Japanese Language

[Grytorm]

Compared to other languages how hard is it to learn Japanese as a second language as an English speaker? Recently I realized that I am slightly interested in learning Japanese because the Meiji Restoration seems interesting.

[noparlpf]

Depends how good you are at languages, but it's not really harder than, say, Spanish. If you stick to romaji/kana. If you want to learn kanji, well, have fun with that. That's pretty tough even if you grow up in Japan.

[banthesun]

Bad news, according to this (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-HARDLANGUAGES-FINAL-WIDE.png) infographic it's amongst the hardest languages to learn. I've been learning it myself recently though, and can say it is a pretty interesting language to learn though, since kanji seem to work a lot like root words in English, and can explain certain other words.

[AtlanteanTroll]

Hard.

I'm currently in my second semester of college Japanese, and once again, it is hard. On top of learning both the hiragana and katakana alphabets, you have to learn kanji (which number in the 1000's) as well. The only other foreign language I've ever taken was French, and that was much easier. Now, there are some things about Japanese that are easy, mainly that even with the incredibly complicated writing system, the spoken language is pretty easy, as all the sounds in the language (with one exception) falls into either "vowel+a/i/u/e/o" or "a/i/u/e/o." But yeah, it isn't easy. I wouldn't just pursue it given some new found interest in one piece of the country's history.

日本語は大変ですよ。

[noparlpf]

Hard.

I'm currently in my second semester of college Japanese, and once again, it is hard. On top of learning both the hiragana and katakana alphabets, you have to learn kanji (which number in the 1000's) as well. The only other foreign language I've ever taken was French, and that was much easier. Now, there are some things about Japanese that are easy, mainly that even with the incredibly complicated writing system, the spoken language is pretty easy, as all the sounds in the language (with one exception) falls into either "vowel+a/i/u/e/o" or "a/i/u/e/o." But yeah, it isn't easy. I wouldn't just pursue it given some new found interest in one piece of the country's history.

日本語は大変ですよ。

You mean "consonant+a/i/u/e/o", right? Because a/e/i/o/u are vowels.

[Sallera]

Oh, that's a neat diagram. (Japanese is my main language of study, and I'm about to start learning Finnish as well... I think there might be a bit of masochism involved here.)

It's definitely not an easy language, but if you have an interest in studying languages for the sake of it, I think it's a good choice. I've been at it for a couple years since I came back to it after uni, and it's always been interesting enough to keep me going. Definitely takes regular practice and dedication, though; once you get past 6-800 kanji, it starts getting difficult to keep them all in mind. You'll want access to some written media for practice (which generally means finding things aimed at younger audiences, for a newer student), and as with all languages, if you don't have someone to talk with on a regular basis (a problem I have myself), your conversational skills and extemporaneous recollection are going to suffer.

But hey, it's a really neat country to visit, so if you've got interests outside of just studying the history, then go for it. But if it's only the history you're interested in, I think you'd put in far more effort than it would be worth before you'd start getting relevant rewards. There should be plenty of history texts in English.

[Selpharia]

I started Japanese with a bacground in both English and Chinese. but once you overcome the hurdles about sentence structure and politeness level, it's not too hard. And the Meiji resytoration is tremendously interesting, especially the time before the 1890(?) signing of the new constitution

[Grytorm]

I am going to major in history. It is not the fact that it is Japanese history that interests me but that it is an industrial revolution which an extremely basic view of the time period matches the broader topic I am interested in. Unfortunately I am not very good at languages.

[afroakuma]

Ah, a thread where I can be of use.

I'm a native English speaker, with a background in French, and studied Italian, Spanish and German. Japanese is the latest language I've turned my attentions to, and I took an introductory course in university.

Soundwise, Japanese is very easy to grasp. Strangely, it's tonally related to Italian, of all things, in that they both have vowels that behave in specific ways and a focus on how doubled consonants and vowels are pronounced. If you have a good ear for the sound of a language, you'll pick that up quickly enough.

Writing starts as a challenge and escalates up to a nightmare. You'll be learning the hiragana (50 characters), then the katakana (50 characters), and then you'll start on kanji (more characters than a Robert Jordan series). Learning the kana helps you learn sounds and word structure; kanji will turn that all on its head. For instance, I learned the word for flower as はな, but they don't write it like that, because that is how small children write. 花 is the way to write flower (hana) in Japanese.

