This is a long shot, but I am working with a bright high school freshman who had trouble learning the Hebrew writing system. And as a result, is being told that she should not attempt to study Japanese, but must study Spanish instead. She's an Anime fan and has no interest in Spanish. Anyone out there who has studied both Japanese and Hebrew? The Hebrew letters look hard to distinguish from each other to me. Is it possible that Hiragana could be easier to learn than the Hebrew alphabet? The high school program does not start Kanji until the third year, so it's not an issue.

Thanks!

I don't know anything about the Hebrew writing system so I can't comment on that. But no kanji until third year? That's ridiculous and reflects poorly on the quality of the Japanese program at the school. She might be better off doing self study.

Success in a language depends largely upon interest in learning it. Maybe she just lacked interest in Hebrew and thus never succeeded. Forcing her into Spanish would end with a similar result.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Success in a language depends largely upon interest in learning it. Maybe she just lacked interest in Hebrew and thus never succeeded. Forcing her into Spanish would end with a similar result.

I agree!
Hebrew alefbet is ridiculously easy to learn but with zero motivation, anything can become hard! The difficulty in Hebrew comes from that normally only consonants are written and thus you have to know the word before you'll really be able to read it in a regular newspaper for example. With Japanese you encounter similar problems with kanji, but they are more than simply phonetic letters. This is why, I think, most people here have gotten addicted to them!

Then again, there are only couple of dozen alefbet as opposed to the Hiragana, katakana, and thousands of kanji used in Japanese!

There is no question about which writing system is harder to master but still motivation is everything!

With the right tool, learning to read the kanas becomes fun!

http://www.chipchat.com/NihonGo/protect/...Drill.html
http://www.chipchat.com/NihonGo/protect/...Drill.html

I studied hebrew in college...I've more or less forgotten all of it, but the writing system is much easier compared to Japanese.

There are 23 consonant letters if I remember correctly...along with a few variations on certain letters depending on if they are at the end of a word.

Then there are some vowels. These are written underneath the consonants. The tricky part is that in normal text, the vowels are left out (except for unusual words). So you have to recognize the word to fill in the vowels. If you have good vocab, then it's no problem.

Th_ c_t _nd th_ d_g pl_y_d _n th_ p_rk.

So that can be tricky. But it's not so bad because you see common words alot and get used to them....like th_ in the above example. And while p_rk could be park or pork, context let's you know which one it is.

I guess the similarity to japanese is that there is a barrier to reading. Until you learn a word well, you need the vowels in hebrew. Until you learn a kanji compound, you need the furigana.

But japanese has a lot more letters in addition to all the kanji and their various readings, so I'd say it is much more difficult.

But if your friend wants to learn it, she shouldn't let that discourage her. Maybe japanese will click somehow that Hebrew didn't

Hi, first post, and thanks so much to Fabrice for fixing my forums password!

I studied both at university too, though it was classical Hebrew (torah etc). And I'll just echo what many people here say: phonetically, Hebrew is harder than kana, because of the vowel markers and their absence. Kanji makes a whole other thing entirely, but if your friend knows about Heisig & this site, no worries!

Grammatically, hebrew has so similarities with particles (-ah is a direction marker, so "Jerusalem-ah" means "Jerusalemwards," as in "I am going Jerusalemwards."), but that's about it. Neither is too close to English (assuming that's your native tongue).

And motivation is the main factor-- if she's motivated by manga/anime, she'll do better at Japanese than at Spanish with no motivation. Remember too the perspective of the people who tell her to take Spanish: they have too teach a certain curriculum on certain schedule, and see most of their students give up. So Spanish, which is much closer to English, requires less effort from students to pass tests etc; less effort means fewer frustrated students, which means less work for the teacher. But if she is motivated, this is neither here nor there.

I must admit Spanish travels better than Japanese, though. I wish I knew it.

vn nglsh sn't tht hrd t rd wtht vwls, dn't y thnk? Jhnzp pntd ths t a fw psts g bt I ls ntcd t bt a yr g.

I've dabbled in many languages over the years, and I've given up on nearly every non-latin-alphabet one almost instantly: Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Chinese. I gave up on Japanese many times too until I found a textbook that started off in romaji and eased into kana a bit at a time (that book, incidentally, was Ultimate Japanese: Beginner - Intermediate). A simple alphabet may seem like child's play to us RTK people, but it is quite a daunting task to someone who isn't used to learning a language in a writing system other than their own. Heck, I believe it's a bit of a task even for the Japanese when they start learning English in 7th grade.

A lot of Japanese learning materials start off in romaji and ease into kana or stay in romaji. But books for languages in simpler writing systems usually present the characters on pages 1 and 2 and expect the learner to be able to use and apply them from page 3 onward, and that can be rehheally scary to a novice language learner.

