Hello everyone, I am a beginner language learner learning my first language (English). I am Turkish. I want to learn 3 languages. English, Spanish, and Japanese. It has been 2.5 months since I bought LingQ. The reason I bought LingQ is that I have a hard time with grammar. The structure of English is the exact opposite of Turkish. The method of learning a language intuitively by reading and listening appealed to me. There is something that has been bothering me lately and it is eating me up. I can’t help but wonder if I started with the wrong language. I did some research on Japanese recently and saw that there are incredible similarities. I already knew it, but it is much more similar than I thought. It seems like learning Japanese will be easier for me. I am thinking about whether I should stop learning English and start learning Japanese, but I can’t decide.
My question is, will learning Japanese make it easier for me to learn English and Spanish? Will the experience gained from learning Japanese provide an advantage in English and Spanish? Or am I wrong? Can you please write your thoughts. Correct guidance would be very valuable to me.
I would say the more different to your native the better. It makes you brain more flexible. I wouldn’t read too much into the difficulty this early. Learning a language a long journey and you don’t get the benefits immediately. Although learning any second language helps with subsequent languages, it will help even more if languages are more related. Like learning spanish or english is halfway to learning the other.
First foreign language is always the hardest, relatively speaking. I would concentrate on one that you find would be the most useful at this point.
I’m mainly learning Greek but improving my French on Lingq. They are very different languages so I don’t get confused much at all. Overall, there is a broad practices and attitude of knowing about comprehsnsible input and practicing each day. Every 100,000 words I read, I easily notice an improvement.
You´d better focus on spanish language. It is the second most spoken native language after mandarin chinese. I am learning chinese and I really enjoy it. Foucs on listening and reading when possible. Talking will come by itself.
Choose the one that attracts you the most. Leave out any considerations about “usefulness” or didactical considerations.
You’re going to experience difficulties, and moments were you’ll think that you’ll never get it, no matter which one you decide upon. A solid will of learning will make you much more resilient against quitting, and motivated to waddle through the less motivating moments.
ps. English, with the same script system, has to be easier for a turk, compared to Japanese, no matter if the syntax in the latter language is closer to Turkish, no?
Hello! I am a native English speaker who also speaks Spanish, and I’m learning Korean as well.
My opinion is that it depends on your goal. If your goal is to learn English, learning Japanese will probably not help you very much. Japanese vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and everything is very different from English. It would be better to either 1) focus on Spanish first, since it has some similarities with English (and even then, the similarities are not very strong. It will still be difficult to learn English afterwards) 2) Just keep going with English even though it’s hard, it will get easier with time. (Trust me, Korean grammar is a nightmare for me, but I am finally starting to understand more, after persisting for a few years)
If your goal is simply to learn a bunch of languages and have fun while doing it, learn the one that seems the most fun to you! If you want to do Japanese instead of English, go for it!
Hello, thank you very much for your answer. We also use the Latin alphabet in Turkish, but in terms of structure and usage logic, it is the exact opposite of English. Japanese and Korean are agglutinative languages ​​like Turkish. Small suffixes are added to the end of words and new words are formed. Although not completely, Japanese can be written as it is read, just like Turkish. All of these seem like an advantage to me. It would be nice if someone who has had a similar experience before wrote about what they experienced. I wrote it with Google Translate.
Hello, I understand you very well It is not easy for a native English speaker to understand Korean. You are experiencing the same situation as I did with English. It is a nightmare for me too. I know that English is very difficult to understand for Japanese people. First of all, I thought about starting Spanish. I heard from some people that Spanish is easier to learn than English. The reason I started with English is a bit economical. Thank you for your answer.
I am a native speaker of English who is an advanced speaker of Japanese.
Japanese was not my first language. I’d studied Spanish first in elementary school briefly then in middle school till my first year in university. I now am spending most of my time on LingQ in Italian, though I do some audio books and podcasts here to keep up on kanji and some vocab.
The first steps in Japanese thus were not so hard. I found speaking and making sounds not so difficult. Hiragana and Katakana were not so hard to learn. Kanji after the first 500 or so was harder but I think with more practice I started recognizing more and more and then using them on occasion.
It depends what you want to get out of it. I think English globally is more key and unless you have a profound interest in Japan, it is the way to go. Even from there you can connect with others into Japan as English is a common international language on websites, forums, etc, and many things are translated Japanese to English vs Japanese direct to Turkish.
Turkish is much more agglutinative than Japanese. Japanese has almost no agglutination. Japanese uses “particles” (small words) instead of case endings. Its verb changes are simple: past/present, yes/no, casual/polite. Verb have no “I/we/you”.
Learning Japanese will NOT make English or Spanish easier. J is not similar to those languages. Plus it uses a difficult writing system: perhaps harder than Chinese. The others use a Latin alphabet, almost the same as Turkish.
Spanish has many verb endings for person (I/we/you), tense, conditional, etc. A Spanish verb conjugation page looks like a Turkish one.
Learning any second language will make learning the next more easier (as long as you learn it to a high level). It’s not about how closely related they are or if there is some crossover that you can use to learn the next language (although that helps even more). It’s purely that learning a language makes your brain more flexible, for example recognizing patterns within the language. L2 (as in non native second language) uses different part of the brain so in essence it’s like training a muscle that you haven’t used before. No matter what you use it for in the future, it’s always better prepared.
Whether the particles / suffixes are written as separate words or attached directly to the word they refer to is purely a spelling convention. Because of the kanji characters in Japanese, there is no choice but to write these suffixes as separate words (i.e. “particles”). In languages with an alphabetic script, direct appending as a “suffix” is not a problem, which is why it is often (but not always) done this way there.
And the suffixes in agglutinative languages are not case endings, but simply suffixes.
I have been learning Korean for a while, which also has a reversed word order compared to my mother tongue and other languges I had come into contact before. In the beginning this seemed like the biggest issue. It is not - I realized later in the learning process. Yes, the word order really took quite some time to get used to, but acquiring the thousands of words necessary to understand a language is taking a lot longer.
It is not easy for a native English speaker to understand Korean. You are experiencing the same situation as I did with English. It is a nightmare for me too. I know that English is very difficult to understand for Japanese people. First of all, I thought about starting Spanish. I heard from some people that Spanish is easier to learn than English. The reason I started with English is a bit economical. Thank you for your answer.