If you understand language structure, you'll pick up on clever things they do in writing and sounds involving the use of voiceless and voiced consonants. Nothing I know of, though, prepared me to anticipate that an h sound would turn into a b sound under certain circumstances. I've found sentence structure very challenging, as the order is not comparable to other languages that I am familiar with. Verb conjugation is much simpler, but you'll need to pick up the use of particles, small interlocutor sounds that construct the meaning of the sentence ("watashi wa akuma desu"; "tamago o tabemasu" etc.)

Overall, while it's far from the most difficult language in the world (Hungarian you devil tongue you), the complex interplay between sounds, writing and the methods in which the Japanese use language, particularly loanwords, contractions and hey, just for the fun of it, contracted loanwords... where was I? Ah yes. Point is, it's something you have to be ready to commit real time to. You will find the different levels of familiarity and politeness to be a hurdle when attempting to parse media ("I thought 'watashi' meant 'I,' why is this guy saying 'ore?' And this one says 'boku!' So confused...") and you won't practically be able to read the language in common use for quite some time. Still, I enjoyed learning what I did of the language and am eager to learn more.

Hope that helps.

[Jon_Dahl]

Bad news, according to this (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-HARDLANGUAGES-FINAL-WIDE.png) infographic it's amongst the hardest languages to learn. I've been learning it myself recently though, and can say it is a pretty interesting language to learn though, since kanji seem to work a lot like root words in English, and can explain certain other words.

Portuguese is in the Easy section and there's an outline of Portugal there, which is a minor Lusophonic country compared to Brazil. I don't like that infographic :( There must be something wrong with it.

[Grytorm]

This news saddens me. Although it was probably a pointless desire.

[AtlanteanTroll]

You mean "consonant+a/i/u/e/o", right? Because a/e/i/o/u are vowels.
Yeah, I wasn't really thinking too hard. Had just woken up. :smallredface:



Ah, a thread where I can be of use.

I'm a native English speaker, with a background in French, and studied Italian, Spanish and German. Japanese is the latest language I've turned my attentions to, and I took an introductory course in university.

Soundwise, Japanese is very easy to grasp. Strangely, it's tonally related to Italian, of all things, in that they both have vowels that behave in specific ways and a focus on how doubled consonants and vowels are pronounced. If you have a good ear for the sound of a language, you'll pick that up quickly enough.

Writing starts as a challenge and escalates up to a nightmare. You'll be learning the hiragana (50 characters), then the katakana (50 characters), and then you'll start on kanji (more characters than a Robert Jordan series). Learning the kana helps you learn sounds and word structure; kanji will turn that all on its head. For instance, I learned the word for flower as はな, but they don't write it like that, because that is how small children write. 花 is the way to write flower (hana) in Japanese.

If you understand language structure, you'll pick up on clever things they do in writing and sounds involving the use of voiceless and voiced consonants. Nothing I know of, though, prepared me to anticipate that an h sound would turn into a b sound under certain circumstances. I've found sentence structure very challenging, as the order is not comparable to other languages that I am familiar with. Verb conjugation is much simpler, but you'll need to pick up the use of particles, small interlocutor sounds that construct the meaning of the sentence ("watashi wa akuma desu"; "tamago o tabemasu" etc.)

Overall, while it's far from the most difficult language in the world (Hungarian you devil tongue you), the complex interplay between sounds, writing and the methods in which the Japanese use language, particularly loanwords, contractions and hey, just for the fun of it, contracted loanwords... where was I? Ah yes. Point is, it's something you have to be ready to commit real time to. You will find the different levels of familiarity and politeness to be a hurdle when attempting to parse media ("I thought 'watashi' meant 'I,' why is this guy saying 'ore?' And this one says 'boku!' So confused...") and you won't practically be able to read the language in common use for quite some time. Still, I enjoyed learning what I did of the language and am eager to learn more.

Hope that helps.
This seems like an excellent basic overview. That said, who doesn't love a good contracted loanword? (Afro also forgot to mention loan words frequently don't mean what they mean in their language of origin. (Which, about 90% of the time, is English.))

