In Italian, I reigned supreme. Around this time, I gained the confidence to approach Japanese. Although I had always wanted to learn Japanese, I was afraid. Since I was unable to learn Vietnamese and pick it up from my mom, I thought that learning Japanese was a pipe dream. It only took 16 years, but I did it. For our long delayed honeymoon, husband and I went to Italy.
Like Japan, Italy had quite the reputation to live up to. I imagined a boisterous and passionate people, pasta and pizza of the highest quality, and vast landscapes of rolling hills with cypress trees and the glow of the Mediterranean. As I sat on the patio of our hotel that was perched on the hills of Florence, waiting for our morning taxi to pick us up, I stood and looked out to the city below.
The bridges near Palazzo Vecchio. The vineyards and hills that stretched on beyond the city limits and to the horizon. The birds were singing. I was full from the breakfast of fresh honey and fruit from the local villa garden, and the morning mist was clearing up into a beautiful, blue day.
However, Italian showed me that I was not only good at learning languages—but there was nothing I enjoyed more. In the mean time… arrivederci! And how he made the class hate you. Italy is so fucked up currently, and yet so amazing in terms of beauty, history, and culture.
And food. Yes, Italy is fucked up right now. In one mid-sized city we saw the political extremes played out. There was a group of young and some middle aged Italians holding up signs and chanting phrases that were in support of helping refugees. On the other end of town square, we saw the other camp telling refugees to go back where they came from.
It made me happy to see the anti-racist crowd in larger numbers. It made me realize that, despite what I hear on the news, there are still a lot of progressive Italians in the country. But yeah. But I think just like in the US, they are quite divided. Did you speak a lot of Italian when you went there? Or did you forget mostly everything these years? Somehow Chinese occupied all my language-related brain space. I guess she thought it was the best for you, but it must have been very difficult for her!
Pick out words on signs, newspapers and in books. With Japanese, seeing a Kanji Character gives you very little clue about how to read it. So the written language must also be intensively studied to be able to read any writing accessible to a normal literate adult.
Ethnologue reports that Japanese is the ninth most spoken language in the world, by number of speakers. Read the original article on Business Insider UK. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies.
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Already subscribed? Log in. Forgotten your password? Want an ad-free experience? If they actually do want to live in or visit Japan, knowing some Japanese would be much more helpful than knowing some Italian. I would only be taking it to learn the basics.
I still advise against it though. For example, PhD programs in math often require students to pass a reading test of a non-English language that math papers may be written in e. French, German, Russian ; such tests are mainly concerned with whether the student can read a math paper written in that language and understand the math, rather than being able to converse with a native speaker in that language.
Or may be fluent but illiterate. The Modern Languages Department at my school is growing tremendously and will be soon be offering minors in the languages where they only have the first four semesters. I recently went to a campus event where employers and companies from around our area came and spoke about the advantages of having a foreign language education, be it a full major, a minor, or even just some experience.
There was a company with a Japanese headquarters, and they said they really like to hire people with Japanese skills so that they can communicate with their higher-ups, translate some documents, or maybe even make business trips out there.
Japanese programs are shrinking, not growing.
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