Re: Japanese learning, is anybody as frustrated as me?

From: Sean (seanpantsholland_at_telus.pants.net)
Date: 12/10/04 

Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 20:29:46 GMT

Bart Mathias wrote:
> Sean wrote:
>
>>[...]
>
>
>>How come my Korean students sometimes break out in laughter at how easy
>>Japanese is because "It's just like Korean!"?
>
>
> That's an interesting question! Why the mirth?
>
> Of course, Japanese isn't just like Korean. Japanese hardly ever say
> things like 家を行く, which would be a literal translation of a normal
> Korean phrase. Negation is very different. これは本が<isn't> for これ
> はほんじゃない. (Japanese lacks equivalents for Korean verbs meaning
> "is not" and "there is/are no," though the adjective ない works for the
> latter in familiar-register speech.) The honorific system is quite
> different between the two languages, as is the handling of tense. I
> knew Koreans who had learned Japanese as the only legal language in
> school during the war who nonetheless thought a pig was a "puda"--the
> phonologies are immensely different.
>
> The similarities are about what one would expect between two languages
> that are pure SOV type and similar Chinese-related vocabulary. Those
> two things were very helpful to me in my attempt to learn Japanese, but
> I'd say Japanese and Korean are less similar than English and French,
> and not much more similar than English and Chinese, except for the lack
> of common vocabulary.
>
> Bart

I certainly bow to your knowledge. I am not interpreting, but rather
just reporting my observation that Korean kids don't seem to be troubled
by those aspects of Japanese that have everyone else saying "Huh?" On
the other hand, my Korean students often say that they will take the pus
downtown, whether they're speaking English or Japanese.

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