[noparlpf]

Yeah, I wasn't really thinking too hard. Had just woken up. :smallredface:

No worries. Just wanted to avoid confusion.

[Sallera]

(Afro also forgot to mention loan words frequently don't mean what they mean in their language of origin. (Which, about 90% of the time, is English.))

Japanese Guide to Borrowing Words

1) Pick a foreign word that sounds interesting (sabotage)
2) Convert to katakana (サボタージュ)
3) Chop in half, or whatever fraction takes your fancy (サボ)
4) Add a regular verb ending (in hiragana) (サボる)
5) Pick a meaning vaguely related to the original word (to skip classes, to slack off)

[Eldariel]

Let's see:
1) Japanese phonology is almost pathetically easy. Their consonant and vowel inventory is significantly simpler than that of English, for instance, and they only appear in certain combinations. The only problem, if any, is getting used to the usual values of the vowel phonemes (English has marked them in an atypical fashion for the last 1000 years or so, which can be a problem if studying from a book).
2) Japanese grammar is a doozy. First of all, many factors that are irrelevant in English are extremely relevant; signifying the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, all the different politeness levels, the strange malfactive passive, there are a lot of things that simply don't exist in English (and can't really be expressed properly in English either, which is why Japanese-English translation is quite difficult and you get all these Japanism honorific-suffixes and such in translated Japanese works). Japanese also makes heavy use of affixes while English is almost bereft of them, which can initially throw you off but it's not as extreme as in e.g. Uralic languages and indeed, it's something you'll run into soon enough.
3) Japanese script is something else. Learning the kanas is just like learning new alphabet, nothing special, but learning kanji (and indeed, dealing with the inherent homonymy and even the multiple ways of writing each concept) is something else entirely. This is a lot of work and it takes great dedication to reach the level where Japanese even consider you "literate" (2000 for fluent reading; 1000 for 6th grader's level - an average high school graduate knows 4000-5000 and university graduates know more).


You could do worse but not by much. Of course, learning kanji gives you a step up in learning hanzi if you ever decide to go that route so it's not entirely useless. Unfortunately Japanese is quite isolated grammatically and thus that doesn't carry over nearly as well but it does of course have shared vocabulary with its nearest neighbors (and oh-so-many English loanwords - hell, if you can't think of a Japanese word for something, you can just pronounce an English word in the Japanese way and there's a reasonable chance of it being Japanese).

[T-Mick]

If you want easy, go learn Icelandic or some other Germanic tongue. They are most similar to English. Romance languages are harder, generally, but thanks to English stealing words from Latin and, well, practically every other Western language, are tolerable. Far Eastern tongues are right out. You will be immersed in a pool of pure and alien foreignness. Not to discourage you, of course.

[PallElendro]

There are few but major points that make Japanese hard to learn. Firstly, the sentence structure. In English, an example sentence looks something along the lines of "Noun Verb Article (adjective) noun." There is variation among some languages like placing the adjective after the noun, but then in Japanese, it looks like a string of mess that can only be understood one the whole sentence is strung out in "Noun (adjective) Noun Particle Verb."
Then there are annotations. This is the part that gave me headaches. In English, there are the polite terms for a person (e.g. sir, mister), then there are the impolite but friendly versions (bro, mate, bloke), and then there are the aggressively impolite versions (wanker, bitch). In Japan, tread lightly on the way you use connotations. I gave up entirely on learning anything except the polite ways to say things, since I'd probably be using that should I ever travel. Telling you now, it's best that you just work with the polite connotation if you're still interested.
Finally, the customs. These parts get me the worst even though I should be embracing them. There are so many things that can set off any native Japanese person if you so much as bow incorrectly with good intentions anyway. I practically had to appear with absolutely no physical abnormality or mannerism less than being a butler to someone. I don't think there's an obvious polite way to say 'no'; you have got to take what you're given. Then there's the flattery. It's distasteful in its inherent dishonesty. One has to make themselves seem like the most abject scum of the world deserving no praise, then the second party has to herald like they're the elder gods. It's so frustrating, even when everyone knows they are cool and stuff. And then if they acknowledge their obvious talents the first time, then they're arrogant.

