You'd survive basic Japanese with hiragana/katakana but you won't be able to read a lot without kanji, I think? And kanji is simplified Chinese characters..things that you still have to memorize more than "mix and play around to form words". I used to be interested in Japanese and Chinese language and alphabet but after learning that there are several Chinese dialects..I said screw even dreaming about Chinese and stuck with basic Japanese reading and listening here and there.

Clearly everyone should just learn our language then!

Whenever something on the TV plays with the topic of people from foreign countries learning Filipino..what I hear a lot would be stuff such as..we'd have sentences made by repeating a single syllable (e.g. "bababa ba?" which means " going down?")..and our pronunciation..which is often straightforward and, as I used to label it even when I were a kid, unaffected, that most accents (and being used to pronouncing vowels in different ways) would mangle our language during the process of learning it.

That's what I loved about Tagalog(Filipino), no gender. French drove me crazy. I can't even imagine trying to learn Russian or another language that also has a NEUTRAL gender.

How true that is. Until now i can't for the life of me roll my r. That rule where D becomes an R if it is surrounded by vowels just kills me, especially with the repetition. Kararating ko lang. I can't freakin get my tongue around it. Repetitive syllables are hard to adjust to. I had the hardest time saying Pananampalataya(faith) when I was new. It always bumbled out as Panananananamaplalataya. Something I observed in most other Americans, is that they had the hardest time with object and actor focus verbs. I don't know why it came easier for me, maybe it's just the way my brain tics, but some of them even after 2 years screw up the focuses a lot. They try to say something like 'I read a book', which would be 'nagbasa ako ng aklat' but they say 'binasa ako ng aklat'(becomes object focuse, meaning 'The book read me') or 'nagbasa ko ang aklat'(just plain incorrect, wrong pronouns and noun markers), or they'll say 'binasa ko ANG aklat'(now refers to a specific book 'I read THE book'). I met a lot of foreigners who just couldn't get around that.

I can somehow relate to how they must've felt.

If I remember correctly, one of my weakest suits in our Elementary Filipino classes were those lessons about subject and predicate clauses. They aren't as delineated as English sentences tend to be. Most of my classmates and myself had a hard time learning to dissect our own sentences in that way. And yes, our verb forms must seem messed up, not as easy as adding d/-ed for most words. If some words have the same form across 2 or more tenses, our verbs tend to be different depending on the tense.

You don't really have to emphasize the r versus d..not everyone does it..at least where I'm from. At least it's good to hear you had quite a relatively easy time adjusting to the verbal differences..it saves you from a lot of unfortunate circumstances where you can just be plainly misunderstood.

Kanji isn't "simplified" Chinese characters

Shiri is right — kanji is more like "transformed" Chinese characters, and knowing Chinese does not automatically mean you are fluent in reading kanji. However, it does help a lot!

The unfortunate thing about learning Japanese is being so used to a language without gender, number, or articles and very little verb conjugation. It makes learning Dutch that much harder. (But then, I am told by my Dutch friends that it is the hardest language for foreigners to learn, and that's why all Dutch speak English instead).

Sorry for the wrong term used!

It's the adjective I usually stumble upon, probably because of a simplistic nature to define kanji as Chinese characters without the flourish. And yeah, I've had more than a couple tell me they are still quite different.

Yeah, i've heard some pretty screwy messups. The worst one I heard was a new missionary with basic vocabulary trying to say 'the people killed Jesus Christ', but it came out 'Jesus Christ killed the people'. All it takes is transposing the noun markers.........

My interest in learning Japanese just skyrocketed....

I can speak some Canto fluently but my vocabulary sucks.

From my very cursory study, basic Japanese enough to make yourself understood seems relatively simple. Japanese enough not to make an ass out of yourself, harder. Reading and writing on top of that just ratchets it up more. My favorite thing is still that it's easy to pronounce; English has far more sounds than Japanese, even if we have less letters in our alphabet than they have in their syllaberies.

