I’m a native English speaker. In high school and college, I took Spanish and absolutely loved it. Now I’m learning Japanese, and I have a horrible professor. But I also think it’s because it’s difficult for me to approach a language without relating it to English (like I did with Spanish, which of c…

Native English speaker here. Learned Latin (up to Latin VI), Spanish (to III), French (to II), and ASL (to II) in middle school and high school. While I understand the sentiments of acm2010, it is ultimately impossible not to relate a new language back to one’s native language (unless you are unde…

I learnt Spanish first and currently I’m getting towards the end of mid-advanced Japanese. Things you learn in one are often surprisingly applicable in the other: for example, I had to learn about transitivity in verbs to master indirect and direct object pronouns in Spanish (lo/la/le). This then ga…

[image] anon40173924: Also, it helps to know that the verb is always at the end of a Japanese sentence I’m not trying to nitpick, but it might be clearer to say at the end of a clause, since you can have a sentence with many clauses and many verbs sprinkled throughout.

lniguidula1: But I also think it’s because it’s difficult for me to approach a language without relating it to English. You could learn to stop relating it to English? There is not always a convenient shortcut available.

The biggest thing, in my opinion, is to take all your assumptions you’ve developed through learning Romance languages, and burn them. All. Of. Them. Japanese has a great way of repeatedly smacking you across the face until you do it. I think it is safe to say that Japanese learners who learn to dis…

Omg thank you for such a fleshed out response! It was hard forming a question because I don’t know what I don’t know?? :pensive: I wasn’t sure if anyone would understand. ありがとうございます！

[image] VegasVed: The biggest thing, in my opinion, is to take all your assumptions you’ve developed through learning Romance languages, and burn them. All. Of. Them. Japanese has a great way of repeatedly smacking you across the face until you do it. I agree. One should understand that Japan…

I think it was koichi the creator of this site has a blog where you can learn hiragana and katakana (the two alphabets) in a day. I managed to learn Hiragana fully in 2 hours. I recommend you learning the alphabet because what use is learning a language if you don’t know it’s alphabet. From a perso…

[image] strangelearner: I think it was koichi the creator of this site has a blog where you can learn hiragana and katakana (the two alphabets) in a day. I managed to learn Hiragana fully in 2 hours. I recommend you learning the alphabet because what use is learning a language if you don’t know …

Unless you’re some super manly guy talking about how manly you are all the time you probably shouldn’t be rolling your Rs in Japanese. It’s also fairly ridiculous here that people think you can simply “disconnect” your native language here. Unless one has some kind of new brain implanted into their…

[image] anon40173924: I have found Spanish and Japanese are similar in some ways. The vowels are pronounced the same way, and the r is rolled. Ramón and ramen are definitely not pronounced in the same way.

Advice for understanding/learning Japanese when you've only ever learned Romance languages?

Japanese Language

konekush September 6, 2017, 6:26pm 18

The Japanese R is a tap, not a trill, and it’s pronounced the way the ‘t’ sounds in the word ‘water’ in standard (US)American dialect.

Tap/flap [ɾ]:

Trill [r]:

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Advice for understanding/learning Japanese when you've only ever learned Romance languages?

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