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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I tried to learn Japanese once, only for half a year.

I think it benefitted me, even if I didn't learn much.

It let me look a bit deeper into Japanese culture. The politeness is baked deeply into the language and the sheer amount of Kanji told me that a Japanese person has to constantly be on track to not forget even the most important ones.

On the other hand Japanese seemed antiquated. 3 sets of symbols and one of them has thousands of items. The gramma seems kina straight forward, but the sentences simply get too long fast.

I speak German and English, which aren't drastically different. But while learning Japanese I found out how different languages really can be.

English is a bit compacter than German, no "der/die/das", just "the". Most words are not capitalized, no compound words, etc. but English is A LOT compacter than Japanese.

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I studied only an entire year (2 semesters), and I have a fairly different view of Japanese. A Japanese person exerts no more effort to 'be on track' with their native language than anyone else. I'm not sure what you mean about sentences getting too long too fast. As a first semester student, perhaps more experience would better-inform your sense of sentence complexity.

Japanese expends a lot more syllables to say the same thing that English can say in fewer. Even more if you use the polite form (e.g., speaking in a business context, train announcements, etc.) Grandparent post was not the first person I've observed to notice this.

Japanese syllables are often shorter than English syllables, and a native speaker can articulate then quickly and fluently, but it seems to take much more linguistic "mass" to say a thing in Japanese compared to its English equivalent, unless you use a blunt direct form.

Yup, Japanese is a machine-gun language. Spanish, too.

No no no. Finish is a machine gun language. And a broken one at that. Everything sounds like ratatata ta ta. PS: Too long working for Nokia, I guess. ;)

Finnish and Japanese have enough in common (agglutinative, SOV word order, double consonants and vowels) that some linguists think they might be distantly related.

Listen to some spoken Japanese; you might find it sounds a lot like Finnish.

Not so much for reading, but in Japan I actually saw quite a few places that were offering lessons to teach people how to become better at writing kanji, since the vast majority of communication is over phones and through computers where simply knowing the reading and having a decent idea of what the correct kanji looks like will suffice

Also in college every single one of my Japanese friends had a business keigo book they were constantly studying in their senior years to prep them for communicating in the working world.

English: What is this? (3)

German: Was ist das? (3)

Japanese: Are wa nan desu ka. (5)

And this is just a simple example. Often the sentences get even longer when set in past tense or in some of the "politeness forms".

Maybe that's the reason they use these symbols, they allow for compact writing of even long sentences.

On the other hand, the Japanese I met didn't really "talk" the way I learned it at university. Noone said stuff like "Are wa nan desu ka", they just said "Are wa?"

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