Japanese also has keigo, or polite speech, as opposed to plain speech, and it's interesting how politeness and being sensitive to relative social status is ingrained into the language itself. One of my teachers for the class I'm taking talked the other day about how just learning vocabulary and grammar is different from knowing when to speak what - we learned polite speech first, presumably because it's less embarrassing to err on the side of formality if or when we speak to Japanese.

A sort-of related example I learned recently is that there are two different verbs for receiving (morau/moraimasu and kureru/kuremasu), and their usage depends on who the receiver is in relation to you, and whether or not they did it out of goodwill or because they were asked. Complicated, but interesting!

Very interesting! Thus, the difference between "They will understand me" and "They will understand me AND I won't come off sounding like an asshole."

While 'the hardest language to learn' is very subjective. It is generally agreed on that for English native speakers Hungarian is the most difficult language to learn, followed by Japanese.

Dutch is actually considered easy to learn for English native speakers. The largest problem is to find someone that will speak Dutch to you. Most Dutch people are so friendly (or impatient) that they'll just switch to English rather than see you struggle with Dutch. Which obviously doesn't benefit your learning curve.

That said English is far easier to learn for us Dutch speakers because we use subtitles rather than dubbing. Subconcious learning ftw.

In Japanese, there are approximately twenty different ways to ask to borrow an object, depending on politeness level. It's pretty intense stuff.

As for Dutch — it's very true that "hardest language" is subjective, and as a student of language, I should know better than to say stuff like that. It's the language that's caused me the most grief so far, though! Especially with pronunciation.

You'd think those weird African clicking languages would be a bitch to try and learn too.

Filipinos are much the same way. When I was new, everybody wanted to speak English to me, it was sooooo frustrating. I think it was 33% they wanted to show off their English(i gather this from the fact all the wealthy will ONLY speak english, so it's a class thing), 33% they wanted to help you or make you feel at home, and 33% frustration with poor tagalog. Heck, when i had been out a long time and was fluent, I sometimes refused to speak Tagalog to the new Americans just cause I didn't want to hear their terrible Tagalog.

Unless I'm sorely mistaken, it's a common (mis)perception among us that fluent English (as opposed to what we term Carabao English and Taglish) is either for scholars or the rich. Someone speaking in straight English would earn a label of "rich" and that may even extend to "rich and haughty". And then you'd see people gape at others who clearly look as middle- to low- class and can speak English fluently. I would like to not call it a stereotypical attitude..but I've been exposed to that sort of scrutiny for as long as I can remember.

Out in the provinces the people that generally refused to speak in Tagalog to me were teachers, and old ladies. Most of the poorer people could understand English i think, but they were more comfortable in Tagalog or Ilocano. Also, anybody that had a background in politics, business, or the medical professions liked to speak English a lot. I could also throw balik-bayans coming from the States into that group. But the farmer, the trike driver, and the uneducated generally spoke Tagalog, and i felt more comfortable with them(maybe it's just because i come from a small town and my folks come from humble circumstances). I don't know how they felt around me though I met a person from Cavite that spoke the best English I have ever heard from a filipino. He sounded like he could be from California.

EDIT: I should note that I have only spent 2 days in Manila, so I can't tell much about the culture there. Remember folks, the Philippines is a very diverse country.

Aye, I agree. I generally like the atmosphere in provinces, or at least those province-raised folks, when it comes to that. Manila is a different place. You'd get to observe a lot of circumstances where rural-bred and urban-bred people are delineated..Personally, I think, even though Carabao English sounds laughable for some, I'm thankful that even those among us who weren't educated in the language can understand and (sometimes) speak enough to carry on small conversations. You'd have so many sides of the views about the language and those that can and cannot speak it in Manila, and I generally find it saddening. Thinking about it, I'd say you were lucky to be assigned to the provinces..the drama, scrutiny and criticism all around is not pleasant around where I'm from.