I liked your comment about how babies manage to learn their home language just as fast as any other baby learns theirs. I have told friends and family this many times when they try to point out that one language is harder than another.

I kinda go the opposite way of a lot of people though… I always tell everyone how easy Japanese is, especially in the beginning. This coming from someone who has taken German, French, Spanish and Italian… as soon as I came upon this language where we didn’t have to spend the entire lesson conjugating bloody verbs I was happy.

When people start whining about Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji (Oh my!!) I tell them I taught myself Katakana and Hiragana in a couple of days and retained it… and Kanji is so much fun to learn =P

English is a ridiculous language. I am so happy it is my first language, because I sure as hell wouldn’t want to learn it. (And I do not understand why it is so “cool” to foreign people… I read a lot of foreign magazines (especially Japanese) and they go crazy with the English.

What isn’t true is your reference.

Smelling some fine grade BS when I saw the title of the article, I actually checked the reference the lying idiots at Wikipedia used to support that statement and it says nothing of substance about Korean definitely taking the longest to learn of all the worlds 6000+ languages and dialect. .

What it (the reference, not the article) does say is that it has been found that toddlers begin to use a particular grammatical pattern in Korean at around age five, although there is evidence they understand it before hand. This is mentioned almost in passing, in a context talking about Chinese.

Also, Wexler, the author of the piece reference appears to be following a Chomskian perspective of language acquisition, which is … how to put this kindly … 40+ year old dribble from a man who was so well trusted that the rest of the linguistic community didn’t bother testing out his hypotheses and people who believe it nowadays should be shoved in a room and made to watch Prison Break season 4 for days and days and days until they repent … or come up with some actual evidence.

This isn’t true. Korean takes the longest time for toddlers to learn. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardest_language

One thing: to this I disagree: “Full competence in one’s mother tongue is acquired early, but writing has to be learned separately and much later.” My native language is Spanish, which I learned to read within my first two years (my writing… was somewhat correct but crap back then though)

I find Japanese to be very simple… (but of course, very different from both Spanish and English). I can (finally) understand some of the Ontama show for the group capsule (finally) and other music interviews (not in their entirety, but quite a bit… my goal now is to understand full videos).

Thanks for the posts, always motivate me.

wow, this is inspiring

thanks for khatzumoto for lifting up beginners in studying learn Japanese, like me.

And now I’ll have a look on japanese, it can’t be worst!

I don’t read English text letter by letter, sounding them out in my head. I read and understand words directly, much like I pick up the meaning instantly when I see a kanji compound. Given that English pronounciation and writing have become separated to such a large extent, I have no problems treating English words as just another form of logographs. They’re made up of letters, just like kanji is made up of components.

That said, I still disagree with the “OMG I CAN NEVER LEARN THAT LANGUAGE” bullshit that can often be heard. I’m confident I could learn every language I wanted to if I had enough time to do so.

Thanks khatzumoto for changing that and giving us motivation.

To your method in general I have to say though, that although I don’t doubt that it works for you and many people who try to follow you, it might be a too strong strain on one’s social life for most people. Nevertheless, this doesn’t change the facts you stated.

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I wonder if they pulled the “adults can’t learn as well as children” routine at that point.