tokyostyle Wrote:

afterglowefx Wrote:let alone one commonly regarded as one of the most difficult for Western learners, in a paltry three months.

Don't confuse the extra time it takes to learn a writing system that is completely different from romance languages with difficulty. Benny is specifically focusing on speaking only thus the read/writing complexity is totally irrelevant.

It's not all about the writing system.

Grammmar, vocabulary, keigo and other cultural rules, etc...they are all about as far away from English as you can get with the sole exception of katakana vocabulary.

It's a damn hard language to learn to speak even if you did everything in romaji. Much harder than other languages more closely related to English IMO.

tokyostyle Wrote:Don't confuse the extra time it takes to learn a writing system that is completely different from romance languages with difficulty. Benny is specifically focusing on speaking only thus the read/writing complexity is totally irrelevant.

I'm not so sure the two can be cleanly separated.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Basically, (as I can attest, having done it), you sacrifice a solid base (the kanji) for being able to speak a few phrases smoothly at the beginning. But later when you need to expand your vocabulary, you absolutely need the written language.

I did the same thing, and am only now at a 3000-4000 word vocabulary taking kanji seriously. Now half the words I learn I barely need to review because they're essentially freebies--I know the kanji, I know the reading, I know three other words that are similar, and it's painless to pick it up and file away.

Anyway, regardless, even putting aside the writing system, I'm still standing on what I said: I watched a couple videos, and he's right about where anybody could expect to be after 3 months of good studying: lower beginner. Hell, I've been studying for 7 months and I've been in-country for two years, I'm JLPT3+, I talk all day everyday in Japanese, I understand the content of nearly everything being said around me, and I'm about as fluent as an autistic five year old.

I guess it just depends on what your definition of fluency is. Benny is obviously making up his, where as I tend to default to the dictionary.

I have to admit, I'm disappointed. For someone who promised fluency in speaking in 3 months, he speaks slowly and with a terrible accent. He hasn't given us a video in a month, evidently because he hasn't improved much. I could understand this if he was concentrating on learning the language as a whole, but he's ONLY learning the spoken language! I guess his "method" doesn't work quite as well as he thought, at least for Japanese.

[RawToast]

Hirakana Wrote:I have to admit, I'm disappointed. For someone who promised fluency in speaking in 3 months, he speaks slowly and with a terrible accent. He hasn't given us a video in a month, evidently because he hasn't improved much. I could understand this if he was concentrating on learning the language as a whole, but he's ONLY learning the spoken language! I guess his "method" doesn't work quite as well as he thought, at least for Japanese.

It'll probably go like his Chinese (where he did learn some of the Hanzi using RTK). After 3 months his Mandarin video sounded poor to the untrained ear (lots of ums, slow, etc.) whilst his 4/4.5 month video seemed pretty good (again untrained ear).

I wouldn't be surprised if the results were similar; although, this time my ear isn't untrained and there are some good honest listeners on here

His Japanese looks to be on track to match his Chinese almost exactly. Which is very far away from anything that could reasonably be defined as 'fluent', unfortunately.

Anyway extending the time for being sick or for a holiday or whatever reason you give seems cheating to me. Part of the reason learning in 3 months is tough is also because real life gets in the way, as it has done for him, but he seems to want to just give himself an extra month and then claim afterwards it was really only 3.

I first started learning Japanese some 7 years ago, but have taken lots of breaks or gone through phases where I didn't study with as much intensity. I guess if we ignore all that time I'm N1 after 6 months and I'm a genius

irishpolyglot Wrote:Please keep trolling at a minimum. This has been such a friendly community until you charged in and made stuff up. I only delete comments on my blog/Youtube when they are genuinely hateful. This is a standard on blogs and channels.

I'm not insulting people here, but you are. Cut it out, and keep the banter friendly.

irishpolyglot Wrote:lol, that's a long trolling message smile All the way to a PPPSs and accusations of being in a cult? Pretty impressive! I really think your time would be better spent learning the language!!

