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@Tom: My mom isn’t a native English speaker, so I guess I could ask her! ;) I’m not sure she knew very much English at all, if any, before she moved here. She was born in Indonesia, to answer the question that tends to come up next. ;D But just to confuse things, I’ll add that she’s actually Chinese. So I’m half Chinese Indonesian, sort of…? ;)
Anyway, I’m pretty glad I learned English as a native language, since I hear it’s pretty hard. I just wish I had also learned something else alongside it … like maybe Indonesian. ;D (My mother speaks Bahasa but not Chinese, so there was pretty much no chance of me learning Chinese as a kid. Funny, though, isn’t it, that I thought Chinese was beyond me even though I am part Chinese? O, the travails of the happa! ;))
@Kas: How cool that your school actually had Chinese! I completely agree with you that people should have to learn a language other than their own, because it does help broaden people’s cultural perspective. My bachelor’s is in anthropology, so I’m pretty keen on broadening of cultural perspectives. ;D
BTW, I hated high school, too. I think it was in my sophomore year that I decided I really, really wanted to be homeschooled — I have friends who are successfully homeschooled, so, I thought, why not? Unfortunately, I let a rather clueless school counselor talk me out of it. To this day I don’t think I should have listened to her. Thinking back on how she sounded, I’m pretty sure she probably didn’t know anyone who was homeschooled or know anything about it, much less understand where I was coming from. I’m reasonably certain she was just hell-bent on keeping me from leaving the traditional school system, for whatever reason. Alas. If I’d followed through on becoming homeschooled, I bet I would have actually learned at least one more language and been super-fluent in it by now! ;D
Oh, and I wasn’t really ready for college when I entered it, either, even though I slogged through those four years of high school. Academically, I was fine, but emotionally, I really, really, really should have listened to myself and taken a year off to do something else. I hear that’s more common in many places in Europe, and I think it’s a great policy to get more exposure to the non-academic world before going back into it and investing in a degree that’s supposed to shape your whole career path.
(Tom, is this enough babbling for you? I’m definitely verbose today! ;))
@Tom: I think the American mentality toward second-languge acquisition is pretty similar, at least in the education system. (I don’t feel qualified to say how people tend to feel about learning languages well after they leave school. ;)) Most of us took another language in school only because we were required to do so, not because we were interested. When I was in high school, I think my options were French and Spanish. There may have been a German class, but I think there were only two levels of German available (or maybe one!), whereas you could take up to four levels in French and Spanish, and that made German seem a little pointless. I really did want to take something like German, though, or even Arabic, and if they had offered a Japanese or Chinese class, well, I definitely would have considered it!
Once I got into college and there were real options, I was super-enthusiastic about taking advantage of that, and I did in fact end up taking Latin and Arabic … but I ended up not pursuing those after graduation because, well, our school system doesn’t frequently emphasize continuing one’s learning outside the classroom, or if it does emphasize that, I must have missed it almost every single time. ;) So no matter how much I enjoyed learning something in class, it always ended up falling by the wayside in favor of the next round of classes…
Anyway, off on a tangent now, aren’t I? ;D
@Both of you: When I was younger I used to think that learning Japanese and Chinese was beyond me, and maybe it’s related to the old-school way of doing things. Well, and to the fact that everyone made it sound like it was The Hardest Thing Evar. But they probably thought that because the old way of doing things can be pretty hard if you’re not inclined toward memorizing large chunks of booky information. ;D
@Tom: So far I’m leaning toward the idea that older books (at least the ones I have) are more focused on sheer memorization and long explanations than modern resources, which tend to emphasize quick gratification and short bites of information. Not that there’s no memorization involved in newer teaching methods, obviously, but the approach is sort of … airier in modern stuff.
Now, I wouldn’t bet any money on that assessment, based as it is on rather minimal data, but that’s my current cautious, open-to-change analysis. ;)
I was all set to say “Just get an iPod Touch and download Kotoba!” and then I watched the video Tom posted a link to and realized Koichi beat me to it. Well, except for the Kotoba recommendation. (For the record, I like Kotoba because it’s both free and thorough. And yes, it, too, uses the Jim Breen dictionary.)
