Shamoozal.com - Smorgas Board

One of the transfer requirements at school here is to take a semester of a foreign language. Now, I've always wanted to learn Japanese since I started playing games and watching anime. The downside being I hate 90% of people who watch anime, and everyone I've met at school that's taken that class has been one of those people, and also the class is supposed to be really difficult.

Should I (try to) take it!?

Sure.

no. spanish is more useful in real life. unless you are planning on going into the tentacle rape monster business.

You should, Japanese is really useful for the game industry or animation industry, I'm still in the process of taking japanese courses. It's just a bunch of memorization of the alphabets.

I'm with Irate, go with Spanish. It is way more useful than Japanese in this country.

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Well, my dream job is to do something in the games industry, and it would be useful in that area. If I learned Japanese, I could translate all those wacky japanese game show clips for you all....so that's something.

you could translate books to japanese and then back to engrish and create hilarious results like this

If it's for a career in games then go with japanese, I plan to move over there in a couple years for animation, so It's needed, they don't really bother with english over there. Also being fluent spanish doesn't seem to great, maybe one semester of spanish would be useful.

Well, there's only 2 Japanese classes and they're at really shitty times. I'll probably just take Spanish, and maybe take this another semester.

I was just going to say this. hahahaha. Especially where you are. It's practically a 2nd main language.

But I've always wanted to learn German. It just sounds so cool.

And no offense to pretty much everyone here but most Westerners are just pretty plan bad at learning Asian languages. They just don't have the ears for it. The sounds are too different and they just end up sounding like fools. Conversely, just think about how the hardcore Asians sound when they have a heavy accents. Yeah, that's right, that's how you sound to them when you try to speak their language. Except much worse.

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

J'aime la français. C'est ma langue préféré avec l'exception de l'anglais. Mais c'est une lague un peu étrage et difficile avec la grammaire.

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Take Mandarin (Chinese). You'll need it once China invades the U.S.

well then i like your style mr casse

I'd rather those damn Spanish speakers learn how to speak the damn language we speak here. Fuckers.

agreed. but lots of businesses are targeting the interlopers because they have lots of untaxed income.

hahahaha! I can't believe I actually know what the hell you wrote, got to love our nation's two languages, though I could never speak it and people say words too fast for me to get in a natural setting. I guess being in Ottawa has its uses though.

Nick wrote: "I love French. It's my preferred language, with the exception of English. But, this is a language that's a little strange, and the grammer is difficult." (modified a little, from the little translation)

As to Dante, take whatever you want, there's no such thing as "one language being better than another" to learn. I doubt you will seriously need Spanish unless you plan on working for the CIA in helping to fuck up South American countries more. Arabic is great to learn, so is just about any European language. Mandarin, Cantonese etc. is also great to learn for business just as Japanese is.

However, Asian languages are among the hardest to learn in the world, and is especially difficult to someone with an English ear. The reason why English is "the hardest language to learn" is because of how bastardized and clunky it is, and you are used to the non-sensical and bastardized nature of our broken language, so a lot of languages out there with any semblence of logical structure just becomes retardedly hard because you want to use English grammar in forming sentences.

Also, with regard to a lot of Asian languages, there are many words that sound ridiculously similar to one another that a lot of Western ears cannot pick up the subtle variations between words, and further, have a problem of holding syllables too long, making the wrong sounds with your mouth etc. and make it hard for people to understand you. Still though it is doable, my Polish friend has spent two years working in China and can *sort of* speak their language now

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The hardest part about Japanese is the Kanji. There are thousands of characters to know. Katakana and Hiragana are much easier.

The biggest differences that I have seen in languages since I've been in Cybertron are:

Sounds - in particular, there isn't a different character for L and R sounds, or P and F sounds, or V and B sounds. I think this is true for Japanese/Chinese/Korean

Sentence Structure - order of subject, object, and verb are different on this side of the world compared to the western side. When reading a sentence and translating it word for word, it would sound like "Jin Su Car Seoul Go" instead of "Jin Su goes to Seoul by car."

Lack of articles - "A" and "The" do not exist here.

Levels of respect - depending on who you are talking to, and their age in comparison to yours, you have to use so many different levels of speech. Even if you are 28 and the other person is 27, the tone and words are different.

As far as English goes - yes, it is a very bastardized language. There are words that come from so many different roots, from greek, to latin, german, etc. It gets very confusing.

I am already starting to learn Arabic for my next job. My biggest fear will definitely be the writing of it.

Et Nick, j'aime la français aussi, mais l'anglais est Kickass!

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Elaine: Well, how am I gonna know what movies to see?
Video store employee: We have a wide variety of Thark Picks.
Elaine: Thark's trash.
Video store employee: I'm Thark.
Elaine: [embarassed] Hi.

Vrai, mais le Français sonne sexy.

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Elaine: Well, how am I gonna know what movies to see?
Video store employee: We have a wide variety of Thark Picks.
Elaine: Thark's trash.
Video store employee: I'm Thark.
Elaine: [embarassed] Hi.

Haha!

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N'oublier pas vos accents.

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Mes accents sont trés difficile parce que mon clavier est coréen et anglais.

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Elaine: Well, how am I gonna know what movies to see?
Video store employee: We have a wide variety of Thark Picks.
Elaine: Thark's trash.
Video store employee: I'm Thark.
Elaine: [embarassed] Hi.

Aucun problème Big T OTW, nous parlons le français du Quebec et le sonne de français-Quebecois est très terrible.

We're fastly approaching the extent of my handle on the French language, but I think I said:

No problem Big T OTW, we speak the French of Quebec and the sound of French-Quebecers is very terrible.

(I wish I knew how to say Quebecer French sounds like cats screwing haha)

I'll revert back to English for now though haha.

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Elaine: Well, how am I gonna know what movies to see?
Video store employee: We have a wide variety of Thark Picks.
Elaine: Thark's trash.
Video store employee: I'm Thark.
Elaine: [embarassed] Hi.

Personally i find french retarded, the spellings at least just send me to rage. And kanji is really easy once you can speak the language, you can memorize a couple kanji a day, I'm not sure if it's hard to understand japanese but if you live there for a while you can easily tell what words differ from what, and I haven't found spanish useful, i live in LA where it's supposed to be useful, but as far as business goes I really couldn't care about spanish haha