Benny is a scammer. He accuses people of trolling when they express any sort of opposing opinion. In both of these cases, he is responding to people who had genuine, well thought-out criticisms and he simply brushed them off as trolls and even acted as if he was some kind of authority figure. "Please keep trolling to a minimum"?? Listen here buddy, this ain't your forum.
In the particular case of Japanese, Benny has failed to show any results. He has come up with some lousy excuses because he realizes his level is not up to scratch.

afterglowefx Wrote:Anyway, with any reasonable definition of 'fluency' (i.e., any definition which does not skew the meaning so far as to outright break the word), I fail to see how one could achieve fluency in any language whatsoever, let alone one commonly regarded as one of the most difficult for Western learners, in a paltry three months. (The US State Dept.'s employees get double the amount of time they get for other languages to learn Japanese/Chinese, if it's any indication of the ease of Japanese.)

(EDIT: Oops, I seem to be a little late to the party. Additional stuff added to the bottom.)

The only part of Japanese that's even remotely more difficult to learn than other languages is the writing system. Honestly, I think that ranking by the government is flawed, since they consider Romance languages to be relatively easy for English speakers compared to Japanese. Considering the only thing that could possibly make a Romance language easy for English speakers are numerous cognates (thank the Normans for that), which Japanese also has plenty of, they should be considered the same difficulty as Japanese.
I'm assuming the only reason Japanese is considered 'really difficult' is due to the writing system, which, with this forum as proof, isn't that big of a deal.

No, the reason someone wouldn't be successfully 'fluent' in Japanese in three months is simply that it takes more than three months to fit all the knowledge and nuance necessary to be truly 'fluent' into one's head. It's very apparent at my current stage that grammar books and vocab lists only take you so far before you simply have to learn through massive amounts of active reading and listening (passive listening is only good for gaining an ear for the language, which helps with pronunciation; extensive reading is really good for consolidating what you've learned, though).

So yeah, I agree with you about 'fluency' in three months being an improbable achievement, but I disagree with the idea that Japanese is a particularly difficult language to learn.

Quote:Grammmar, vocabulary, keigo and other cultural rules, etc...they are all about as far away from English as you can get with the sole exception of katakana vocabulary.

It's a damn hard language to learn to speak even if you did everything in romaji. Much harder than other languages more closely related to English IMO.

And the Romance languages aren't? Since when is a kitchen a female entity? What is up with not working throughout the day, are they really that lazy that they need a nap? And really, who's idea of polite involves eating loudly and belching? Further more, what's up with using wine and cheese for everything and having special ways of consuming such things? (note: these are rather stereotyped 'weird' things about a couple cultures and languages, but they still make the point)

Concerning 敬語, or any other level of politeness, is it really that different than telling someone how to speak in polite settings in any other language? The only real difference I can see is that the Japanese actually gave it regular rules and a word to describe it. Polite speech is something that every culture and language has, it's just a matter of how you describe it. In English, the way to be polite is to use as much butchered French as possible, avoid words of Germanic origin that don't have a grammatical function that you require, and use sentence structures similar to a stereotypical 1920s businessman's. How do we understand it? Use fancy words and don't swear. We don't have a name for it, but still consider it polite language. 敬語 is the same concept ('special' speech patterns and conjugation and make use of a particular set of vocabulary and phrases). The difference? There's a word for it and a regular set of rules. If anything, 敬語 should be, theoretically, easier to learn than business English.
Can't refer to any other languages on that, but I'm assuming it's the same (but we know what assuming does). Also can't really say anything about the other levels of honorific Japanese, but it's still the same idea: a set sub-language used in a certain situation.

As for grammar, the Romance languages have very little in common with English and have numerous exceptions that don't make sense to anyone who doesn't study etymology and linguistics. If anything, Japanese grammar is easy, simply because it almost always follows the rules. Not to mention that modifying verbs and nouns is very similar to how it's done in English.

Why am I using Romance languages as the example? Because they are considered 'easy' for English speakers to learn.

In any case, there's no real point to comparing other languages to English. All of them require a lot of studying to become proficient at them, and any advantages are almost inconsequential.

