Japan has changed in important and visible ways • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#391

Post by djtango » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

MagnumOpus wrote: post #330

petodo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Chinese is hard" -> 1.5B people figured it out. Yeah and at least 90% of them were immersed in it since birth at home. Learning mother language while growing is very different from learning foreign language as adult. > Can't understate how hardcore it is. No, it isn't for kids, my kids are trilingual without any issues and much effort, kids are like sponges absorbing new information/languages easily, if you start…

> at least 90% of them were immersed in it since birth at home Bullshit... Maybe at best half of Chinese have Mandarin as a home language - of which half again speak Xinan Mandarin at home which is barely intelligible to a Standard Mandarin (Beifanghua) speaker. So the majority of Chinese learned Mandarin as a second language. And obviously the writing and ideograms is something that every one of them had to painstak…

> And obviously the writing and ideograms is something that every one of them had to painstakingly memorise over 15 years of schooling...

Yeah I've always wondered what the implications of growing up learning an ideogram based language has on your development.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#392

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

petodo wrote: post #215

kleene_op wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty weird to me as well. I don't understand how you could love a country enough to live and work there for a decade but not try to learn its language.

Let me introduce you to wild idea that language is just tool and has nothing to do really with the country/culture. I may loved China (at least first few years) where I lived for years without loving their politicians and learning language (beyond few useful phrase and numbers), same goes actually for many countries I travelled. My kid is citizen of country A, was born in country B and lives in country C speaking lan…

I would be very surprised if in the case you all stayed in C, your kid wouldn't adopt at least some of the culture/ethnicity/values of C, which would be through the language of C (or possibly a C-derived subculture/creole).

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#393

Post by insane_dreamer » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 2:40 PM UTC

> during Wingfield-Hayes’ decade in the country, Japan’s immigration policy changed substantially, and he ought to have noticed

While gov policies are changing, socially Japan is not very open to foreigners. I have friends who were born there, speak the language perfectly, and they're still _gaijin_, or _hafu_ if they're half-Japanese, and will be til the day they die even if they live in Japan their whole lives. This will take a lot longer to change than government policies.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#394

Post by anthk » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 2:40 PM UTC

petodo wrote: post #376

anthk wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which can be filled with help of friend within few minutes? Good luck with Spanish and French tax-related forms. In case of Spain, the documents are full of legalese jargon not even a native can grasp it at 100% without a gov website in an aside tab reading twice or trice the legal terms.

> Good luck with Spanish and French tax-related forms. In case of Spain, the documents are full of legalese jargon not even a native can grasp it at 100% without a gov website in an aside tab reading twice or trice the legal terms. So you say one more reason not even bother trying to learn language for this reason, since you stand no chance if even native speaker can't understand it.

No, it's a reason to talk to a native speaker in its own language to get understood well in order to avoid hard mistakes.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#395

Post by bradknowles » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:16 PM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #384

bradknowles wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife did much better than I did, even though she never became fully fluent. I will agree that I didn't go to a full immersion language school. But we did arrange for multiple tutors, some on our own dime and some paid for by her employer or mine. And we interacted with the people in our neighborhood on a daily basis. I found that those who were Flemish speakers would actively prefer to practice their English with…

How about Flemish then? It's one of the closest languages to English, so did you have an easier time with that?

You must have missed the part where I said that all the Flemish speakers I met wanted to practice their English with me?

I never got a chance to try to learn Flemish. Every single one of those speakers that I met, were also master linguists (whether they acknowledged it or not), and spoke at least six languages fluently, and those were the only ones they admitted to. They also spoke at least two or three other languages with less fluency, and yet they claimed only the ones in which they were fluent.

During the time I worked at Snow, BV (a Dutch consulting company), part of my employment agreement with them was that they would pay for and arrange to have a Dutch tutor for me, in Brussels. By someone who really spoke Dutch, not Flemish. Unfortunately, that never happened.

To my ears, Flemish and Dutch seemed to be the same language. But not to the Flemish people in Belgium -- to them, these are two distinct languages. The Dutch would agree with me.

