Japanese

[mike jones]

Does anyone here speak Japanese? I switched majors in school and now I have to take a year of a foreign language. I wanted to take something that I thought would be fun and somewhat unusual, and 2 weeks into the quarter, it has turned out to be my favorite class!

[Stedric]

It would be a fascinating language to learn, but its very complex at the same time. Whats it like?

[mike jones]

well theres 2 "alphabets" called hiragana and katakana. hiragana characters are used to express certain sounds and syllables (e.g. a, ka, sa, ta, ha...) and then katakana characters are also used to express syllables but they are used to express words that aren't really japanese (e.g. our names would be expressed with katakana characters, since they aren't of japanese origin). The last set of characters are called kanji. These are the difficult ones to remember, because each kanji corresponds to a unique word, instead of just to a syllable. Kanji are the big, elaborate looking characters. And thats your quick Japanese lesson for the day!

[ermitonto]

And as an added bonus, each kanji can have many possible pronunciations depending on context.

I don't speak Japanese (I'm juggling too many languages as it is...) but I would like to get at least a basic command of it someday.

[Caruso329]

Nihongo wa sugoi desu yo! (Japanese is really awesome!) I'm taking Japanese too. I love it. Our sensei Tani-san is so funny. She makes fun of us sometimes, and we make fun of her all the time in class. Thats easily my favorite class. I can't speak too well yet, but I've only been in the class for a couple months.

[mellow mood]

japenese is too useless to be learnt

i wanna travel later in my life so english, french and spanish are the 3 most common languages.

maybe ill see for a fourth one, not sure

still japanese looks cool but too hard eh eh

[somebody someone]

woah dude japanese is far out, surely some of the most complicated stuff out there? Anything beyond irish is past me

[Mojavpa]

I need to learn german and italian and french before I can get my Masters in Music. Help!!!!

[Caruso329]

Its actually really easy and simple for me.. they don't have as much bullshit as english does. I'd try to explain but it's too long.

[mellow mood]

I need to learn german and italian and french before I can get my Masters in Music. Help!!!!

u studying in music? what instrument? and why do u need to learn all those languages? this is crazy man

[Mojavpa]

u studying in music? what instrument? and why do u need to learn all those languages? this is crazy man

Oh, I play clarinet but I'm studying music history. Western music has its roots in Germany and Italy, but France was definately the the third most important country when it comes to the development of music. you cant really understad the relationship between the words and music in a Mozart Opera like Don Giovanni, really, until you know good deal of Italian. And how can you understand a Debussy chanson until you know French? you never hear of any really famous English composers because even though England produced great writers, there werent very many good English composers.

[mellow mood]

yea

still crazy to learn all this

at least i speak french

and yea no pretty good english composers... eh eh

[ermitonto]

japenese is too useless to be learnt

i wanna travel later in my life so english, french and spanish are the 3 most common languages.
Well, that depends on how you want to define "common". If you're going solely by the number of speakers, the three most spoken languages are Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and English. Then Spanish, Russian and Arabic. French is far down on the list; even Bengali has several times the number of speakers that French has, although most of them are concentrated in Bangladesh and Eastern India. It all depends on where you want to travel, I guess.

[Caruso329]

chinpoko means penis in japanese.. thats the joke they used in that episode of southpark where they released CHINPOKO-MON which meant PENIS-MON.

[mike jones]

^^^^ i didn't even know thats what it meant and that was already like my fav episode. south park and japanese are both awesome.

[Caruso329]

oh and chachi means penis in korea. When Jonie loves Chachi came to Korean it had huuuuge ratings cause they thought they were going to see Jonie get her brains fuck out.

[F L E S H]

well theres 2 "alphabets" called hiragana and katakana. hiragana characters are used to express certain sounds and syllables (e.g. a, ka, sa, ta, ha...) and then katakana characters are also used to express syllables but they are used to express words that aren't really japanese (e.g. our names would be expressed with katakana characters, since they aren't of japanese origin). The last set of characters are called kanji. These are the difficult ones to remember, because each kanji corresponds to a unique word, instead of just to a syllable. Kanji are the big, elaborate looking characters. And thats your quick Japanese lesson for the day!
Kanji are not simply elaborate characters, they're Chinese characters. I could help you with those, I'm learning Chinese :D