Please shed light on some Japanese reading for me

[mdchachi]

@butterffingers

This is actually an interesting topic. I’ve always wondered why words with Chinese orgins aren’t considered loanwords in Japanese. Is it because they’re so integrated with the language, like they’ve been there since “forever” so they feel like part of the language already? And also because 外来語 can only be represented by Kana, so they seem more or less “limited”.

There is no modern Japanese language without these ancient Chinese additions so it doesn’t really make sense to consider them foreign. But they do differentiate them for people who study that sort of thing. Chinese “loan words” are called 漢語. See the Wikipedia article.
By the way, they used to assign kanji to some modern era 外来語. For example in Japan it’s still not uncommon to see 珈琲 on shop signs instead of コーヒー.

[JustHiro]

@butterffingers

But you went from Lesson 2 to Lesson 5 in one week? That’s wow… I know the time we spend studying in a day could be different

That’s probably the case. I graduated from school last year and took a year off to learn Japanese until I begin university in October of this year. I began working a full-time job, but recently switched to a part-time job in order to speed up my progress. Now I’m studying about three hours a day, completing about three chapters a week, hopefully completing the fourth book by the end of June. If you have a full-time job, school or university, that’s obviously a tough schedule for you to copy. But I’m going to kick university off learning two languages at once in October, so I’m literally forced to be fluent in Japanese by then.

@butterffingers

Well, looks like i’m in for a years-long marathon here because i’m that kind of person who dissects every single element of a sentence because i can’t stand it when there’s something i don’t understand when i should

That’s mostly a good thing, though, because it will allow you to improve much faster. But when immersing yourself into native material, you have to learn to sometimes let things go, and realize you’ll eventually understand a phrase if you encounter it in a different context later on. Otherwise, it’s going to get too exhausting for you to maintain.

@butterffingers

It certainly is challenging to learn Japanese from the English language’s standpoint. I wonder if coming from any other language makes it easier to learn it though, because my first language couldn’t help either

Well, having German as a native language doesn’t make things any easier for me either. But Korean has pretty much the same grammar as Japanese, so Korean learner shouldn’t have a hard time processing complicated sentences if they understand the components it’s made of.

[Chocobits]

@JustHiro

That’s mostly a good thing, though, because it will allow you to improve much faster. But when immersing yourself into native material, you have to learn to sometimes let things go, and realize you’ll eventually understand a phrase if you encounter it in a different context later on. Otherwise, it’s going to get too exhausting for you to maintain.

I’m still at an elementary level but I have seen this and can attest to it firsthand. There are advantages to dissecting and forcing yourself to understand a thing completely, and there is also great value in just letting a lot of immersive input hammer you, knowing that not a lot of it will stick. It’s all about the amount of input you expose yourself to. Even if you only retain 5% of the words and grammar you encounter, that adds up when you’re factoring in 5% of hundreds of thousands of words.

There are undeniably advantages to switching back and forth between active study with native materials (stopping to look up everything) and passive immersion (being content with ambiguity and just following along with vague notions of what is going on).

Our brains have the amazing capability of taking things we have already heard and putting them into context retroactively. Things that you have encountered during passive immersion will resurface and make sense after the fact when you are able to put two and two together when you encounter the same pieces of information elsewhere and it all somehow clicks.