So if you dk how Chinese language works, yes, there are a buncha characters you have to memorise, like: 市, 人, 电, 话, 谁, and 建. This is a recognizedly difficult aspect of Chinese language study, and I will not doubt it's an ingenious invention on their part. (It's slightly less difficult if you spend your entire childhood being made to learn Chinese.)

A more subtle aspect of studying Chinese, though, is that there is one higher degree of "memorization" needed, in that you have to remember "words" too, which are usually 2 characters, sometime more. For instance, you can put 电 and 话 together, dian4 and hua4, meaning "electricity" and "speech" on its own, to make 电话: dian4 hua4, which, jointedly as a unit, have the meaning of "telephone".

Another example of this would be 文 wen2 (language or culture) + 明 ming2 (brightness) = 文明 wen2 ming2 (civilization)

It seems beautiful, and it undoubtedly is beautiful. However, what troubles me is that recently I've been self-studying Japanese, and it's recently come to light for me that most, perhaps the vast majority, of these "words", is actually invented not by ingenious Chinese scholars, but Japanese reformers during the 19th century Meiji restoration. In seeking to modernize their civilisation and make it on par with the West's, they basically made a bunch of new "words", and it was THOSE who found their ways into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. NOT the other way around (Chinese -> the other 3).

Not wishing to cast doubt on the intricacy of this linguistic culture. But I can hardly help but feel betrayed at these revelations.

>"aggrivated" not "aggravated"
Better stick to English, self appointed Mr. Worldwide.

One thing I learned that really helped understand how Japanese was meant to be dead was the concept of "chunking." You need to teach your brain how to read chunks of characters. I thought that was cool.

I only made it to the tail end of N4 last time I tried. Was 5 months of very intensive 8 hours a day immersion studies before I crashed out

>>23037452
Sorry, it was a typo and I just got up when I made it.

>>23037466
Chinese is like that too actually, so I'm sort of used to it.

>>23037466
My eventual end goal is to make it all the way to N1. Sounds really tricky, especially when I could be studying for equally challenging tech certs that are more useful and could actually help me land some form of viable employment

I'm Japanese American, fluent in Japanese, and learning Chinese.
Chinese has had way, way more influence on Japanese than the other way around.

>>23040207
Did your family speak Japanese at home, and to what degree? Did they make you write characters or do textbook work?

Mine did for Chinese, and I resented it. Especially after my Chinese school literally shut down due to insufficient funding, and what they did afterwards was basically buy Chinese textbooks from China and the work there sucked more since my parents were making me do it before using the Ipad and mom maintained higher standards.

I'm semi fluent now, like enough to autistically geek and sperg out about the whole language, and even use it as a sort of launchpad for Japanese which sometimes seems "cooler", but not enough to potentially teach my kids the language in the same way my mom did in the event that I start a family someday.

>>23037426 (OP)
Reverse adoption of cultural items is a fascinating topic. Kind of like how tomatoes were not really a food crop before Europeans created a bunch of more edible cultivars, and now they are considered essential to South American cuisine.

Another example coming to mind is curry being brought from India to Britain, and then Britain brining curry to Japan.

>>23040200
I definitely had some sunken cost fallacy going on with my Japanese studies after a while. I love the language but if I put as much effort into Spanish instead I would've ended up fluent in the time it took to reach N3. Japanese is such a beautiful language, though. I love the structure way more than English.

Is Japanese even that hard? Maybe the kanji's difficult? I dunno tho.

>>23040519
Japanese is extremely difficult especially for native English speakers. You have to rewire your brain over several years.

>>23040519
Memorizing Kanji gets easier if you've had to memorize the very same Hanzi in Chinese class as a kid.

You still have to memorize the native (kun) readings though.

>>23040575
it's one of the most difficult languages to learn, but all languages are fairly hard to learn
it's like 6 months for spanish vs max 2 years for japanese, if you take learning it seriously
it's not so extreme

>resurrecting dead thread alert
>>23040575
I doubt it's that hard even for someone who's learned the easier languages to the point of living in and interacting with those languages. I already know what it's like to shoot up in bed in the middle of the night when you get the dream of the neurons knotting together to form a neural node of language acquisition. Le animus will help me (((subs NEVER dubs)))
>>23040692
No idea about Chinese. That and some other crazy language like Thai or Vietnamese or whatever is where I put my hard coded language limits at. Despite being an L1 English speaker, I've had exposure to Japanese through my parents and grandparents and all the Japanese soap operas and movies we would watch.

Either of you two one of the people who recognized the movie "Door to door" when I posted about it? It's a pretty tearjerking Japanese movie if you're a sentimental faggot like me who's a sucker for the like "parental-sacrifice" trope or whatever. That and that other soap opera I'm thinking about had me fucking straight DISTRAUGHT.

I meant
>"Door to door" had me distraught as a kid. Definitely not a faggot like that now are you kidding me lol? Cry more, faggot lel.

CHING WONG FONT CHI HAI CHICKY CHOW MEIN AWWWWWWWWH PING WING CHUNG DING WUNG BONG BING CHUNG CHUNG BING WING CHUN

CHOO CHUN CHINNY CHI WONG WANG WANG WONG WING BING CHUN CHOO HAI CHUN LEE