Writer's Block: Voulez-vous parler ...

[tabular_rasa]

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I speak English (native speaker) and Japanese. I consider myself mostly fluent in Japanese. When it comes to survival skills (shopping, etc) and normal interpersonal interaction (small talk, etc), I don't have any problems. However, my specialized and professional vocabulary is still quite lacking-- and my literacy is probably equivalent to a 10th grader's. (But you would never say a 15-year--old Japanese kid isn't fluent in their own language, would you? But they still can't read every kanji character printed in the daily newspaper!). Still, I consider myself fluent because I know enough language that when I do encounter a word I don't know, I can *talk around* it and comprehend or express the meaning from context.

I can only learn one other language? That's annoying and limiting. I'm actually seriously considering beginning another language. The two choices I think would be most practical are Chinese or Spanish. Chinese is growing in demand as a second language and it has many written characters in common with Japanese, so my energies in learning them would count double. (Though considering I hate learning Japanese characters and know less than half of the 2000 necessary for literacy, do I really want to subject myself to studying 5000?). But outside of writing, Chinese is absolutely nothing like Japanese. From what I remember in 5th and 6th grade Chinese, the tonality of the language was very unintuitive to me. It would be a hard choice to commit to. As for Spanish-- well, there's no denying its practicality in the States, especially if I'm considering moving to SoCal. (Though, it'd be just as useful in Elkhart, frankly!). I liked the semester of Spanish I took in high school; the sound system is very straightforward, the grammar is comprehensible, and it's a pretty-sounding language-- and reading in the Roman alphabet feels so easy after a decade of Japanese! From a career perspective I guess it'd be kind weird to be a language teacher of both Japanese and Spanish, but I've seen worse (my cooperating teacher last semester was Japanese/French). And knowing Spanish would boost my skills as an ESL teacher, another path I've considered fusing with Japanese instruction.

I've also considered Korean, though there's less demand for it as a school foreign language. (Though that may change within a few years). The Korean writing system is allegedly one of the most advanced in the world (the way all the sounds/syllables are categorized and arranged), and its sound and grammar patterns resemble Japanese quite closely, much more closely than Chinese. (That's why so many Korean kids at WashU took Japanese; it's the *easy* language for them to take). *Shrug.* Frankly, I'd learn just about any language if given a good opportunity for study. It's like traveling the world; I'm cool to go just about anywhere.

Comments

[eternitat.livejournal.com]

Japanese and Korean are related to each other. They are Altaic languages- distantly related to Turkish and Mongolian. Chinese is Sino-Tibetan- Japanese just borrowed the Kanji.

[tabular-rasa.livejournal.com]

Yup, we talked about that in linguistics, and vaguely in some of my Japanese history classes. (It's so interesting to me that that language family spanned across the entire continent; you'd think they'd stick to regions, but nope!). At first in Japan reading and writing was done in Chinese (only the educated knew how to read and write, and they also studied Chinese) while Japanese was a separate spoken language-- and then at one point they decided to change that, and sort of *inflicted* Japanese sounds on Chinese characters. There were two different camps at first; some people tried to spell out Japanese with Chinese characters based on matching the sounds, while some tried to match them up based on meaning. At the same time, the two indigenous kana (symbols denoting syllabic sounds, with no inherent meaning, like an alphabet) were developed, so they eventually came up with the compromise they have today: using characters for nouns and the meaningful roots of adjectives and verbs, with the sound-based kana added on to illustrate the verb conjugations.

Makes for a hell of a difficult writing system. Sometimes I wish I lived in the Heian era, where educated court women stuck to transcribing their speech into the much easier kana. (Only the men used the Chinese characters). During WWII, there was even a movement to throw out the "foreign" Chinese characters from the written language in favor of an all-Japanese (and therefore "superior") writing system based on indigenous kana. I can't say I much approve of the motivation, but it certainly would have made my life easier if they had changed it >.< Though part of me thinks Japan enjoys keeping its language difficult on purpose, as a sort of guard from letting too many people know it. Otherwise, it would lose its special Japanese-ness.

Lol . . . Sorry for the random linguistic history lesson! But you might have been interested :-P

[eternitat.livejournal.com]

You bet it was interesting indeed!!!

There's probably a specific term for it...

[orgasmicpsyduck.livejournal.com]

I think we need more languages where words are pronounced how they're spelled.

On a related note, you wanna be my penpal? I've been meaning to dust off my elementary-level comprehension of the language, but am too ashamed to tell a stranger who's pumped to hear about exciting American life that I'm almost 24 and live with my parents.

[just-you-wait.livejournal.com]

In high school, my french teacher came into class and accidentally began talking in spanish. i loved how everyone in the class was confused as hell while i understood perfectly :D

I'm awful at tones though. My mom can never understand me at all when I attempt vietnamese.