Using the Czech language to learn Japanese?

4 comments

1. > there’s very little resources for learning Japanese from Czech.

   well that kinda solves the problem then

2. I don’t speak Czech, but I speak another Slavic language, and although I found it is an advantage compared to what speakers of analytic languages have to deal with, you shouldn’t expect two different languages to map perfectly. Your advantage is that you don’t need to waste time wrapping your head around the idea that a thingie attached to a word marks its relationship to other words. Also, you’re unlikely to mix up the subject and the direct object (didn’t know it was possible until I saw English speaking learners do just that). It helps to roughly draft certain similarities, but a spreadsheet of what can be what would have to be very long and nuanced to be accurate.

   Like, you put で : 6th case, and the very first example is jsem ve škole. Thing is で as 6th case works for most actions/verbs, eating, working, sleeping. But for being (いる,ある) and living (住む) you’d use に, so your first example falls through.

   Then you have 2. pád: do koho čeho (jít do školy for both に and へ, but there are differences in usage and meaning in Japanese, so assigning the second case to both doesn’t tell you how to use those particles. And there are more particles with overlapping functions, but used with different verbs, grammatical constructions, contexts.

3. I speak Serbian, and I don’t think падежи are quite analogous to particles — there is an overlap in what purpose they serve in sentences but I’m not sure I agree it’s enough to be a useful learning tool. If nothing else, the fact that different Slavic languages use different падежи for analogous sentences kind of implies that they aren’t universal (even among Slavic languages). In particular, particles don’t follow a rigid case system like in Slavic languages so their usage is far more fluid (in my opinion).

   I guess the best you’ll be able to find is a Japanese textbooks written for Czech speakers and see how they explain particles. I don’t speak Czech so I can’t search for you — though I found some Serbian resources so I’m sure there are Czech ones. [I did find a report (in Japanese) outlining common problems Czech speakers had when learning Japanese.](https://www.nier.go.jp/saka/pdf/N08008011.pdf) Maybe you’ll find it interesting?

   Funnily enough, [here is a video from a Japanese guy talking about Serbian падежи (in Serbian).](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN-z2nZca9Y) It’s not clear to me whether he sees a link between Japanese particles and падежи — he says that both Japanese and English have “речице” instead of падежи, which could be taken either way. His examples do focus on particles but I feel that he would’ve used articles as the example if he was talking about English.

4. Slovak here, I’m learning Japanese via English and as you say, being bilingual or multilingual gives you added linguistic/cultural insights, I don’t think Slovak grammar directly translates well. Japanese is just so different, so I’ve actually adopted a blank slate approach in trying to learn the language on its own for what it means.

   Whereas Slovak and Spanish connect really well, especially if you speak English because you have the grammar overlaps from your Slavic language and some Latin roots in English that overlap w Spanish vocabulary.