Starting to think I need a t-shirt that indicates my status as a Koichi fangirl in training. (I promise to stay on the non-creepy side of fangirlism, though. ;))
Wow. I was looking for exactly this information last month, and now here it is on the TF forums. TextFugu is so magical. ;D
Ooh, this is a useful thread. Or at least it will be for me once I get Netflix. ;)
@Raymond: I love NaNoWriMo! I’ve only managed to “win” it once (the very first time I did it, a few years ago), but 50,000 words in 30 days just once is nothing to scoff at, I guess. ;) Even if it didn’t turn out to be a full novel for me…
@Tom: Definitely, learning old Japanese vocab would be useful for that, and I do have some interest in reading older things, so … I’ll just learn what I learn and see what happens. ;) It seems like a better idea to just keep learning than to tell myself “no, don’t learn that!” at any point. Sometimes I have to make adjustments to other things I’ve learned, so there’s no reason I can’t do that with Japanese if I have to, right?
Welcome! :D Totally feel you on the idea that learning Japanese allows for a deeper enjoyment of the culture, and I, too, find that the more I learn about Japanese culture in any time period, the more interested I am in the culture as a whole, including the language. It’s nice when things are self-reinforcing like that, isn’t it? ;)
Congrats on beginning your new degree, too! Someday I’ll join the second-degree club … and maybe I’ll even manage to connect mine to Japan … ;D
Welcome, Raymond! Love your story, and I’d love to hear more of them, too. ;D My experience is also that love of Japan is highly infectious … but maybe some of us just have immune systems that are weak against the Japan bug. ;)
@Both of you: The only reason it even occurred to me to think about learning “old” Japanese is that in a few Amazon.com reviews of some books, people complained that they used such-and-such book to learn and were constantly being corrected on their out-of-date Japanese when they went to Japan. I don’t actually remember which books those were, but I guess the comment stuck in my head. ;)
@Gigatron: Hey, if you don’t feel like studying Japanese right now, no worries — you can always go back to it when you feel more than 50% interested. The language isn’t going to disappear into the ether. ;D
I totally feel like I should have more to say, but I am soooo tired at the moment that I don’t know what I should be saying. I hope you guys will forgive me if I drop the ball on some idea or other. Poke me if you want to resurrect a conversation item. :D
@Tom: Well, I’m not sure how my old-school 60s books compare to modern books, since I don’t actually have any modern Japanese-learning books. ;) (Aside from the grammar, which is, er, just kind of a grammar. So it reads like the reference book it is.) They don’t really seem extra hard to understand, though. They just kind of feel … quaint, like other older books, you know? (Lord of the Rings comes to mind…)
I know that with the older books there’s a danger of my learning Japanese that’s out of date, but I figure that as long as I keep consuming a lot of modern Japanese media, that will help offset the risk. And it’s not like reading a lot of older books in English has permanently mangled my ability to communicate in modern English, so I’m willing to take a chance on learning some old Japanese, too. ;)
Re: cold places in the US, there’s always Oregon! ;D It seems like it’d be nice — cool weather, rainforests, surfing, much closer to California quirkiness than the East Coast. Of course, we’ve got New York over here, which is nothing to scoff at, either. (Babble babble. ;D)
@Tom: The books I have at the moment are Beginning Japanese and Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin, Read Japanese Today by Len Walsh, and Barron’s Japanese Grammar. The books are definitely not standalone resources, IMO, especially since most of them are fairly old (the Jorden books and RJT are all from the 60s). I just take them with a handful of salt. The same goes for the apps, though, really.
We do have pretty hot summers, although it could be worse, and it is in some places in the US, I hear … ;D
@Tom: Oh — I’ve only made it to chapter 5 of Season 2 of TF so far. :D Until about two days ago I was using mostly iPhone apps and rather old books to learn. Re: weather, I think I just like extremes (which sometimes includes extremely nice weather ;)). Hot summers, freezing winters, ridiculously great beach weather … ;D
@Hashi: Hiya, Hashi! Lately I’ve been doing copywriting and commissioned fiction, and in the past I’ve done magazine editing, copy editing and a teeny bit of poetry … but my real love is fantasy, particularly epic and humorous types. I haven’t written much of what I super-love in the past few years (bad me), but I do at least have a cunning plan to start doing it again more.
