Learning another Language

Ridin-High

Ridin-High

Hi All,

I'm interested in learning another language, trying to narrow down what i want to learn.

I'm leaning towards Japanese at the moment, because a big interest of mine is popular in that neck of the woods (kickboxing and MMA). Would help when i travel over their and their might also be a possibility to have subsidized travel over their if i went with Australian fighters to be a translator.

Down side to japanese is that from my knowledge their isn't a large contingent of jap's living in Australia. Eg it's quite common knowledge that Viets/Chinese in Cabramatta, Koreans in Strathfield.

Would prefer an asian language due to interest in their cultures. Any ideas welcome.

Also wouldn't mind hearing the experience from other people here that learnt a second language as an adult.

Regards,

RH
 
We'll be learning and teaching our kids French over the next few months.

Get them thinking a bit more.

Might be nice to comapre notes late down the track.
 
I reckon Japanese is a pain of a language to learn, let alone master!

Helps a lot if you know and can read/write trad Chinese before attempting Japanese, but even then spoken Japanese is incredibly context sensitive (same writing, different audio depending on context).

Found mandarin a lot more "sensible" in its structure and less variable.

Plenty of Japanese student's who'll be happy to try you out :)



The Y-man
 
Aaron Sice:

I suggest to you and anything others looking at studying a language to take a gander at the cd's of Michel Thomas. I used his french cd's to remember my previous proficiency in french. He is accredited with teaching five random school children in the UK fluency with french within 5 days.
 
Japanese isn't easy. It would help a lot if you already know Chinese, say.

There is a decent japanese community in Sydney. A lot of them are students or learning english so language exchange is always popular. There are a few free papers which advertise these, such as www.cheers.com.au and www.info-m-jenta.com

The beginner classes would probably just be the two simple alphabets and a few phrases. You'd get to maybe Level 2 in the proficiency exam by pure study alone. To actually be able to speak it properly, you really have to go there.

As an aside, I know Chinese, did Japanese classes for 3 years, then went to Japan and realised how crap I was. Shaved off most of the accent in 9 months but didn't achieve fluency for a year or so.
 
I ttried Thai at one stage. I never got to the written language; despite some months of study before I went, it was not enough for more than basic conversations- but even that little bit opened a lot of doors. And smiles.

Thai, like many Asian languages, is tonal, which adds to the difficulty level for those unaccustomed to that.

Bahasa, spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia, may be a much easier option. No tones, western alphabet, simple language structure.
 
I studied Japanese at a community college for 2 years or so many years ago... and was able to pick up a reasonable amount... good travel japanese. I could read and write all hiragana and katakana, and around 150 kanji. Definitely not enough to do any translating though.

The speaking, hiragana and katakana are all relatively painless to learn. But Kanji (chinese characters) is nearly impossible. They say it takes 15 years of study to read a newspaper (around 2500 characters). The challenge is that the pronounciation and meaning of the kanji will vary depending upon the context of the sentence.

But pronounciation/ grammar for spoken japanese is relatively simple.
and if you learn Katakana, you will be able to read foreign words, like Makodonarudo (mcdonalds), biifu kare (beef curry) and alot of other menu items. Recognising kanji will also mean you can learn place names when you are on a train etc.

Just one suggestion.. make sure you are practising speaking with someone of your own gender. The intonation for men and women is quite different, and you will sound strange otherwise.

most Japanese people are located around Chatswood to North Sydney areas. It should be relatively easy to find someone who would be interested in practising with you. But there is nothing like doing a trip to Japan to pick up the language much quicker...... its by far the fastest way to learn. (but avoid Osaka/ Hokkaido and other areas with a strong dialect, otherwise noone will understand you! :)

Good luck! I'm heading over to Japan on Saturday, so we'll see how much of my language I remember. Generally I find within a couple of days I'm back to being able to read katakana and remember all my basic phrases.

Pen
 
I'm looking at starting learning Cantonese later this year. Am looking at starting by self paced learning with cd's and then heading over to Hong Kong for a two week intensive (will do longer if I can get leave). Then resuming at a community college or similar.

Would anyone have a recommendation on whether this makes sense or not? Apart from 4 years fo school latin I've never attempted to learn another language.

My aim is long term to move to and work in Hong Kong in Finance (current industry).
 
Gave the community college a call and got the info of the course, i'll give it a crack and see how it goes. Got to organise time with work to attend (shift worker).
 