As someone who speaks French fluently and is currently learning Spanish, you couldn't be more wrong.

Hirakana Wrote:As someone who speaks French fluently and is currently learning Spanish, you couldn't be more wrong.

Elaborate or I'll ignore that. I spent a couple of years on mandatory Spanish classes, so I think I'm qualified to say it's more difficult than the language that I got further in within a year than all my time studying Spanish. Of course, I really didn't have any reason to learn Spanish (still don't), so that could have been a factor.

Either way, elaborate, please. Tell me why I'm wrong. If you do it well enough, then I'll change my mind. If you don't... I don't really know, since I don't really care enough to put a lot of work into this meaningless argument.

sholum Wrote:The only part of Japanese that's even remotely more difficult to learn than other languages is the writing system. Honestly, I think that ranking by the government is flawed, since they consider Romance languages to be relatively easy for English speakers compared to Japanese.

Yeah no, that doesn't add up for me.

Because I rented a Japanese movie the other day, and at the beginning of the movie, it had some disclaimer about "the characters in this story are fictional" etc. The message appeared simultaneously in Italian and Japanese, and I could read the Italian faster and easier than the Japanese. I've never studied Italian (although I took high school French), while I've actively studied Japanese for 10 years.

So it seems glaringly obvious that Japanese is an order of magnitude harder than a romance language. It takes a really, really long time before one can even competently read and write, which are the most basic skills. And the spoken language--the words in no way resemble English. French, Italian, and Spanish are just like English with slightly different words--you can make a reasonable guess half the time.

But try it for yourself. Here's some random Italian:

Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Just looking at this, I can immediately understand "Una," "al giorno," and "il medico," plus make a good guess on "di torno." Even "mela," once I see the translation, makes sense.

Moreover, I can immediately speak this sentence, and probably with a reasonable accent if I imitate Tony down at the pizza shop.

I can also write the sentence. And I'm sure I could remember it tomorrow. All without having once studied Italian. How is this not easier than Japanese?

It's midnight here, so I apologize if I sounded rude, but what you said about Japanese being on the roughly the same difficulty level as Romance languages for English natives is not true. English has many, many cognates with Romance languages due to the Norman invasion of England, around 29%. How many words come from Japanese in English? Very few. English uses mostly the same alphabet as Romance languages. English has similar grammar and sentence structure to Romance languages (SVO). Romance "concepts" translate better to English, not so for Japanese (んだ、敬語 etc.) I'm sure there are other reasons, but I'm too tired to list them right now.

Just looking objectively...
westerners that have an aptitude for languages and study really hard can become facile
in Japanese in around 3 years. (Forgive me but I don't really like the word fluent for a bunch of reasons)
Whereas westerners have been known to pick up Spanish/French/italian to that level within a year.

Chinese/Koreans are the opposite. Many have famously passed jlpt N1 in a year, whereas even the best will take ages longer to learn English.

I have never heard of an american learning to speak Japanese well in a year, or a Chinese/Korean to learn to speak good English in a year.

The more I think about it, the less I understand what he is trying to prove and accomplish. If I understand him correctly, it's all about showing that you can become fluent in Japanese in 3 months.

In order to achieve his grand claim he completely sacrifices reading and writing. As others have said, this is most probably a bad idea if you are serious about learning Japanese to a decent level and would come back to hurt your progress later on. But I understand that studying kanji does not fit to his sexy and enjoyable approach, so I see why he skips it. If you have no desire to go further, why bother, right?!

My main concern with him is the way he states his mission. It's not "let's see how much Japanese I can learn with my approach within 3 months" (and maybe compare it with the results of others using different approaches), but rather "I'll be fluent in three months" (and my approach rules, so please worship me). The only way to achieve his extraordinary claim is by watering down the meaning of 'fluent' and the whole project that initially looked interesting ends up as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Based on his performance so far, he'll be able to speak a bit of Japanese and be alright as long as he is in total control of the environment and can steer the conversation. However, I'd guess that he'll be lost if he is thrown into some random situation. Hence it's also obvious why he won't do a JLPT listening test.