And to my ears, both of these languages sound like German but spoken with English word sounds. Every time tried to listen closely, it would nearly break my brain.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#396

Post by SkyBelow » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #298

AdamN wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my hair cut by a Greek barber in Copenhagen. He had been there for 12 years and didn't know any Danish. Somebody came in speaking Danish and he said "I'm sorry but I don't speak Danish" and the rest was in English. For many English speakers it's their third or fourth language and the value of Danish is pretty limited - even for a Copenhagen resident. Obviously, that Greek barber would probably love to speak Dan…

> but as an adult, even a decade of effort won't get him to the level any Danish person can speak English. Children don't have any special ability to pick up languages, but they do have certain advantages: they aren't afraid to make mistakes, they are fully immersed in the language from the moment they wake up, they have no responsibilities like jobs and other adult stuff and they have people (parents, school, teache…

>Children don't have any special ability to pick up languages

They do. One example I recall from a neurology class is that the auditory cortex of a young child is able to differentiate more sounds than that of an adult. As a child ages, they lose the ability to distinguish sounds not common in their native language. The inability to distinguish the sounds also applies to the inability to tell the sounds apart when speaking it which decreases their ability to produce the correct sound. There is some research showing it is possible to relearn the ability to differentiate, but this requires training specifically in identifying sounds, not training in learning a language.

This doesn't mean fluency as an adult is impossible, and there are many actions that an adult could take to better align their learning environment to that of a child's which would improve their learning, but we should recognize there are some difference that cannot be replicated in adults.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#397

Post by epups » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:24 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #382

epups wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is not a a lone entity as well. It exists in a concert of nations. It buys and sells products from elsewhere. If you showed how modern Tokyo looks like to a Japanese from only 100 years ago, they would have a breakdown. Meanwhile, to the average Westerner, Tokyo is perfectly understandable, although of course unique. Let's just take one example. John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how…

> John von Neumann - a gasp immigrant - may have more to do with how America looks like today than anybody alive in the 1800s Not at all. Bangladesh, where I’m from, has computers too, but its government, institutions, infrastructure, constitution, etc., are still what Bangladeshis and the British created. Society is a product of culture, and culture runs deep and is extremely sticky.

I'm not sure I understand your point here. All those things you mentioned are not at all a product of the people of Bangladesh alone, they are a collective effort. You live in a system of government invented in Europe, your infrastructure is more and more owned by China, your predominant religion is not from Bangladesh originally. You talk about countries as if they are some independent silos of people who have lived in the area for millennia, and I find that to be absolutely unjustified.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#398

Post by tarsinge » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

totetsu wrote: post #155

karaokeyoga wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived here for over ten years and generally agree with you. I love it here, but I also feel that some westerners treat Japan with a "specialness" or "exoticness" that it doesn't quite deserve.

Yes. I've been here almost that long. Mostly in the rural areas. It's just a nice normal place.. I think there are a few problems with perceptions of Japan. not being part of the anglo-sphere, most of the everyday stuff doesn't make it in front of western eyes. What does is filtered through journalists, like the BBC guy, who have to fit their stories into certain safe tropes. Another big place of interflow of culture…

> Another big place of interflow of culture is with manga/anime subcultures, which are produced and consumed by a very specific part of Japanese society in the first place, then exoticised a great deal by the types of internet communities where it is popular.

More niche but in a similar vein I was a bit disappointed to find not everyone was an extreme metalhead in Norway and that most people were normal too.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#399

Post by Tangurena2 » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #357

hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

Japanese is rated as either the #1 or #2 hardest language for a native English speaker to learn (and the reverse is true which explains why you often run into people with little or no English there as opposed to in, say, Western Europe, where many people are practically natively fluent in English). People can and do learn Japanese, but it isn't something that one can easily learn in their spare time the way English s…

Written Japanese is a difficult language for native Japanese people. One would be in high school before one has learned enough Kanji to read a typical daily newspaper.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#400

Post by brigandish » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 3:41 PM UTC

midoridensha wrote: post #134

ngc248 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I see way more misery in American cities than I ever seen here. The grass is always greener on the other side. Even Japan has misery, but due to their cultural norms you are not supposed to show that publicly, you are just supposed to eat it and grin. Compared to all that the "anything goes" culture of the US is always preferable. (Ofc the US has its own problems)

Things you don't see publicly in Japan are lots of homelessness, crime, and general bad behavior. It's pretty hard to hide homelessness and (violent) crime.

There's plenty of homelessness about in Japan, you don't even need to go to somewhere like Nishinari where it's virtually ubiquitous.