Language Discussion (Possibly Through the use of Language)

Denmark is, I believe, the most bilingual country in the world. 85% of its citizens speak English, and almost 100% speak Danish, but many youths hate the way Danish sounds so it’s actually dying out while English is gaining popularity.

様 = Sama, it’s used to refer to a superior.
方 = Hō, means person.
君 = Kimi, means you, in a polite way.

memorizes I knew what “sama” went already but I didn’t know the kanji.
Also I think this is the shortest post I’ve made here so far. :stuck_out_tongue: Are you a native speaker or are you just (slightly, somewhat, very) experienced?

No, I’m a latin-spanish speaker that knows english and I’m learning some japanese :stuck_out_tongue:

[size=9]–And yes, there is a difference between spanish from latin america and spanish-spanish, just like american-english and english-english.–[/size]

Well, Americans are infamous for their monolingualism (in the past - and sorry that I can’t provide sources for this - American culture heavily discouraged language learning due to it being seen as unpatriotic, particularly during the world wars, apparently), though to be fair I don’t think the state of foreign language education is good in Japan either.

(As a Canadian, although we’re technially a bilingual country, foreign language education with the exception of French is even more limited than in the States, and even for French in my province it is only mandatory up until the first year of high school, so in a sense it’s actually even worse, but I assume that my district is particularly bad at foreign language education - my high school didn’t even offer anything but French except for two years of Spanish no one ever took. But that’s neither here nor there.)

What do the kanji 様, 方、and 君 mean, and what are their readings? Are they honorifics? (I presume so since さん is “-san”, and we all know what that means.) I guess Japanese speakers really do care about honorifics a lot… I’m taking a second-half-of-first-year Japanese course right now (the uni calls it JAPAN 102), but a) unlike other courses at other universities we don’t touch kanji at all until second year* and b) I’m honestly terrible at it due to lack of studying and a lack of knowledge of how to study (as I’ve never managed to learn a foreign language before and I never figured out how to study for foreign languages - or any subject for that matter.) I can do the homework sheets fine, but when it comes to listening, I don’t understand a thing. With speaking, I can’t come up with anything to say except if it’s a specific exercise. I actually already know a few kanji since I’m native Chinese and I know a vanishingly small amount of it (can’t actually at all except i learned a few characters when I was little) and I recognized some of them when I saw them in the Japanese textbook and looked up how they would be used in Japanese, but still.

@Crazycolorz5, I guess you could ask your sister to translate if this doesn’t work out (I hope it does, of course), but I doubt she would be willing, what with everyone in the world always being busy and all. :stuck_out_tongue:

Such as? I’m wondering what tends to offend Japanese speakers, so we don’t make the same mistakes again or something.

… okay, this reminds me: I really should go to study Japanese now. >_> The only way I know how: memorizing vocab.

*No, I’m not making this up. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t think it’s normal. We even held off katakana until this semester, though I did memorize the table before I even started the previous course.

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Denmark is, I believe, the most bilingual country in the world. 85% of its citizens speak English, and almost 100% speak Danish, but many youths hate the way Danish sounds so it’s actually dying out while English is gaining popularity.

Sorry, I wasn’t sure whether to move this post. I decided to do so, which is why it is in its place and not at the top.

Academic classes seem like they’re generally inadequate for learning kanji, since it’s the same here in the southern U.S… I’m in third-year Japanese and we’re generally just expected to learn the kanji for each lesson on our own so we know them once the furigana start disappearing. Back when we /did/ go over kanji in class in second year, we didn’t cover nearly enough. At the risk of sounding like I’m plugging, I suggest reading Remembering the Kanji, which goes over how to write the jōyō kanji and remember them using stories. My new year’s resolution for this year was to finally learn the kanji to the point that I don’t embarrassingly have to say “dunno” if my family and I come across some Japanese text and they ask me what it says, so I read a few pages of the book and review the previous few pages each night. Good Guy FEU, reminding everyone to go study.

Re:the Japanese in question ("to the Japanese people who made Rekka If), it’s interesting to see that honorifics don’t just apply to names, but to any reference to a person. That’s something that a Westerner like myself would never think of.

And about America/Americans, I find that the way that people consume media to be an insight into culture. You have people around the world consuming American media— music, film, etc— but then you have Americans also consuming American media, with anything else being a niche. 'Murica puts out material extremely well, but it isn’t good at taking input, which is ironic given that its inhabitants bill it as a land of immigrants or a melting pot from time to time. Add a massive ocean on either side separating it from the continents that have more than three countries each on them and you get an American who is expected just to learn languages and cultures to a cursory understanding, not to fluency. You also get people (including some Americans) who say that Americans are cancer because of this situation, and then you get Americans like myself who hate being grouped in with the people around them and try anything they can to escape the stereotype of being someone who spreads ignorance.

And re:Spanish in Europe/Latin America, just ask a computer. They’re masculine in Europe but feminine in Latin America (iırc)!

[quote=“Crazycolorz5, post:7, topic:721, full:true”]
Sorry, I wasn’t sure whether to move this post. I decided to do so, which is why it is in its place and not at the top.
[/quote] I was actually afraid that my reply was going off topic even though I still wanted to say something, so thanks for making this stuff into its own thread. And if it is still off-topic… whoopsidoodle.

–That’s because in Europe/Spain they call “Ordenador” to a PC, while in Latin America we call them “Computadora”
In Spanish, almost every word ending with “a” is femenine–

[quote=“Mikey_Seregon, post:9, topic:721”]
In Spanish, almost every word ending with “a” is femenine
[/quote] Yep… which led to me taking a very, very long time to memorise «el día» and «la mano». xD

–That’s normal, since spanish is very difficult to learn for a english speaker.
It’s difficult even for a spanish speaker speak and write properly XD
A simple “´” can make the difference between “papá (dad)” and “papa (potato)”–

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… Now that one I did not know. And hey, a Spanish-speaker agrees that it’s difficult for English-speakers! My cohorts tend to parade it around as “the easy language”, but the genders and verb endings slay me. χ_X

Oh, the verbs, such a glorious headache.
I think that is the major confusion-generating in spanish for non-spanish speakers, just see:

Yo camino
Tu caminas
El/Ella/Eso camina
Ustedes caminan
Nosotros caminamos
Vosotros caminais
Ellos/Ellas/Esos caminan

And that is just the present form XD
BTW, in english that is:

I walk
You walk (Singular)
He/She/It walks
You walk (Plural)
We walk
You walk (Plural, mostly used in Spain, very rarely used in latin america)
They walk

FYI this is usually pronounced “kata” for person

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Yeah, the present tense is the only one I remember from high school (where I had to take either Spanish, French, or Latin). If I have to say anything else, I just tack an -é on it and hope I don’t sound like a complete invalid. Which I do anyway, because every Spanish-speaker I come across seems to speak with a different accent. xD

My bad, I forgot that XP

That’s because there is a different accent in EVERY country, spanish accent is not the same as honduran accent or mexican accent, even in every city/town there are variations of the accents.

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Meanwhile, I speak in pure, unadulterated Haskell code. You?

Console.WriteLine(“I’m more of a C# guy myself.”);

Je marche
Tu Marches
Il/Elle Marche
Nous Marchons
Vouz Marchez
Ils/Elles Marchent!

walking in present-tense-french!! :3

print(“I like Python”)

#include < iostream>
int main()
{std::cout << “, but I use C++ a lot more”;}