Comments by "Yo2" (@yo2trader539) on "How to become fluent in Japanese in 2024" video.

  1.  @lokelosk  It' difficult to explain. We're used to hearing regional and generational dialects. We're also used to hearing Japanese spoken by Koreans and Chinese. Koreans sometimes struggle with certain phonetic sounds, and Chinese with grammar. But some foreigners are able to master the flow of Japanese. Peter Barakan is a prime example. When I saw him on Japanese TV as kid, I honestly thought he grew up speaking Japanese at home in Japan. (He's from the UK, and perhaps his part Burmese upbringing helped him.) It's not simply about pronunciation, pitch-accent (intonation), expressions, phrases, or word choices. The most impressive is the "Ma (間)," or timing/pause between words and sentences when he speaks.
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  2. I don't think studying English will ever make me English.
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  3. There are regional and generational variations. But everybody would understand formal Japanese, a.k.a KEGIO. You'll get used to regional dialects quickly, so I'd work on formal Japanese. Good luck.
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  4. I think people who are fluent and regularly watch enough Japanese news programs, drama, movies, YouTube, etc are able identify how a man and women speaks in Japanese. There are certain phrases that mostly women/men use...and they'll pick up on that too. I don't think it's text books or learning apps will have any impact because they keep the Japanese pretty "standard" and "neutral."
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  5.  @fuelaccum3398  It highly depends on your native tongue, doesn't it? Japanese may be one of the most difficult for native English speakers. But I've met a number of Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Russians, and ethnic Koreans/Mongolians from China who speak near native Japanese. For many of them, Japanese would be their 3rd or 4th language. Yet they speak Japanese far better than most native English speakers in Japan. I'm always impressed with people from former Soviet Union. Their universities probably have one of the best language/culture programs in the world. If you've studied Japanese linguistics, you may have read work from the late Alexander Vovin. He received his education/training in Soviet Union in Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg). He was teaching in the US, and was translating Japanese diaries from 13th century into English. To translate between 2nd and 3rd language is beyond belief. It's obviously the easiest to translate a foreign language into your mother tongue.
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  6. 3年間でそれだけ書けたら凄いと思いますよ。外国語を学ぶ際に、子供向けのテレビ番組を観たり、子供向けの本を読むことから始めるのが有効かなと自分は感じてます。そうやってネイティブ・スピーカーの子供が辿るプロセスを真似るとスムーズに吸収できるように思います。ご興味のある分野の動画を観たり、小説を読んだり、音楽を聴くのもを有効かなと思います。日本語のYouTube番組も多いですし、色々な方法があると思います。日本のテレビやYouTubeを『日本語字幕』で見るのも良いと思います。
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  7. And for the same reason you've mentioned, a European language (including English) is difficult for Japanese people too. We cannot translate word for word, thus we have to memorize an entire expression or phrase. There is a famous Swedish lady on Japanese public broadcasting (johannainjapan). Her Japanese is near-native. So I don't think it's impossible for a Swede to master Japanese. I would highly recommend following the advice from the Austrian lady in this video. Just listen to music, watch TV, YouTube, movies in Japanese in your free time as part of entertainment. Grammar is pattern recognition. The more you're exposed to it, the more it will make sense. Just based on my personal experience, Europeans seem to be able to master Japanese far better than Americans. There are French, Germans, Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Hungarians, Brits, Ukrainians, and Russians who have near-native fluency in Japanese. And I think those from former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have one of the best language abilities. We have witnessed some Ukrainian refugees without any Japanese training reaching N2-JLPT in just 2 years in Japan. Just looking back in how much I struggled learning English, I cannot imagine myself mastering Ukrainian/Russian in just 2 years.
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  8. Learning Japanese would probably be much more intuitive for a Hungarian than other Europeans...because the original Magyars are from Siberia.
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  9. Depends on your native tongue. Mongol, Korean, Turkic, Hungarian, Finn, or Estonian speakers have grammatical similarities. Ethnic Mongols/Koreans from China will be near-native in 2 years. And Slavic/Russian and Romance/Latin language speakers find Japanese pronunciation to be intuitive. We've witnessed some Ukrainian refugees without any prior Japanese skills reaching N2-JLPT in just 2 years. We've also have seen Georgian Sumo Wrestlers speaking near native Japanese.
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