On the bright side, there isn't anything difficult about verbose if you're looking at the vocabulary. No silent letters, no clicks or drawn-out syllables. You could probably get away with a few ending sounds, but it's probably best to use them anyway.

[Eldan]

This seems like an excellent basic overview. That said, who doesn't love a good contracted loanword? (Afro also forgot to mention loan words frequently don't mean what they mean in their language of origin. (Which, about 90% of the time, is English.))

Hey, English does that all the time. Not the contraction so much, but you've stolen tons of German words and half of them mean something different to you. "Angst", anybody?

[Eldariel]

Hey, English does that all the time. Not the contraction so much, but you've stolen tons of German words and half of them mean something different to you. "Angst", anybody?

English is, if anything, the biggest wordloaner of them all. It has a whole vocabulary's worth of loan words from Romance languages, another set from Germanic languages and a third set from Celtic languages. Exactly why it has a bunch of synonyms for practically anything. I recently found out that antediluvian is still an English word and basically means "a very old thing": it's literally Latin for "before the flood".

[AtlanteanTroll]

Hey, English does that all the time. Not the contraction so much, but you've stolen tons of German words and half of them mean something different to you. "Angst", anybody?

Angst, at least according to the all-powerful Wikipedia, is not actually a loanword, thank you very much. :smalltongue:

[Grytorm]

Hey, English does that all the time. Not the contraction so much, but you've stolen tons of German words and half of them mean something different to you. "Angst", anybody?

I thought English was nothing but loan words. :smallbiggrin:

How hard is English to learn really? I see a lot of references to that. At the very least with English the subject of a verb doesn't change the conjugation much.

[noparlpf]

Angst, at least according to the all-powerful Wikipedia, is not actually a loanword, thank you very much. :smalltongue:

Wikipedia says it is a loanword.
"In other languages such as Danish, Dutch and German the word angst is not a loanword as it is in English..."

[meto30]

The hardest part of Japanese for a English-speaker from the West would be, if you ask me, the etiquette, or to quote those above me, 'customs' of using it, not the Kanji(Chinese ideograms; Hanja in Korean), if you ask me. I am a native Korean, which both culture and language is closest to that of Japan of all nations in the world, and count myself a fluent speaker of the Japanese language; and I can tell you, the hundreds of 'modes' of speech to be used differently for different purposes (which is the most complex among all languages in East Asia) will definitely drive all westerners crazy. I am a Korean, whose mother tongue too has different modes that must be mastered individually, but those Japanese modes still drive me crazy.

The Chinese written language (which those ideograms basically are as many already seem to know) has a very specific rule about it that you can utilize to guess the meaning of words, and once you get your hands on an electronic dictionary or smart phone app that can scan both printed letters and handwriting to recognize Kanji for you (very easy to find!), you can get through almost all reading requirements in no time (even better in Japanese because both Korean and Japanese only use specific combinations(words) of Hanja/Kanji unlike the native Chinese who conjoin them freely); and the spoken language doesn't involve the ideograms themselves. Heck, you can get through almost all conversation by "Japanizing" English words; this is how I get by while in Japan and I hit a word I can't quite remember.

But the customs, the modes! The myriad ways of being polite aside (you get a lot of leeway if you are ethnically non-Asian; try being a not-so-well-learned Korean over there!), the hundreds of ways a speaker of Japanese would employ modes, sentence shortening, and even intentional mispronunciation to convey context and identity is not a skill to be trifled with. For instance, misusing a certain method of conveying politeness can not only end up rendering the sentence incomprehensible, it can get the listener the impression that you self-identify as a member of a certain sexuality. Fortunately, Japan is rather liberal about such things. Korea isn't, but that's too far a tangent for this thread.

So, basically, if you're willing to go all the way and learn the Kanji fully for professional-level language use (which would correspond to level 1 on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test), then Kanji and the customs would be your top obstacles, about equal in height, but if you aren't going for that then the Kanji requirement becomes a lot less than it originally seemed to be. There are about a thousand Kanji used in everyday life, and that number increases to about 3,000 if you're going to, say, live in Japan for extended periods of time but will be working in a Westerner-friendly environment (such as the Japanese branch of a foreign company). The number of kanji increases exponentially the closer you get to the government/financial/legal/academic sectors, but in that case you pretty much will have to be learning Japanese full time.

