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People are going on about how Korean is so easy to learn because it's so close to Japanese and hey it's got an alphabet! No kanji! Anyone can pick up Korean! And I'm over here weeping because I don't care how beautiful and elegant hangul is, I don't care that the letters show you what shape your mouth is (lies, all lies)
a) all hangul look the same to me. As bad as the indigenous alphabets where < and > are actual letters
and
b) I *need* kanji to know what a language is saying. This is like when I tried to learn Cantonese after a year of Japanese and had to stop because my mind insisted that Chinese had to have particles so I'd know what part of speech that word is (hint: it doesn't) and the word order is all wrong even though it's basically the same word order as my native language. Bref, Japanese has burrowed into my brain so deeply it's become a crutch
and
c) Korean *sounds* are different from Japanese. Especially the vowels. Especially those vowel&consonent sounds that don't exist in English. I know there's a version of Korean that sounds like Japanese-that-doesn't-make-sense, and evidently it's an accent not a dialect, but generally that's not the Korean I hear around here. Basically, I can't hear the Korean they speak around here. It won't resolve into syllables.
Anyway I'd rather learn Welsh or Maōri, if I could find a decent tutorial. Two languages that I will never have an opportunity to use.
a) all hangul look the same to me. As bad as the indigenous alphabets where < and > are actual letters
and
b) I *need* kanji to know what a language is saying. This is like when I tried to learn Cantonese after a year of Japanese and had to stop because my mind insisted that Chinese had to have particles so I'd know what part of speech that word is (hint: it doesn't) and the word order is all wrong even though it's basically the same word order as my native language. Bref, Japanese has burrowed into my brain so deeply it's become a crutch
and
c) Korean *sounds* are different from Japanese. Especially the vowels. Especially those vowel&consonent sounds that don't exist in English. I know there's a version of Korean that sounds like Japanese-that-doesn't-make-sense, and evidently it's an accent not a dialect, but generally that's not the Korean I hear around here. Basically, I can't hear the Korean they speak around here. It won't resolve into syllables.
Anyway I'd rather learn Welsh or Maōri, if I could find a decent tutorial. Two languages that I will never have an opportunity to use.
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But I am not good with languages.
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Neither am I, really, which is why I'm still studying kanji forty years after starting. But I like languages, is why I go on dabbling in them.
Reading aside, Japanese is much easier than any European language I know. No genders! Few tenses! And the vowels-- always an English speaker's downfall-- are the same as Spanish.
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I was plus-minus fluent in three of the five respect/ distance levels. Couldn't handle the extreme demotic machine gun delivery of close intimates, didn't need the extreme politeness of the most formal. And anyway, if a foreigner knows even basic respect language, the Japanese are duly impressed even if you get the level wrong. Which you do, of course.
But I have no ear for pitch accent (what translates as emphasis in English) so I sounded half like someone from Osaka (whose pitch accents are different from standard Japanese) and half like someone putting their emPHAsis on the MIStaken syllABle