If my projections about his level of Japanese at the end of the project turn out to be true, then to me it seems that he'll prove the opposite of what he is out to do:

Assuming he has studied for 8 hours during 100 days, then that's a total of 800 hours of study. Somebody without the luxury of being able to devote himself solely to learning a language can maybe afford to study for 1-2 hours a day. So for a normal person it would take 1-2 years to get to a comparable amount of study time. If we assume that the spreading out of the studying gives comparable efficiency gains as being a language learning pro, you'll still be at the very beginning of the journey after two years. How disencouraging!

I have an acquaintance who has his own English school in Tokyo. He was always disencouraged by the slow progress of his clients. However, once he started learning Japanese and went to lessons for some few hours a week, he realised why that was the case: A few hours a week just don't cut it!

I realise that the Japanese-learning community probably strikes a lot of people as a bunch of bitter elitist jerks, claiming that Japanese is so terribly hard and that it will take years to reach a decent level. However, maybe the reason for this claim might be that it is actually really time-consuming! I'd be the first one to admit that there are a lot of silly myths about the difficulty of learning Japanese, but it being time-consuming isn't among them!

So based on these considerations I can only resort to one conclusion. In the end it unfortunately seems to me like the typical scam of selling the dream of doing the impossible to people who can't see through it. And that's a shame! I really wanted to like the guy because I actually like his attitude and 'just do it'-approach. Unfortunately it now seems to me like he's actually doing more harm than good.

ps: i realise those are some serious accusations and would actually love to be convinced of the opposite!

^ agreed

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

sholum Wrote:The only part of Japanese that's even remotely more difficult to learn than other languages is the writing system. Honestly, I think that ranking by the government is flawed, since they consider Romance languages to be relatively easy for English speakers compared to Japanese.

Yeah no, that doesn't add up for me.

Because I rented a Japanese movie the other day, and at the beginning of the movie, it had some disclaimer about "the characters in this story are fictional" etc. The message appeared simultaneously in Italian and Japanese, and I could read the Italian faster and easier than the Japanese. I've never studied Italian (although I took high school French), while I've actively studied Japanese for 10 years.

So it seems glaringly obvious that Japanese is an order of magnitude harder than a romance language. It takes a really, really long time before one can even competently read and write, which are the most basic skills. And the spoken language--the words in no way resemble English. French, Italian, and Spanish are just like English with slightly different words--you can make a reasonable guess half the time.

But try it for yourself. Here's some random Italian:

Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Just looking at this, I can immediately understand "Una," "al giorno," and "il medico," plus make a good guess on "di torno." Even "mela," once I see the translation, makes sense.

Moreover, I can immediately speak this sentence, and probably with a reasonable accent if I imitate Tony down at the pizza shop.

I can also write the sentence. And I'm sure I could remember it tomorrow. All without having once studied Italian. How is this not easier than Japanese?

I'll be completely honest with you, I could only guess at 'una' and 'medico' (and medico only to the point that I knew it had something to do with medicine in general). I didn't get the rest of it at all, though maybe had I heard it...
I will concede that my point on cognates was pointless, though. I did mention that cognates were a big part of the reason why they think Romance languages are 'easier'.

So, just because Romance languages use SVO means that they're instantly the same as English?

As for the reading part, that was one of my points: the main reason they say it's hard is because of the written language. In a conversation discussing how someone clearly wouldn't be able to learn Japanese, one of the hardest languages, just because they ignored the written language, this doesn't really hold as a counter-argument to 'Japanese isn't as hard as they make it sound, since the main difficulty is the written language, which this forum has made pretty easy'.