[danzibr]

Japanese Guide to Borrowing Words

1) Pick a foreign word that sounds interesting (sabotage)
2) Convert to katakana (サボタージュ)
3) Chop in half, or whatever fraction takes your fancy (サボ)
4) Add a regular verb ending (in hiragana) (サボる)
5) Pick a meaning vaguely related to the original word (to skip classes, to slack off)
Perhaps meant as a joke, this is terrible advice.

I studied Japanese on my own for about a year, then took all eight semester my university had to offer, and since then (another two years) I've studied every day. Quite a bit of this has been said already, but I'll throw in my two cents.

Japanese has very easy pronunciation. Only the r's at beginning of words are hard.

Japanese has very easy grammar. No need to learn different words for subject and object (like I/me), you use markers instead. No need to conjugate differently for first/second/third person, or singular/plural. Super easy conjugation.

Only a few ways to conjugate verbs. "Present," past, volitional, passive, etc.

They have a syllabary, and two ways to write each syllable. Essentially, one for native words and one for loan words. Learn a few characters, easy.

But it is very hard in some respects. It's truly a foreign language, unlike German or Spanish. It's waaaaaaaay different. Some things are totally not intuitive.

They do have more conjugations when it comes to... different social situations, short of. They have short form (like casual), long form (formal), then super long form (super formal).

And of course, kanji. What I study every day is mostly kanji, and even after several years, I can't read very well (just hopping on wikipedia pages in Japanese, for example). HOWEVER, there are ways you can learn kanji much more quickly, and once you start learning them, they actually make learning/figuring out more vocab a lot easier.

Long story short, many aspects of Japanese are quite simple, but it's very different from English, and kanji are hard. Well, tedious is probably a better word, but yeah... them kanji.

[Eldariel]

How hard is English to learn really? I see a lot of references to that. At the very least with English the subject of a verb doesn't change the conjugation much.

English is ridiculously easy to learn in many places because of the amount of natural exposure to it. English grammar is actually fairly complex, mostly due to the amount of exceptions it has synchronically, drawing from the inconsistent historical changes, and English pronunciation has nothing to do with the way the words are written more often than not (why is "knight" pronounced [nait]? Well, there's the loss of the [gh]-sound, the loss of the [k], the vowel shift for the [i]...). Most people I've talked with don't even know English has a subjunctive mood, for instance. Or the proper cases for pronouns in e.g. causative constructions. That doesn't stop people from effortlessly using it correctly in speech. Same goes for all the phrases that use components that don't even exist in English or are based on obsolete grammar (e.g. "kith and kin" for inexistent words, or "until death do us part" for 13th century grammar); English is literally riddled with these, and there are lots of inconsistent remnants from that time. Learning all of it by acquiring it as information would be an immense undertaking.

However, English is among the few languages where, without moving to an English-speaking country, it's possible to actually immerse yourself in the language and acquire proficiency without wasting time on its grammar and orthography, instead of trying to learn it through the pedagogically terrible lectures in university or classes in school (the classes are useful once you reach conversational level but up until that point it's mostly a waste of time trying to memorize grammar).

[AtlanteanTroll]

Perhaps meant as a joke, this is terrible advice.
It is still accurate. (At least to サボる, and a good few other loan-verbs as well.)

[Yora]

I had classes in English, French, Latin, and Japanese. And I really don't see how Japanese got its reputation for being super dificult.

English was easy because it's mostly a dumbed down version of old German. But otherwise I think Japanese is one of the easiest languages I've seen so far. French, Latin, and also German are just brutal in comparison.
The only complication I see with Japanese is, that everything you already know about other languages will be completely useless. Doesn't really matter how many and what languages you've already learned, when you start Japanese, you will be just as clueless as anyone else.
When you want to translate a sentence, you can't just start at one end and work your way down one word at a time. Instead, you need to discern the information that the sentence contains, and then you start constructing a completely new sentence from scratch, that holds the same information. It may be a bit unusual at first if you're familiar with European languages, but not terribly problematic once you've done it a few time. Because Japanese gramar is very simply (though a bit more complex than English) and precise word order usually doesn't matter.

