I’m an American living in Japan right now and have just started to try learning Latin. I’ve been meaning to for years and never got around to it. Why now? Who knows, but I’m finding it a welcome distraction from learning kanji.. ha ha. The only problem is that I keep trying to put my sentences into Japanese word order… that and looking up “dative case” in the dictionary every 10 minutes for the first day I started studying. Gah. Where are the particles and modified nominal phrases??
I can’t believe how much starting to learn Latin has done for my English already though - I’ve never studied European languages before, and suddenly my native language is making a lot more sense now that I see how the original root words were used. There is a lot of “aha!” going on here lately.
Anyone else here who started with English, learned a totally unrelated second language, and is now being simultaneously confused and enlightened by Latin?
Hi! I tried to learn Japanese, but after only like 40 kanji and elementary grammar I gave up because there wasn’t anything I really wanted to do with it besides “READ MAGNA!!11” and I’m not so into that anymore.
When I started Latin I didn’t feel really enlightened, because I do/did Spanish, but it IS fun to be able to break apart English verbs. (introduction!) And to sometimes say “oh yeah, that’s a real sinecure” and “i’m gonna ambulate to CVS” for fun.
Welcome Molly!
I’ve never tried to study a non- IE language before, I imagine it’s a real challenge to learn Japanese (which is why I’ll probably never attempt it ). @Amy: I can see why you would want to know Japanese for reading Mangas, the translations are crap, because you just loose so much in the translation (either that or they hard to follow in Japanese too, I wouldn’t know).
It’s more to do with your manual instinct than brain and it’s so harsh.
).