Languages I have met in my life - part 1

I already mentioned in the previous posts, but again I'd like to talk about which language I have every learned so far.

My first experience of learning foreign language took place when I was 9 or 10 years old. Almost all Japanese people take mandatory English classes at their junior high and high school, but I was so fascinated by the language that was incredibly different from ours and sounded extremely cool for me at that time that I couldn't wait to learn it. So I eagerly asked my parents to allow me to go to a small private English school near my home. There were only 3 or sometimes 4 kids at that school, where we sang English songs (such as the Beatles or the Sound of Music songs) not knowing the meaning, and played games. This first step of language learning was amazing.

About 10 years after that, I took Indonesian, French, and Italian class in my freshman year and Spanish class in my sophomore year in my Japanese university.

Indonesian is very easy to learn because of its simple grammatical structure. For example, they don't have tense; you just say, like "I go to the cafe" and put "yesterday" or "tomorrow" or "in the future," whatever. Sweet. I also felt that its sound was kind of cute when I heard some words like "jalan-jalan" (means "a walk") or "Pagi!" (a casual greeting like "Hi")

Italian and Spanish was a bit difficult, but what was nice about those two languages was that their pronunciation system was similar to that of Japanese. It is great we don't need to care about the difference of sounds, such as between "r" and "l" in English... (this is problematic for many of us because we can't distinguish them! I know it may sounds weird, but it's often a serious problem!)

In that sense, French was really complicated in both pronunciation and grammar. Among those languages I spent the longest time for French class, but the grade was always worst. Meanwhile I like like the way French people talk. Its beautiful sound somehow has a hint of long European history.


Maybe I need more time to talk about my language learning experience, so I will continue this topic in the next post...

How to get the sense of different languages?

This semester I'm taking Spanish 101 class. Though I took a beginner Spanish class for a year about 9 years ago, I already forgot most of what I learned there. Now I'm remembering the sense of Spanish little by little.

In today's class, the professor explained the sentence "Me gusta la playa" as below:

In English we say "I like the beach."
But in Spanish, it's more like "The beach is pleasing to me." So the subject of this sentence is not "me" but "la playa" (the beach).

"Me" in this sentence corresponds to "to me" in English, "gusta" corresponds to "is pleasing." The infinitive form of the verb is "gustar," and it varies depending on "la playa", not "me."

Let's think about English. You change the verb depending on the subject, so you say "I like the beach and he likes the beach too." On the other hand, in Spanish you say "Me gusta la foto y me gustan las gatos." (Please don't care about the meaning of the sentence, it just occurred to me.)

A little confusing, but it's ok so far. I can still keep up.


By the way, I was thinking about why many Japanese people find it difficult to speak in English, and one of the major reason seems to be the word order.

In English we say "I like bananas."
In Japanese we say "私は(I)バナナが(bananas)好きです(like)."

In English we say "I don't like beef."
In Japanese we say "私は(I)牛肉が(beef)好き(like)ではありません(not)."

And after coming to the States I found that this word order problem affects understanding of English to a greater extent than I thought at first. This is just my opinion, but many of us are too much used to unconsciously try to know what the object is before knowing the verb. In other words, especially when we Japanese listen to spoken English saying "I don't like beef," we unconsciously try to first find the subject and second the object, not the verb.

As a result, we think, like, "Ok, this person said something about him/herself because the subject was 'I' and talked something about beef. But what's the matter with beef?" This is because we easily miss the verb and get no idea about if it was "like" or "hate."

This is kind of an exaggerated example, but this kind of thing did occur when I was listen to a long and complicated sentence or attending a speech for a long time. What was interesting is that it happens less and less after I recognized this phenomenon.

So, based on my own experience, clearly recognizing the difference between the mother language and another language may lead to greater understanding of another language.