[quote]OsakaNate wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]OsakaNate wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
I don’t think any classes or software will make someone proficient without immersion.[/quote]
This.
Classes and software are good for basics, practice, and reinforcement, but to truly understand a language, you need to be forced to interact in it on a regular basis.
You would be surprised at how many foreign people here never learn any more than ‘‘Excuse me’’, ‘‘Thank You’’, and ‘‘One more beer, please.’’[/quote]
That would drive me insane. I worked in suburb of Phoenix for three months that mostly spoke Spanish. Picked that stuff up easy (this was after my first trip to SA). Hell I even went to a Vietnamese kitchen everyday for two and half months and could speak enough of it to get around, as well as, have a polite (not like Vietnamese people are really all that polite) conversation.
How long are these people living in Japan that they don’t speak, or are they just over there for business. I have seen Spanish, Vietnamese, and Polish speaking people all keep their native tongues and hardly pick up American because they never put themselves out into the culture.[/quote]
Understand that I’m being slightly facetious. But only slightly.
English is recognized here as the medium of international communication, and Japanese study it starting in jr. high school. Most of them forget it by the time they’re out of college, though.
Many of the people who don’t bother to learn the language are English teachers. Some of them are only here for a year or two, others for much longer. They get by because transportation areas use romanizations of Japanese words and English directions for tourists, and by working in English-language environments. They make friends with bilingual Japanese or foreign people, and never put themselves out into the culture enough to really need the language, so they don’t put the effort in to learn much of it.
It would drive me crazy. My Japanese is intermediate at best, and it kills me whenever I can’t participate as well as I’d like in conversations.[/quote]
I figured you were being a little facetious, and I figured about the relation of English in Japan.
However, I concur, it would drive me crazy not being able to speak with others. Maybe it’s just my family and my culture, but my cousin knowns six languages (two she can actually speak, the others are for translating books), my cousin is a English teacher in Korea and picked up Korean in a few months. She picked up other languages by visiting different Islands on vacation. My grandmother and grandfather both know French, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