To be fair though, I don't think I did a good job of declaring my argument. Let's just go ahead and restate the idea that there is no point to deciding which language is more difficult to learn.
I, personally, did really poorly in Spanish class. In fact, I failed it. I didn't really care for the language and put very little effort into learning it. Even now, I barely understand more than the couple of phrases that some of my relatives (who did much better in that class) spit out every once in a while for some laughs. I even have an uncle who teaches Spanish at a college and frequently goes to different Spanish speaking countries for various things, such as research. I still didn't do good in Spanish, so clearly being an English speaker has nothing to do with it.
On the other hand, I like the Japanese language. I put effort into my studies and I see results from doing so. I like reading, so I got used to reading fairly quickly, though I still don't have a large vocabulary and need to study a few kanji that always trip me up. All of my study of the writing system has been done in the past year. All previous study was of basic grammar and vocabulary in romaji, which gave me a basis to learn everything else from, as sporadic as it was (off and on for about a year and a half). If I had even a partially developed study method when I started and had studied regularly, I'd probably be literate to the level of a highschool student. I'm not even going to bother wondering about speaking or listening, since I still haven't really studied either, but I assume I'd have gotten frustrated at some point and started studying, I might have enough Japanese ability to be functional in Japanese conversation and correspondence. That's a guess though.
To continue from that guess, I'd have achieved functional Japanese at two years, if we also assume I spent way more time than necessary on reading, since that's the kind of person I am.

Basically, I'm trying to render the argument that one language can be that much harder than another pointless. Maybe it's theoretically easier to learn one language than another and maybe a lot of people do, but that doesn't mean it's true. All of them require effort to the point that any advantage is miniscule in comparison and the natural difference of individual learners would completely obscure it.

Maybe I should just shut up now and do something productive instead of trying to argue with people, who are all stupid. I, of course, am not a 'people', so that does not apply to myself. I'm better than all of you and am a whiny person who wants to get attention. I'm also stupid, but I'm also not. And everyone is ignorant of something or another.
Quite simply, allow me to exit this completely pointless and worthless argument (I've deemed it as such, through my great, infallibly fallible knowledge) by trying to appeal to you through some kind of absurdity. Hey, it works for dogs, why not humans?

Seriously though, I'm not interested in continuing. I just don't care enough to argue over something I find pointless. I just wanted to point out that Japanese isn't particularly difficult compared to other languages and that whatever difficulty it has is pointless to consider as such when studying it. It is as it is; same as everything else. It's easier to learn when you don't compare every pointless thing and allow functional connections to be made with the material you're trying to learn first, instead of 'A is inherently more difficult than B for some reasons that people who aren't me stated. People who aren't me are better at deciding what subjective traits I give to things than I am, so I'll listen to them and study this thing that I really don't give a damn about instead of that thing I'm actually interested in'. And they wonder why all the kids these days are content with being ignorant.

Hirakana Wrote:Benny is a scammer. He accuses people of trolling when they express any sort of opposing opinion. In both of these cases, he is responding to people who had genuine, well thought-out criticisms and he simply brushed them off as trolls and even acted as if he was some kind of authority figure. "Please keep trolling to a minimum"?? Listen here buddy, this ain't your forum.
In the particular case of Japanese, Benny has failed to show any results. He has come up with some lousy excuses because he realizes his level is not up to scratch.

His posts weren't unreasonable there. I felt sorry for Benny because half of this forum has a massive axe to grind with him before him even saying or doing anything, including yourself.

I'm assuming most of it is jealousy, since people here think they work really hard on Japanese so why don't they have their own big successful language blog??

Anyway, Benny's progress isn't bad but hes definitely not going to reach anything close to his fluent in 3 months target. But then we all knew this from the beginning too, I'd say he performed basically as expected. But that is still enough to be motivating to a lot of people, so its really not the end of the world.

If he tries to pass his skills off as being fluent and speaking great Japanese, I'd be annoyed about that because he isn't. But I haven't as of yet seen him write anything to give he has that impression himself.

The long post on this thread about Spanish and Japanese being of essentially equal difficulty is so wrong and ridiculous I can't be bothered to actually explain why. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure it out.

Why certain people on this board are actually willing to put romance languages and fundamentally, incomprehensibly alien languages like the one to which this board is dedicated on the same level of difficulty in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is beyond me.

So you find Japanese easy? That's fantastic! Perhaps you've some aptitude for languages, or are just generally bright. That too is fantastic. Nobody is claiming that Japanese should be harder for you, only that if your native language is of Western origin you'd be seeing much faster results in another Western language.