Thank you for the replies. A special thanks to billyclyde and johnzep. Hebrew is one language with which I have absolutely no experience.

johnzep Wrote:And while p_rk could be park or pork, context let's you know which one it is.

The thing is, ability to use context is something that only comes with time. We can easily read something with no spaces or vowels because we already know English. It's not that much of a problem once you got the language under your belt, but it's still quite a challenge for a beginner.

Since they aren't going into kanji (shame!), I would have to assume that Japanese would probably be easier than Hebrew, ironically.

But, really, no kanji? That's just weird. I took an introductory Japanese course this summer (eight weeks) and it required us to learn the kana in a week and then ten kanji a day after that (thank God for Heisig, the ol' fella).

JimmySeal Wrote:I've dabbled in many languages over the years, and I've given up on nearly every non-latin-alphabet one almost instantly: Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Chinese...

...But books for languages in simpler writing systems usually present the characters on pages 1 and 2 and expect the learner to be able to use and apply them from page 3 onward, and that can be rehheally scary to a novice language learner.

The same seems to be true with many Japanese books too and I have also occasionally gotten interested in some language but after a while that interest has just withered away with no real ability to communicate anything in that language... Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Suahili... I have never found learning the "easier" alphabets hard thought. The problem is that after a while I have just forgotten it due to lack of practice. Back when using more romaji with Japanese I actually had to learn over the hiragana again at least three times before finally being able to keep them (I was finally smart enough to ditch it..).

Japanese is pretty much the only one that I have a real passion for!

The importance of motivation has come up several times already but I don't think it can be stressed enough.. Meaningful presentation is important too! A table of characters in the first pages of a book as only reference to the writing system is a classic example of bad presentation!

I'm not sure if this is very coherent... Just babbling away at 2:00am..

Ps. Tibetan sounds interesting!

As a little side, as I've seen a lot of people comment, my high school and another high school I know of don't go into Kanji until after two years either. I think it might be a normal thing. Not that High schoolers can't handle kanji, but rather the lessons do start off slowly. I think a week there was about 5 hours of classes, and more focus was spent on learning people in your family, colours, and about Japanese culture than actually how to say anything. We were taught hiragana and katakana. I think we might have learnt the Kanji for the numbers. I stopped learning Japanese after that (something I regret now!) but the other kids in my class then went on to learn a lot of Japanese including a lot of Kanji, so it does speed up a lot.

I just want to say I think this is a normal thing not to learn Kanji until later, at least where I'm from. However, highschool is also five years here, so I guess they have more time to speed things up.

Yeah. When it comes down to it, I think high school and even most university curricula just don't cover that much stuff. My old uni texts (2 yr course) don't really get far past 3kyuu grammar. But the sudden increase in textbooks when you abandon English as the language of instruction is exponential-- I'm using the New Approach blue book and it's so in-depth comparatively it's not funny.

I have different theories on language acquisition. Interest is priority number one, and making it fun to learn is what the teacher should be doing. Personally, I think anyone can learn any language if it is based on food...the stomach controls the flesh. Plop down lots of menus in front of people in the target language and go directly from there...It is how I basically tackled Japanese. I am pretty good with Chinese menus too. Wish though that I could spell though in English. I am happy to see the red highlites here liek just now! :-) 楽しんでね！

Funny, after I'd gone back to take formal instruction, I had a great time, but left it with only marginal improvment, wishing my teacher had been less cool and more of a drill instructor. I agree about interest, especially in-country on a survival level, but I think it's a rare teacher who can be as fun as she/he is effective.

I always felt Hebrew was unlearnabe, glad to know it isn't. Guess since the only people in Mexico that bother to learn it are orthodox Jews, there is little space open for non Jews to get exposed to the language and let alone actually someone teaching it to a non Jew! Oh boy!

Yeah, I feel like that course can't be that good if they aren't teaching ANY kanji in over 2 years. So you can say purple dog, but you can barely even rea anything. That doesn't seem to aid in stimulating the students to learn. However on the other hand I feel that learning 10 kanji a day is tough for me. I'd rather a slower, steadier pace.

Learning the hiragana (I find katakana harder) can be one in less than three weeks at your home with flashcards. Route memorization is how most knowledge is taught at schools anyways, no big difference.. just that hiragana is probably more useful in real life than calculus.

Shame she doesn't want to learn spanish (cuse I speak it fluently.. and maybe also because I personally like how anime is dubbed to the language), but if there isn't an interest, it just won't work. Specially for a language like spanish which has the most illogical grammar ever and I've always heard that foreigners have a hard time understanding the time when each of the 30 different verb tenses are to be used. Quite frankly I find that to be a piece of cake, it's the oddball times when you find a word with an ambiguous sex like "siguiente" and you have two choices: One is right and the other will make you sound like an idiot.