more looking at time frame so I can keep track of where I'm at.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It'll depend a lot on the effort and time you put in. I studied on my own for a bit and this year I started taking classes. I benefited a lot from the more structured learning of a class but even after 2 years of study I still feel super shaky and I can grasp about 60% of any conversation.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
To learn basic grammar and achieve a first grade level is about 40 minutes a day, 20 grammar and 20 vocab or so
It goes up exponentially when you want to reach closer to fluency as reading/watching actively take up lots more time.
Polar Bear Cafe is actually really good for learning, the show goes out of its way to teach you unfamiliar/new kanji and there is a lot of conversation
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Also NHK easy or whatever its called where they show the furigana for each kanji.
I would recommend starting with a radicals deck on anki (or DM me and ill send you a spreadsheet I made). If you have a reasonable grasp of the 215 radicals then kanji becomes a little simpler. Not entirely necessary tho
Genki is rly good as a textbook tho and it's available for piracy pretty easily
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
What other languages? You want to keep track of how much time you have spent learning and how much have you progressed in that period of time?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
I studied for about a year and could watch all of Totoro without subs
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context