Languages
My First Second Language
If you've never learned a new language before, be warned: It's a slow process. You can study them for years and still lack the confidence to actually use them. Don't expect miracles, and don't think you'll be a UN translator any time soon. But, you mustn't be downhearted. Even if you can't follow a language precisely, it's still possible to get the basic idea by just recognising a few words and some sentence structure. A quick dictionary lookup will reveal even more of the mystery. If you're just reading something casually, this is often enough to understand what's being said. Also, when trying to translate your thoughts from English, you can say what you know and let the listener pick up the pieces. Communication doesn't need to be precise to work.
Even if you have learned other European languages before, Japanese is still something of a mind-bender. I'll stir up controversy by saying,
Most European languages are essentially the same.
Let me defend myself. Most European languages developed together, splitting and absorbing each other as culture and politics dictated. Very few English words are actually native, with most coming from whoever happened to have the biggest empire at the time. There's a great deal of Latin in there, for example. So, other languages with Latin origins tend to have very similar words. French and Spanish are almost identical to English, give or take some vowels and pronunciation, and even the likes of German share similar properties. It's not just the words, either. Grammar and sentence structures are largely the same. You probably even take it for granted that the punctuation is familiar.
Japanese is not a European language.
Consider the following:
for (int i=1; i<=10; i++)
{
System.out.println(i);
}
It's a bit of computer code written in Java. It translates into English as, Write the numbers 1 to 10.
As you can clearly see, they're very different. There is no "translation" to take you from one to the other. It's a similar case with English and Japanese. Take sushi, for example. There's no equivalent word in English, so it can't really be translated. You may approximate it by saying "raw fish," but that's not very accurate. This is a key point, so please don't just nod and accept it. Think it over. Imagine removing an entire grammatical structure from English. Let's say, the gerund ("-ing" form of verbs). Now try saying that you want to go jogging. It's perfectly possible, by using "a jog," for example, but that doesn't work if you want to go fishing. Our new reduced version of English is no longer the same, and you need to actually think about what you're saying. What you're spea... no... what you want to say. There.
So how do you go about learning such a language? From the beginning, of course. As if you were a baby. Don't translate from English to Japanese and back. Instead, interpret the sentence to have the meaning floating around in your head, and then express that in the target language. It's a rather abstract process, and harder than translating word for word by brute force, but it is so much better. If you can get your head around the idea, your life will be much easier. If not, take a break now and think about it. Imagine a world without words, in which everyone communicates via mime, and you're half way there.
