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A comment on The English Paradox: Four Decades of Life and Language in Japan. Parent comment

Re:The English Paradox: Four Decades of Life and Language in... by foobarian on Thursday November 07, 2024 @10:05AM (#42077247)
I don't know if it's the Indo-European thing or not, but it seems that the writing system is a huge obstacle. In Europe I don't even have to understand a language to be able to read text out loud, just learn a very limited set of pronunciation rules. Even Cyrillic/Greek is a more or less 1-1 phonetic mapping.
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Re:The English Paradox: Four Decades of Life and Language in... by svachalek on Thursday November 07, 2024 @01:50PM (#42079613)
Japanese use 3 different writing systems but 2 of them are simple phonetic systems. The hard one is kanji which uses Chinese characters, there's really nothing you can do about that except memorize memorize memorize.
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