I don't know that I've got any real talent for languages but I'm a generally bright guy with a lot of education (e.g., a lot of practice in putting crap into my brain). Some personal experience here:

I've been lucky enough to travel. A lot. In university I took a year of Spanish and did a good amount of traveling in Mexico. I mean, I literally took my car and drove south of the border through every Mexican state--twice. Just traveling around the country I learned hundreds of words. Reading menus, street signs, product labels--it's impossible not to absorb the language. I was by no means conversational but give me pretty much anything written in Spanish and I could work it out with just one year of Uni and zero outside studying.

I was in Western Africa in 2011 for a few months. I didn't speak a word of French. But again with the familiar sounding words and the signs and the labels and the menus...yeah, another few hundred words, no problem.

Then I move to Japan. Based on traveling, I opted for Japanese-by-osmosis. And how many words did I pick up in the year and a half before I started studying? Oh, I don't know, maybe a hundred? How many of those were along the lines of "Shut up, sit down, and do your work! Stop talking! Get off the table! You're too loud!"..? ...All of them.

When languages share a common root it's ridiculously easy to sit around and soak up proficiency. You're literally surrounded by study materials, everyday you're seeing the same words on the same signs and products.

In Japan? What does that kanji mean? Guess I better count the strokes, figure out the SKIP pattern, and look it up in my huge ass kanji dictionary! ...or not. You're surrounded by mystery scribbles (frequently written in ridiculous ways) that will never, ever percolate into your brain without conscious effort. Even after you master the kanji, it's not something that's effortlessly absorbed. They get put together in the most bizarre fashion, you can't read it half the time, and the work you need to put in to even get to a point where there is some semblance of meaning is absurd.

All of this is free of charge and takes zero effort in a language like French or Spanish.

NightSky Wrote:

Hirakana Wrote:Benny is a scammer. He accuses people of trolling when they express any sort of opposing opinion. In both of these cases, he is responding to people who had genuine, well thought-out criticisms and he simply brushed them off as trolls and even acted as if he was some kind of authority figure. "Please keep trolling to a minimum"?? Listen here buddy, this ain't your forum.
In the particular case of Japanese, Benny has failed to show any results. He has come up with some lousy excuses because he realizes his level is not up to scratch.

His posts weren't unreasonable there. I felt sorry for Benny because half of this forum has a massive axe to grind with him before him even saying or doing anything, including yourself.

I'm assuming most of it is jealousy, since people here think they work really hard on Japanese so why don't they have their own big successful language blog??

Anyway, Benny's progress isn't bad but hes definitely not going to reach anything close to his fluent in 3 months target. But then we all knew this from the beginning too, I'd say he performed basically as expected. But that is still enough to be motivating to a lot of people, so its really not the end of the world.

If he tries to pass his skills off as being fluent and speaking great Japanese, I'd be annoyed about that because he isn't. But I haven't as of yet seen him write anything to give he has that impression himself.

The long post on this thread about Spanish and Japanese being of essentially equal difficulty is so wrong and ridiculous I can't be bothered to actually explain why. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure it out.

Well, have fun being a hypocrite. I know I am, since I said I'd quit, but clearly no one has heard that. What a joke I am for thinking people would drop something on the internet.

I do agree with what you said about Benny's reception here and his progress, so if it pleases you, focus on that instead of bitching about the difference in opinion we have. Also, take the time to understand the message person you're attacking (myself) before responding, so that you might properly attack me instead of swinging around that blunt understanding that I'm saying Japanese and Spanish are the same.

Also, someone mentioned that Japanese learners have a habit of thinking that they're all that because they're learning such a 'difficult' language. You're exhibiting symptoms of this yourself, so please poke your head with a needle to let out all the hot air that's inflating it.

