Big in Japan: So, you want to learn Japanese... {Gadling}

Oct 14th 2008 5:43AM Hi... stumbled upon this and I have to say, I'd like to politely disagree with you on a couple of points here.

"For the rest of us however, the only way of wrapping of our minds around the linguistic enigma that is Japanese is to spend years and years slaving away over complex characters, grueling grammar patterns and formal phrases that seem to defy all manners of sensible logic."

Nope - check out alljapaneseallthetime.com - a gentleman who became fluent in 18 months, by no extraordinary means. I'm following his method to great success.

Also, kanji are not difficult if you use James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji". I think it's available online. I'm at 1200 kanji after only a few months, and there are people who finish it in 2 months or less for all 2000-odd essential characters.

Japanese is just a regular language... it's not masochistic at all to try and learn it, unless you make it that way. It can be done, just like any other language, but for some reason it has been mystified into this inscrutable secret... but it's not. For people who are serious about learning it to fluency, this kind of "near-impossible" silliness (although popular..) raises tons of red flags!

cheers
km