El Frijolito -> RE: How many languages do you speak?? (Mar. 3 2016 19:45:03)
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I've actually heard from multilingual Japanese speakers that learning Japanese is not as hard as it looks. It seems the hardest step to really get going is memorizing the couple of thousand kanji characters (and from what I hear Chinese has a lot more). The very quick and dirty answers are ... Owing to comparatively limited land, a smaller population, fewer related languages, historical development, and a few other reasons, Japan was able to pursue language reform much more uniformly and successfully than China. One aspect of this was the compilation of the toyo and later the joyo kanji "general use" lists which prescriptively reduced the number of kanji - in the case of the latter, to a little over 2,000. That said, other kanji are certainly found - the Morohashi dictionary (a standard reference work) has over 50,000 character entries, to say nothing of the numerous resulting compounds. Some commonplace Japanese-English dictionaries frequently have in the neighborhood of 7,000 characters - again, with many more "compound" entries. But in general, unless you're reading a lot of pre-WW2 material or literary studies, most of what you'll encounter in kanji is in that general use list. As implied, more cognitive real estate may be employed in memorizing the numerous (usually two-character) compounds. The characters themselves consist of certain repeating graphical elements that are more limited in number, that may convey information about pronunciation or meaning. There are more of these elements than there are letters in the alphabets of Western European languages, but the difference is on the order of tens, not thousands. Still, the student will learn characters and their compounds, and not their constituent elements. There are other wrinkles to Japanese that confront the unwary, like certain dialects employing commonly-used expressions that might seem odd or out-of-place to the uninitiated. The "lack of verb tenses" is a bit of a canard. One way to express future tense, for example, is to contextualize the verb with the time one is talking about (e.g. "tomorrow") and use a verb form expressing probability. Hope this helps...
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