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Comment by woahitsraj | Hacker News Reader

I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages. It's always shocked me how many expats feel it's not necessary to speak the language but the justifications are totally different.

In Sweden they say "Everyone here speaks English anyway"

In Japan they say "All of my friends are expats anyway"

I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

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> I spent about half my year in Japan and half my year in Sweden and I speak both languages.

Yeah, I really doubt that you can move to Japan with zero Japanese and in half year learn enough to hold normal conversation and be able to read/write Japanese, all that while working full time and not being immersed every day in Japanese language course.

It's perfectly possible to learn a language in 6 months if you spend a lot of your time conversing in it, avoiding English as much as possible. They also said "speak", not "write". It's possible and even natural to learn one and not the other.

Almost anything is possible, even time travel, it's just not very realistic under certain circumstances. In case of learning Japanese in 6 months while working full time in English speaking enviroment with 0 Japanese foundations to start with.

> Yeah, I really doubt that you can move to Japan with zero Japanese and in half year learn enough to hold normal conversation and be able to read/write Japanese, all that while working full time and not being immersed every day in Japanese language course.

If you're working full time in Japanese you could absolutely get conversational Japanese within half a year. Indeed I suspect that's the most practical way.

> If you're working full time in Japanese you could absolutely get conversational Japanese within half a year.

I fail to imagine scenario where Japanese company hire non-japanese speaker who will then be working full time in Japanese language to learn it.

Happens all the time with menial or physical jobs where they're desperate for labour - construction, fishing, forestry, that sort of thing. You can't get a work visa for that kind of job, but if you have a visa for other reasons (spouse, child of Japanese national, etc.) they'll take you.

Yeah, but I assume in that case you don't talk much during the job and don't have really time to talk to practice the language, so it's complete circle - can't learn it in job which doesn't require the language, because there is no reason to use there language. Sure you could learn few phrases or at least improve your comprehension I guess, but I don't think you could get fluent after half year of such (hard) work.

Weird way to generalize the problem. The difficulty of learning Swedish is not the language itself, but because Swedes default to speaking English with you if they see you struggling. If you want to truly become fluent in Swedish you have to constantly ask them not to do that, and most expats get sick of it by the 10th or so time.

(First point) https://www.thelocal.se/20180817/the-signs-youve-mastered-th...

>I think if people don't want to learn a language they will come up with any excuse.

In a world where it was actually true that you don't have to learn the language wouldn't it appear that they always have an excuse not to? So how does your experience give evidence we're not in that world?

N1? You mastered 敬語 in 6 months?

I think he spent half a year every year

I think they meant for the past x years, they've been spending half of it in Sweden, the other half in JApan, in chunks of 6 months.

edit: and you can be fluent in one or more languages without knowing how to read/write them.

you spent half a year in japan and speak the language?

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