The Picard ManeuverLooking to make a major life change?
Mîm- It’s in bumfuck nowhere
- I don’t speak Japanese
- Building it up to a modern living standard will be expensive
- I’d have to move to Japan
Unsorted list of reasons why not from the top of my head
It’s not that bad
Looking on maps it’s in a rural area but not that rural. The house is situated on the outskirts of a town, basically
Local middle schools website says they had 185 students in 2020, that’s pretty good for rural Japan
About a 30m walk from the town/school. Train station there, bunch of cafes, konbini.
It’s not going to be living in Tokyo obviously but there are rural areas in Japan that are far worse, where the school is 7 kids that all share a classroom even though they’re mixed grade 2-9 because the district has 1 teacher
Bigger reason for me: that house is decrepit and Japan experiences more natural disasters than pretty much any other country. Like I’m not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
The language isn’t that hard though. プラス、それからもっと漫画を読めるよ。
The language isn’t that hard though
Gonna go ahead and press X to doubt on that. Japanese is consistently ranked among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, alongside Mandarin and Arabic.
Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2. It’s the written form that’s difficult. Speaking is quite easy
Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2
Doubt. Here are some reasons:
- honorifics - they completely change the verb conjugation
- counting numbers - screw that noise, esp. since they conjugate numbers as well; at least Korean doesn’t do that nonsense
- completely reversed grammar (SOV instead of SVO really screws w/ westerners)
Pronunciation is dead simple though.
Skullgridcompletely reversed grammar (SOV instead of SVO really screws w/ westerners)
I don’t think I struggled with that going from Turkish to english
I purchased it -> Ben onu aldım (I it purchased)
If it was just one thing, that’s fine. But it’s more than just putting the verb at the end, it’s:
- switching order of propositional phrases (uses post-position)
- no articles, it uses particles, which are also in postposition
- no difference between singular and plural, it comes from context
All of these together represent a complete shift in how you think about communicating ideas.
If I learn a romance or Germanic language coming from another romance or Germanic language, a lot of the grammar concepts apply and I can largely just translate my existing thoughts to the new language. With Japanese or Korean (very similar grammatically), I have to rewire everything, because the structure of the language is so different from my native language.
Japanese isn’t particularly hard, per se, in an absolute sense. But it is hard from a relative sense coming from a western perspective.