To spell it out for you in a way that you'll understand: the effort that's required to learn a language makes any difference in the 'standard' interpretation of their difficulty irrelevant. Quite simply, saying that one language is harder to learn than the other is BS, since both require such effort that if you could learn one, you could learn the other. Both require extensive amounts of time, such that you can't accurately decide that one takes longer than the other due to the numerous variables. And, as I'm sure anyone who's gotten anywhere in learning a language has figured out, theoretical models of language learning simply don't work. If they did, I'd be functional and literate in Spanish and completely illiterate in Japanese right now. I mean, I took a couple years worth of Spanish classes and have only studied Japanese for a couple of years off and on, after all. If models worked for language learning, then I'd have had a higher highschool GPA and almost everybody (have to allow for outliers, of course) that went through a foreign language class would be fluent, since they clearly got this thing down to an exact science, not fuzzy speculation about things 'possibly' taking this amount of effort or 'somewhere' around this amount of time for a particular set of people with a particular level of motivation and a particular amount of time to devote to studying as well as a particular interest level.

An attempt at putting it in one sentence:
Any language requires effort and their relative 'difficulty' is irrelevant to how easy they are to learn in any given case.

Also, if you're going to complain that my opinion is a joke without giving a reason why (other than saying I'm stupid, in so many words), then don't even mention it, especially since I already attempted to end the discussion of it. Well, first, you don't have to be a psychology major to understand that you're just trying to gain favor with your peers by attacking the one that's 'different'.
I'll interpret this for you, since you seem to require group psychology to function and I'm not part of your group: I'm saying you're the same as every gay hater that just follows the opinions of the masses in their area. Don't believe me? Too bad, psychology is an exact field, just like linguistics; since some dead people and living people say that that is what your actions mean, that must mean I'm right. Isn't that what you and the others used to justify your attacks against me? Some government agencies said that one language should take this much effort and time while others require less? Yeah, government is just the way to lean; that's exactly what the communist infiltrators want you to think. What? I can't use crazy talk? Well, I'm not the only one here spouting ridiculous reasons as to why something is or is not.

Have fun bending over for your beloved group. Don't question them or their opinions, or they'll leave you and you'll be all alone. Definitely don't even consider the point of the other guy, that's even worse. Isn't that how community works?

Seriously though, I don't care if y'all disagree with me as long as you can do so civil like (i.e., keep it to yourself or use neutral reason instead of derisive, hateful remarks to make your point).

NightSky Wrote:I'm assuming most of it is jealousy, since people here think they work really hard on Japanese so why don't they have their own big successful language blog??

I'm assuming that people aren't sheep.

About that "big successful language blog" . . . you know, it's funny, but after posting an update 3 days ago, he's got, umm . . . 2 comments on his blog. Out of "almost half a million monthly readers" and 43,000 Facebook likes. Where are these supposed readers?

The thing is, I also run a blog, which is nothing compared to Benny's. Of course, I could easily buy some Facebook "likes" and match Benny's numbers. Hmmm. If you see me with 43,000 "likes" next year, you can probably figure that's what I did.

So here's what I don't understand. Maybe somebody good with math can explain it to me:

It seems pretty normal to get a couple dozen comments for a post, so I just can't figure how a relentless self-promoter with way, way more readers and Facebook friends has so few comments. It's almost like all his readers and fans are fictional . . . or maybe just all on Christmas break at once. Either would explain it.

JapaneseRuleOf7 - okay its not really a "big successful" blog, I actually agree with you which I think makes the hate for him even stranger to some degree.

I'm not even saying I agree with everything Benny writes, and I've been fairly critical of a few things he has written myself. But the vitrol towards him from this forum (and also the reddit /r/learnjapanese forum) strikes me as way over the top, and I suspect he doesn't get nearly as much abuse from spanish/german/french learning communities.

sholum - congratulations on your psychology degree but I'm genuinely not interested in most of the garbage you have written which is why I gave no explanation before. That I said those things to curry favour with the group is quite funny, especially since I wrote that comment in the same post as one where I'm pretty much going against the group when it comes to Benny. But, well, whatever.

In short my opinion on that actual topic is thus:

If you have just been born and speak no language, English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese etc are all probably about even difficulty to get speaking and understanding none, are more difficult than the others. Small kids tend to speak their own native language just as well as any other kids speak theirs at similar age, so that seems a quite reasonable observation.

