Please enlighten me. How do you learn a language not constrained by bizarre characters, as an adult? Like an American learning French, for example.
True that English is my second language, but I learnt it as a child, and somehow I became relatively fluent. I can never explain to anyone how to do it… English has huge loads of exceptions too.
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NB: I am not being sarcastic…
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic 
Hebrew doesn’t use the latin alphabet and is written right to left, which makes reading it a very unique experience. When I first started to read hiragana I instinctively started at the right because of the connection I had made between non-latin characters and reading in the opposite direction. I had to “retrain” myself. I learned spanish to a decent degree in middle school/early highschool. For me the writing and the speaking aren’t really connected except for the fact that schoolwork requires spoken knowledge to be written. I’m amazed you don’t remember how you learned English! Learning kanji is like nothing else though. They say native speakers of logographic languages process language differently and I can feel a taste of that.
I understand what you meant though and can definitely see how you’d connect learning a new language with strange characters after self-learning Japanese. Self-teaching through the internet (or books) as opposed to immersion begins with reading and then speaking, instead of vise versa. It’s funny, it says I’m level four in the community portal but on my dash it says I’m level three. Stupid money blocking the path to kanji enlightenment!
IMO, most (maybe like 98% of people) can’t handle putting earnest effort into two languages at once. You first have to ask yourself how much effort you are putting into the one and whether that’s enough by itself. I took about 8 years of Spanish classes and studied abroad in Spain, so my Spanish got pretty good and that’s partly why I moved on to Japanese. At one point, I decided to brush up on my Spanish (had to take a test for a job that required it) and found it difficult to keep it up with my fairly time consuming Japanese learning process. Take also into account that I speak an entirely different language at home (Georgian) and it became a big mess.
If I didn’t already have a pretty solid grasp on Spanish, I wouldn’t have undertaken Japanese yet. Not trying to be a party pooper here, but it might be better to full-ass one thing than half-ass two
And what’s even weirder is that even though Spanish, Georgian, and Japanese are all quite different, when I’m in “not English mode,” I often slip words from one language while speaking the other. Especially for filler words and sentence connectors like “No creo que tengo bastante tiempo para hacerlo, でも probablemente puedo en algunos días”
Wonder what’ll happen when/if I learn similar languages o_o
The Kartvellian and Japonic languages are similar in that they do not have any known genetic connections to other languages. Georgian in my opinion has one of the most beautiful alphabets of any language, up there with Tibetan and Kannada.
I hadn’t thought about that. Probably because I don’t think about Georgian academically as I do with other languages. With Spanish and Japanese, it feels like I have some sort of mechanism prepping and processing info in my brain, taking a verb and going through it’s conjugations etc. With Georgian, I just “know what I know.” If I don’t know the correct conjugation for something, I don’t know any set rules I can fall back on, so I just wing it.
One odd example is today, my grandma was watching an American TV program where they were releasing a tiger back into the wild, and she asked what was going on. I was essentially like “They will put it back to where it’s needs to be.” Just now, writing about it, I remember the words for “release” and “nature,” but I can’t think how to conjugate the equivalent for “release” into a present progressive tense (nor would I really know if I did, heh)
The alphabet is certainly pretty and quite unique - I think it’s been featured several times on articles focusing on written language. Not too wild or difficult to learn either (but I read at a snail’s pace and my writing proportions are all wrong 
)
That’s right, and since I have gone far in learning characters, I am going back (to struggling) to learning conversational Japanese. (Upon thinking so, it leads to action. I am doing Erin’s challenge here. I can read all scripts. I can somewhat listen, but I can’t follow all the rules. Therefore, I make some grammatical mistakes, or non-mistakes, but bad decisions.)
I am starting to like video lessons, rather than textbooks, or even podcasts. (Maybe I still need some visual stimulations after all, even if conversation means ear and mouth.) And, I still have no time (or rights?) to attend a real class.
Sorry that I deleted the post (and resurrected it), because I wanted to find the answer by myself.
My approach to Japanese right now is pretty much absorb the vocabulary and synthesize the data in my head. The syntactical structure of Japanese is so different from English and also much simpler. Particles are freaking amazing and the verb conjugations are pretty much consistent. I mean, how freakin awesome is it that all the verbs end in “う”? From three levels of WK I figured out that verbs with a second-to-last “え” syllable (け,せ,て,ね,へ,め,れ) are transitive, vs those with an “あ” (ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ra, I don’t feel like copying and pasting) which are intransitive. Don’t get up in arms everyone about this generalization of what I think is only one verb type (ichidan?). I’m saying the existence of pairs like tomaru/tomeru are very helpful. It’s interesting because in English the forms are rarely distinguishable without context.
No probalo. You could try watching anime with the original Japanese CCs, that could be fun. Maybe with like .5 speed at first!
Already done that, but IMHO, not enough. Had better learn business convo Japanese. Improve myself to being an active speaker.
I’m the same about English. The capacity for learning language is hardwired into the human brain, it unconsciously holds both rules and exceptions to them but when asked why something is incorrect often the only thing that can be said is “it sounds wrong”.
Depends on the language I think. Though every person is different and learns differently.
I took Japanese and Chinese at the same time in high school. Mandarin was really hard and I ended up dropping it. Though they aren’t spoken the same way, the onyomi can often be -similar enough- to mess with you. I’ve also tried learning Korean while learning Japanese and did not have much luck getting fluent in Korean. (Though I think most of that can be attributed to frustration that they no longer use hanja and I found the spellings weird.)
However! I am currently learning Esperanto via DuoLingo while I do WK Kanji. (Mind, I have 14 years of Japanese behind me, so that familiarity with kanji by now helps). But I find Espernato different enough from Japanese that I can learn both pretty well and not get them mixed up in my brain.
That’s the present progressive tense, except with “are” instead of “were”.
I was weirded out when I realized how different the Sino-Japanese (onyomi) and Mandarin Chinese numbers are. Like, what the fuck.
I meant converting the Georgian equivalent (or maybe you knew what I meant and that’s the joke that went over my head o_o)
Hahaha nope. Just oblivious!
You’re probably better off fully focusing on a single language. Instead of doing something like 2 hours of Japanese and 2 hours of X, studying 4 hours of Japanese (kanji, grammar, listening, reading, etc.) should get you close to the finish line way faster. Your head will have less things to juggle. Then again, I’m not one to talk when I’m studying and practicing other things besides Japanese. I feel it’s very inefficient, but I enjoy both things.
Al final, tú escoges. No sabrás si te funciona a menos que lo intentes.
ooh I can kinda read that. In closing, your ?choice?. I don’t know if your function is less then you intend.
All right that’s funny 
Nah, it is “In the end, it’s your choice. You won’t know if it works for you unless you try it.”