The reason real-time translation is difficult: sometimes you have to wait for the end of the sentence.
The reason real-time translation is difficult: sometimes you have to wait for the end of the sentence.
You're viewing a single thread.
I had thought about learning some Japanese but after seeing this, I'm doubting I could.
Spoken Japanese is not insanely difficult for English speakers, although it is more difficult than Romance languages.
If you try to learn to read and write, you're in for a world of pain. Probably 3 years of working on it several hours a day. In fact, even Japanese people are losing the ability to write by hand, because it's easier to type in the phonetic words and have the computer figure out which characters to use.
In fact, even Japanese people are losing the ability to write by hand, because it's easier to type in the phonetic words and have the computer figure out which characters to use.
That does not seem like a healthy thing for a society. Too dependant on technology to do a basic form of communication.
I think it's an indication that the written language is not reasonable for the modern age. Granted, Japanese has 2000 characters in everyday use, versus the 10,000 in Chinese, but each character could have up to six or seven different pronunciations based on the context, whereas I think Chinese has one or at most two.
The sticking point is that written Japanese can carry a lot of nuance. For a given word, you may be able to use different characters to emphasize certain meanings. Losing that would be traumatic, especially because the culture has a great deal of love and respect for their heritage.
You can learn up to early intermediate Japanese pretty easily because you don't have many inflections to worry about--there are no plurals, no verbs changing according to person (I vs he vs they), no articles, etc. And the verb conjugation is very rigid with literally only two irregular verbs. Also the pronunciation is pretty easy coming from English.
If I had to think about the one aspect that makes it so difficult to continue progressing it'd probably be that not being able to read is a huge roadblock to a major form of language acquisition. That plus a limited amount of sounds makes tons of words homophones or similar. For example you've got ko-kyu-u (breathing) vs ko-oh-kyu-u (high quality, high salary, or permanence depending on how you write it). Yeah they have different pitches (kind of like tones but not really), but that's just another thing you've gotta remember.