I am a native English speaker, and also speak two Indian languages fluently (which are Subject object verb and have other grammar similarities to Japanese)
A few years ago, I took a semester of Japanese at university, and felt like I really got the hang of it, since the sentence structure was familiar to me and I am used to learning languages in general. With about 200 hours of instruction and study during that semester, I passed N5, and am actually still able to remember most of the spoken Japanese during my recent trips to Japan.
I wonder if being trilingual and in a SOV language really does help with spoken Japanese, or if I had beginners luck. Like, if I were to take Japanese lessons further to reach a speaking level of N4/N3, could I hit those milestones significantly faster than a regular monolingual American.
Would like to hear the experiences of other bilingual Japanese learners.
10 comments
It’s not so much only spoken, but whole language generally. If something is already familiar to you, you spend less time learning it. More extreme example can be people who know kanji, they usually learn ~1.5x times faster.
I think Koreans have an easier time because the grammar is similar in a lot of ways
I am a native Urdu speaker and there are significant similarities grammatically and Keigo wise. I am not pursuing learning to speak the language but reading comprehension rapidly improved when I stopped using English to learn the language. Most of the sentences just translate naturally if you just translate word by word. Verb conjugation style is also very similar.
My perspective in case anyone finds it relatable or helpful: I speak two SVO languages though my native language (green) has very fluid word order. After the initial difficulty of a new concept I felt like the Japanese word order sunk naturally and didn’t have any issues with it, and don’t believe that my exposure to differently structured languages hindered me, though I did make parallels with certain things in Greek. Its worth noting though that I have had exposure to japanese through anime and games for near ten years now, long before I started learning the language, which may be the reason that it made sense to me quickly.
Former language instructor here. Studies show that speaking/learning multiple languages makes it easier for you to learn a new language. I think the logic behind it is simple – if you know what it means to be a language learner, if you know *how* to learn, then you’re less likely to become demotivated when encountering hurdles and you’re more likely to progress further. Having languages with similar grammar also helps, of course. But I think a lot of it comes down to knowing how to learn.
Yeah I’m fluent with Tamil too and I saw the similarities between the two. I’m learning Japanese in English but recognizing the similarities between Japanese and Tamil helped me understand the former better.
i don’t think “SOV” is the best way to analyze how japanese sentences work. i think the topic-comment model makes more sence, at least to me.
example in hindi:
मैं सेब खाता हूँ।
main seb khaata hoon.
i apple eat is.
here you can see the subject (main), the object (seb), and then the verb (khaata).
example in japanese:
りんごをたべます。
ringo wo tabemasu.
apple <object-marking partical> eat.
here you can see the topic (ringo), and a comment about the topic (tabemasu).
Just for a different perspective, my native language (English) is SVO, but while i’m not very good at japanese I don’t remember the word order causing any difficulties for me, it immediately pretty natural felt.
As a Chinese person, my knowledge of kanji is a blessing and a curse. It makes reading easier since I recognise characters but it messes up my recall of the Japanese pronunciation. The Chinese reading of the characters keep popping up in my head first.
Never got to “fluent” level but studied Latin for a few years and it helped a lot with Japanese.
It has no defined word order but poets often put the verb at the very end. All of Latin grammar is based on the “conjugations” of just about every word in the sentence.