I learnt a little bit of Japanese when I was back at school and went over there for about 2 weeks. My head hurt 24/7 trying to translate (japanese to english- what they said, and then english to japanese-what I wanted to say)

They reckon Japanese (and most asian languages) is fairly easy to pick because it is mainly structured sentence patterns that you have to learn. Lol, apparently english is one of the harder languages to learn because there is no real structure

Japanese is good fun to learn. You should definately do it. And then you can go over for like 6 months and learn one of the martial arts (like I was going to do but never got around to it)

I'd also have a look at playing the cd's while you sleep. There is no evidence to back it up but my old teacher played italian cd's while she was sleeping and could speak Italian really well after a while.
 
explosiveanthon said:
I learnt a little bit of Japanese when I was back at school and went over there for about 2 weeks. My head hurt 24/7 trying to translate (japanese to english- what they said, and then english to japanese-what I wanted to say)

They reckon Japanese (and most asian languages) is fairly easy to pick because it is mainly structured sentence patterns that you have to learn. Lol, apparently english is one of the harder languages to learn because there is no real structure

Japanese is good fun to learn. You should definately do it. And then you can go over for like 6 months and learn one of the martial arts (like I was going to do but never got around to it)

I'd also have a look at playing the cd's while you sleep. There is no evidence to back it up but my old teacher played italian cd's while she was sleeping and could speak Italian really well after a while.
Click to expand...

Yeah i could imagine it would be a brain strain for awhile until u get use to it. Lol im not even that good at english, i had a philo ex who always use to correct my use of english, embarrasing considering english was her second lang.

Yeah not much interest in learning traditional martial arts, i did alot of that during my high school years (was 1st degree Black belt in kung fu and did some boxing training). My focus if i was to train would be MMA (combining aspects of striking/wrestling/grappling).

I think what speeds on the learning and sucsess with anything is that if you have a genuine interest in it.

No use me going to learn chinese when i can't really see myself using it for anything that i like.

I'll probably get some good contacts through the community college and hopefully meet some local japanese people who i can practice with

Regards,

RH
 
Yea Japanese is a hard one.

I'm also a Chinese speaker (Mandarin & Cantonese) and learned Japanese for 8 years in high school. Actually got very high marks (ended up around top 2-3% in my university entrance exam) but could barely say much beyond asking for directions when I went to Japan.

Also there's not much opportunity to get Japanese exposure here or anywhere in the world, except in Japan.
 
Mooze said:
I'm looking at starting learning Cantonese later this year. Am looking at starting by self paced learning with cd's and then heading over to Hong Kong for a two week intensive (will do longer if I can get leave). Then resuming at a community college or similar.

Would anyone have a recommendation on whether this makes sense or not? Apart from 4 years fo school latin I've never attempted to learn another language.

My aim is long term to move to and work in Hong Kong in Finance (current industry).
Click to expand...

Look at efinancialcareers for jobs in HK. 99% of finance jobs in HK require:

- English
- Mandarin


Of this, approx 60% require Cantonese on top of these two languages.

In other words, if your aim is to work in finance in HK, the first thing you need to learn is Mandarin. Take this from a HK expat working in finance...
 
I am quite proficient in Thai (read, speak and write) and it is an interesting language to learn. I did so because of business interests in Thailand.

You will find however that for a tourist you will be greeted with smiles but generally responses back to you will be English. Thais have a great passion for learning English and there is a social class system that exists that those who speak English are superior to those who don't. I find many times that Thais (unless they come from a poorer socioeconomic background) have no interest in speaking to you in their own language. However for business it is critical. If you deal with the middle and upper classes of Thai society your desire to have learnt thai will be seen to be interesting but really nothing more. They won't be impressed that you have done so. In fact most will wonder why you wasted your time.

If you plan to spend a lot of time travelling the country and spending time in some of the rural and lower socioeconomic areas it will be a truly distinct advantage.
 
coastymike said:
I am quite proficient in Thai (read, speak and write) and it is an interesting language to learn. I did so because of business interests in Thailand.

You will find however that for a tourist you will be greeted with smiles but generally responses back to you will be English. Thais have a great passion for learning English and there is a social class system that exists that those who speak English are superior to those who don't. I find many times that Thais (unless they come from a poorer socioeconomic background) have no interest in speaking to you in their own language. However for business it is critical. If you deal with the middle and upper classes of Thai society your desire to have learnt thai will be seen to be interesting but really nothing more. They won't be impressed that you have done so. In fact most will wonder why you wasted your time.

If you plan to spend a lot of time travelling the country and spending time in some of the rural and lower socioeconomic areas it will be a truly distinct advantage.
Click to expand...

In order to be elite, you need to speak the language of another country... what a sad way to think
 
Like a lot of developing countries the people with power put in place things to differentiate those with money from those without money. And for those who don't know much about Thailand money is very very important.
 
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