What probably scares a lot of people is the script. Hiragana and Katakana are basically different alphabets which you just have to learn. Repeat it often enough and you got it. The Chinese characters are a different matter. The common estimate is that you need about 1000 characters to be able to read most things, while most Japanese people know about 2000 characters. There's a lot more, but they are not often used and many people don't even know how to write them.
1,000 sounds a lot, but the first 200 are the hardest part. There is a relatively small selection of elements, of which usually two to four are combined into a character. Once you know about 200 character and are familiar with most of the elements, learning new characters becomes a lot easier, since you can memorize them simply as "sun plus life plus two brooms".

It's a lot of work to memorize the rules and characters, but the rules themselves are actually very simple.
And to be able to get a good idea of what is going on in a manga (which has picture's that show the situation and form more or less coherent stories), you actually can get by with really poor and rudimentary Japanese.

Perhaps meant as a joke, this is terrible advice.
Yes, it's terrible. But the Japanese do it all the time.

[danzibr]

It is still accurate. (At least to サボる, and a good few other loan-verbs as well.)
I can think of very few verbs constructed this way. Perhaps I'm just ignorant.

Yes, it's terrible. But the Japanese do it all the time.
Is this just slang or something? In my studies I very rarely came across this.

[Sallera]

Perhaps meant as a joke, this is terrible advice.

It wasn't intended as advice (I'm not sure to whom such hypothetical advice would be directed); I was just poking fun at the contortions Japanese loanwords tend to go through. English, for example, tends to just steal words wholesale (although I'm sure there are instances where it's just as guilty), but a given loanword in Japanese is likely to have undergone at least one of steps 3-5. (Other examples: コンセント (konsento), from concentric, means 'electrical outlet'; マンション (manshon), from mansion, actually 'apartment.') I wouldn't call it slang, just part of the language.

On an unrelated note, after starting on Finnish last night and being reminded that subject-verb agreement is a thing again, I miss Japanese grammar already.

[noparlpf]

Kana are pretty easy to learn, so if you don't mind people thinking you're stuck in grade school and you don't mind only reading things with furigana (like manga for kids) then Japanese writing isn't too bad.


Most people I've talked with don't even know English has a subjunctive mood, for instance. Or the proper cases for pronouns in e.g. causative constructions. That doesn't stop people from effortlessly using it correctly in speech.

Most native English speakers never use the subjunctive mood properly in speech... When they do, it's because the subjunctive form of the word is the same as the indicative form, or because it's easy to phrase a sentence such that the indicative form fits. The only verb that should really change in the subjunctive is "to be", with "was" becoming "were". Almost nobody does that.

Anyway, yeah, English grammar and pronunciation are ridiculous. Most native speakers don't even know a lot of the finer points of grammar.

[AtlanteanTroll]

Is this just slang or something? In my studies I very rarely came across this.

Nope, not at all. Perhaps a newer verb, but not slang.

It's right there in Genki, Volume I, Chapter 11.

[Eldariel]

Most native English speakers never use the subjunctive mood properly in speech... When they do, it's because the subjunctive form of the word is the same as the indicative form, or because it's easy to phrase a sentence such that the indicative form fits. The only verb that should really change in the subjunctive is "to be", with "was" becoming "were". Almost nobody does that.

With a few significant exceptions, at least from what I've observed. "It's time we left", for instance. There's also the marked third person that seems to be easily enough corrected; "It's important he go" or "It's critical that he be protected", for instance.

[noparlpf]

With a few significant exceptions, at least from what I've observed. "It's time we left", for instance. There's also the marked third person that seems to be easily enough corrected; "It's important he go" or "It's critical that he be protected", for instance.

Those forms match other conjugations of the verbs anyway.

[Eldariel]

Those forms match other conjugations of the verbs anyway.

All the subjunctive forms do (including 'were'; on the surface the irrealis 'were' looks the same as the past plural & 2nd singular of 'be'); the fact that if it weren't for the speakers unconsciously using subjunctive, those forms would be 'leave' ('left' expresses modal remoteness), 'goes' and 'is' respectively. But it is my experience that at least a significant portion of the British would use the subjunctive in those cases quite naturally (of course, I cannot speak for Americans; as it happens, most of my interaction with natives has been with Brits). Which was my point; there are certainly either set phrases or just situations where natives use subjunctive with ease without ever realizing they're doing it.