However its not the same when learning a second language, because you are assisted greatly by knowledge you already know and by being able to see patterns. An English speaker is going to have a much easier time remembering and understanding "Problema" compared to "Mondai" at the beginning, because its, well obvious what it means, but "Mondai" could mean anything. You don't have the hooks to make it easier.

Effectively in learning to speak English I already learned say 50% of the Spanish language without even realising it. Whereas I learned practically zero of the Japanese language, therefore it needs more time to catch up.

No language is more 'difficult' as such, but require a big time investment. It seems reasonable to rate the difficulty of a language based on the time it takes to learn them, and since you already know so much more Spanish than you do Japanese (whether you realise it or not) the time investment is much shorter, therefore its fair to say its much easier.

Hi NightSky,

I edited my post to be less subtle, since it sounded a bit like you missed my point. That being that I've started doubting things about Benny beyond just his language ability.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Hi NightSky,

I edited my post to be less subtle, since it sounded a bit like you missed my point. That being that I've started doubting things about Benny beyond just his language ability.

Fair enough. The only reason I heard of him is because when I started looking for some Chinese / Spanish resources his stupid webpage kept coming up getting in the way

So Google quite likes him even if noone else does!

NightSky Wrote:I'm assuming most of it is jealousy, since people here think they work really hard on Japanese so why don't they have their own big successful language blog??

I think there's some truth in here but it's not the jealousy part. I think people do feel like he's trivializing the hard work it takes to learn Japanese. The blog part, if anything, maybe adds some more to the insulted feeling.

I have to say, after having a chat with a Japanese person this morning (thanks to a link to a chatroom someone here provided in another thread), I've revised my opinion somewhat on how possible it is to achieve his goal, if he's defining fluent as 'not actually fluent at all, but can sort of hold something of a conversation'. Considering the amount of Japanese I don't know (I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm a beginner and my production is *terrible*), it still proved possible to communicate a surprising amount of information (we exchanged restaurant recommendations, talked about art), and even joke a little (about the smell of natto, and tako to ama). I know full well I should probably not have attempted it yet (and will leave well alone for some time now, I was just curious to see how it'd go), I'm sure I made horrendous numbers of mistakes and came across very blunt (which I really hate to do in Japanese so feel rather guilty, hopefully it didn't bother the nice lady I spoke to too much...), but if all you're trying to do is communicate however you can... Especially if the person you're talking to is patient, it might not be pretty but it's probably possible to a greater extent than I had realised, particularly considering unlike me he's ignoring the written language (though kanji has its advantages compared to trying to parse spoken speech).

Is his approach an approach to the language I particularly like? No, but then most of us here have a deeper interest in the Japanese language, and Japanese culture.

Although, that interest helped me out a *lot* in terms of just having common reference points, and topics of conversation. So I think without it, he'll find things harder.

Just sorta musing really, anyway...

For western learners japanese is way harder to learn than romance languages. I'm from Denmark, and my mothertongue is Danish. So ofcourse swedish and norwegian is very easy for me to learn. Why? Because they have so much in common. I have never studied swedish or norwegian, but i can still read and hear and comprehend difficult material simply because it have so much in common with my own language.
I took german in school, and german have alot in common with the danish language aswell. Yet I'm nowhere near fluent. I've only met 2 Danish persons that were fluent in German. both had lived in Germany for years during their childhood.

Basically 100% of people from 14-50yr old Danish people knows english, many are fluent or at a very high level. So most danish people are at high levels in 4 languages, from a very young age. Yet why can no one speak german. Reason: No one cares to learn it, it's just another boring subject in school and few put serious study time into it during class or at home.
My argument is that Japanese is harder to learn for people whose language is of another origin. Meaning the languages doesn't have much in common.

To the guy arguing that spanish and japanese are equally hard. Quantum mechanics is just as easy as simple algebra, it just takes way longer to learn, right? I mean just because it takes 1000xtimes longer to learn doesnt make it harder. \sarcasm