[noparlpf]

Rather, you can usually can form a sentence that's indicative or imperative that uses the same verb form you would use in the subjunctive.
"We should go" vs "It is necessary that we go," for example. Both use "go" rather than, say, "went."

[danzibr]

It is still accurate. (At least to サボる, and a good few other loan-verbs as well.)
I can think of very few verbs constructed this way. Perhaps I'm just ignorant.


Nope, not at all. Perhaps a newer verb, but not slang.

It's right there in Genki, Volume I, Chapter 11.
サボる itself, yes, but I'm wondering about the "good few other loan-verbs as well." I said, "I can think of very few verbs constructed this way." I do indeed acknowledge サボる, but with so many years of Japanese, the only other that came to mind without googling was ダブる. You can slap する on damn near anything, but just る itself is, I would say, very rare.

Oh, and when I was talking about slang, I was talking about slapping る onto things in general (if that wasn't clear).

[AtlanteanTroll]

サボる itself, yes, but I'm wondering about the "good few other loan-verbs as well." I said, "I can think of very few verbs constructed this way." I do indeed acknowledge サボる, but with so many years of Japanese, the only other that came to mind without googling was ダブる. You can slap する on damn near anything, but just る itself is, I would say, very rare.

Oh, and when I was talking about slang, I was talking about slapping る onto things in general (if that wasn't clear).

Ah, I didn't mean る specifically, I was speaking for Sallera's rule as a whole. Which would include the highly common する.

[Grytorm]

Okay. I am not that seriously thinking about Japanese anymore but I might still try at some point as a dedicated second language. But just from this thread I have to start to wonder what do Japanese Keyboards look like? And how are the complex forms forms of the characters described?

[noparlpf]

Okay. I am not that seriously thinking about Japanese anymore but I might still try at some point as a dedicated second language. But just from this thread I have to start to wonder what do Japanese Keyboards look like? And how are the complex forms forms of the characters described?

Looks basically like an English keyboard. It has a few buttons like "Shift" or "Fn" so each button can have multiple functions. That's how you fit English, katakana, and hiragana onto one keyboard. Then if you want to type in kanji you have to either use the equivalent of an Alt code or Unicode, or text processors will have a little dropdown menu as you type in hiragana that gives the option to select kanji with those pronunciations.

[PallElendro]

What do Japanese Keyboards look like?

http://i2.minus.com/ihQ52avnNEYzv.jpg
Looks like your average Western keyboard, but with Japanese characters on the keys.

[AtomicKitKat]

My 2 yen.

I started out with Chinese dialects(aurally/orally), then English(likewise), then around Kindergarten(pre-school 1-2, age 4-6) learned how to write the 2. Around age 10, partly due to personal problems as well as the start of a rebellious streak, my Chinese standard dipped. Long story short, I flunked my high school Chinese(though I probably still know more than most beginning non-native speakers).

My brother on the other hand, has picked up Spanish and Japanese in university, along with self-learning Tamil/Urdu(East Indian), Hangul(Korean) and even Arabic.

I used to "cheat" learn Japanese by asking my brother how to pronounce this and that, and more recently, Wikipedia and Google Translate have been immensely helpful(that Google can pick out the closest words to my chicken scratches is endlessly marvelous).

Point... Coming from a Chinese background, I found Katakana the easiest to learn, since it's essentially "Chinese Word after multiple amputations". If you can find the Chinese word the pronunciation most closely resembles, it's almost like a cheat-sheet. Hiragana is still very difficult for me(not helped by the sheer number of overlappingly similar characters, as well as how different most of them are from the Katakana equivalent). Kanji is...interesting. Knowing what the word is in Chinese is sometimes useful for translation, sometimes not. And I guess to a Chinese speaker, Japanese can sometimes seem backwards.

Example: Fireworks in Chinese is Huo3Hua1(lit. Fire Flower), but in Japanese, it's Hanabi(Flower Fire).

[danzibr]

Ah, I didn't mean る specifically, I was speaking for Sallera's rule as a whole. Which would include the highly common する.
Ooooh, including する? Then yeah, I agree. **** tons of those.