Help which do i pick?

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s1wspartan
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Help which do i pick?

Postby s1wspartan » Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:18 pm

Hello world...Ok this is another 'which language should i learn'....sorry. But it's a little different situation.

I'm trying to hurry up and finish my transfer degree and go to a 4-yr institution to get my bachelor's. A couple schools I talked to one of the requirements is 2 semesters of a foreign language.

That threw a curveball in my schedule plan. So this upcoming semester I need to take a foreign language so I can meet that requirement by next fall semester and transfer. So now its late into registration. The school offers Spanish, French, German and Japanese. I had planned to take Spanish first choice, then French. But hesitated because they only offer total online class. I don't want to do a 100% online class for my first language course. Seems crazy thats all they have, really just kind a crappy. Anyway, so I have to choose between German and Japanese now, because the Spanish and French classes are all full.

I took German 20 years ago, so don't know it, but my only foreign language class exposure. Really my first choice I want to learn Latin, but that's not an option. I tried Mandarin on my own for a while. I have a goal to learn Mandarin eventually. The German instructor is supposed to be really good, I know the Japanese instructor and she is yawesome. But I'm afraid taking Japanese, would not help at all if I want to learn Mandarin. Especially if less than a year later I'm at a 4-yr school and taking Mandarin classes.

If I had to pick between living in Germany or Japan, I think I would pick Germany. Nothing against Japan, but mainly the cost of living is so insane there.

So...I really need any advice should I take German or Japanese...or do I just take a hit and wait for Spanish next semester. The ripple effect will be either I end up in community college and extra semester and transfer a semester later, or end up having to transfer to a school that isn't requiring two semesters of language.

Good:

German - Have a tiny bit of exposure from a long time ago, there is a German town nearby where I live (Frankenmuth, MI) like a little bavaria lots of German speakers there, Germany or Austria or Switzerland would be countries I would like to live

Japanese - The instructor is great, know I would get a good grade in the class, might be more pragmatic for the international business world than German, might help if I want to go on to Mandarin soon (???)

Bad

German - Will it really be much use outside of the couple of German speaking countries ?, is it a poor choice for my first second language?

Japanese - Will it just be a waste of time and have to brain dump it when I start learning Mandarin? Does it make much sense to learn if I don't have big plans to spend time in Japan someday? Is Japan even affordable if I wanted to live there? Or is it a pipe dream like saying you want to move to San Fran area, it's only $4k a month for a 1-bd

Thanks in advance. I posted this on another forum. Need to decide in next few days so I can register...German or Japanese? Or wait till I can take Spanish, but mess up my schedule plan.
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Speakeasy
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Nov 21, 2019 7:58 pm

Welcome!
First, welcome to the forum! Now then, it seems to me that the manner in which you have framed the question and your preferences leads inexorably to studying German rather than Japanese. Pick German.

Ease of Acquisition
For native speakers of English, German is vastly more easy to learn than Japanese. Pick German.

Affinity
You have a stated preference for living in a German-speaking country. Culturally and linguistically, you would have an easier time blending into German, Austrian, or Swiss society than you would in Japan. My advice would you pay no heed to the Sirens who would lure you upon the shoals which protect the Japanese coastline. Pick German.

Usefulness
About forty years ago, my best friend, a second-generation Japanese Canadian, in a desire to connect with his linguistic, cultural, and ethnic roots, spent several years living and working in Japan. This was at the time of the “Japanese Juggernaut” which was supposed to result in Japan's economic and cultural world domination (um, er, we’re still waiting). When he learned that I was studying Japanese, he suggested that I abandon all efforts and stick with my native English. Why? Because, even as a heritage speaker (he had learned the language from his parents and spoke only Japanese with them in the home), he found that achieving a near-native linguistic and cultural skill to be a much greater challenge than he had ever anticipated. Furthermore, despite his ethnic/racial heritage, he found his work colleagues to be insufferably arrogant, openly racist, and contemptuous towards him (they called him a “banana”: yellow on the outside, white on the inside). Finally, having thought carefully about the “Japanese Juggernaut”, he firmly believed that the language itself was insular; that is, with the rarest of exceptions, it had never expanded beyond its borders and that it never would. He believed that the current-at-the-time Lingua Franca would remain dominant, that they might be challenged by Mandarin, but that learning Japanese was a dead-end that only fetishists might wish to convince themselves as being a laudable enterprise. Pick German.

A Gateway to Mandarin?
Question: How similar/different are Chinese (Mandarin), Japanese, Korean languages/dialects? Answer (George Corely, PhD in Linguistics, University of Wisconsin at Madison): They are three unrelated languages, as far as we know for certain. Korean and Japanese are very similar in some respects (both have very sophisticated politeness systems embedded in their morphology, for example), and some have argued that they could be related, but not knowing more about those languages, I'll refrain from going too far into that. There will be some resemblance in vocabulary, since both Japanese and Korean borrowed heavily from Chinese at various times in the past.

I can say that, looking typologically (that is, in terms of what features these languages share) Chinese would probably be the odd-man out. Korean and Japanese have fairly simple pitch-accent systems (basically almost the simplest tone system possible), while Mandarin and many of the closely-related Chinese languages have contour tone systems (that is, not just relative pitch between syllables, but also pitch contours -- like a little melody within the syllable). Also, most morphemes in Chinese are a single syllable, whereas in Japanese and Korean they can be longer. Chinese also has very little morphology, perhaps only allowing compounding, while Japanese and Korean both have an array of inflectional and derivational suffixes.

Many people get confused by the fact that Japanese is partially written using Chinese characters (kanji in Japanese). It should be noted that what writing system a language uses doesn't have any bearing on whether a language is related to another. Hundreds upon hundreds of languages use the Latin alphabet, but not all of those languages are related to Latin. You can also note that a literate Chinese speaker would not be able to read Japanese very easily -- many of the characters have changed their meaning in Japanese, and the syntax and morphology of Japanese are still totally different from Chinese. – Source: Quora

Conclusion: When it comes time to learn Mandarin, study Mandarin, not Japanese. So, for the time-being, pick German.

Your Goal
You want to fill the second language requirement of your bachelor’s degree. Despite your preference for studying Spanish, the studying/teaching environment has presented you with a dilemma: try to learn an incredibly difficult language or try to learn a relatively easy one. Pick German.

Which Should You Pick?
Pick German.

EDITED:
Expansion of the text.
Typos.
Insertion of "A Gateway to Mandarin?"
Formatting, paragraphing.
Last edited by Speakeasy on Thu Nov 21, 2019 9:04 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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AML
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby AML » Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:00 pm

German
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby rdearman » Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:22 pm

Why not do both?
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby Iversen » Thu Nov 21, 2019 8:54 pm

s1wspartan wrote:I'm trying to hurry up and finish my transfer degree ... {...] So this upcoming semester I need to take a foreign language so I can meet that requirement by next fall semester and transfer.


Take German and only German - Spanish can wait.
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby Xenops » Fri Nov 22, 2019 5:24 am

German--if Japanese is hard for someone that wants to learn it (me), it might prove to be torture for someone that doesn't. Pick German.
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s1wspartan
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby s1wspartan » Fri Nov 22, 2019 6:23 pm

Thanks for all the replies. I think it makes most sense to go with German. Plus then I'll be able to go to Frankenmuth, MI and show off my German skills...lol
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby seito » Sat Nov 23, 2019 2:17 am

This may be counter-intuitive, but if you just need the credits, Japanese may be the easier option. If you take two semesters of German, most colleges will expect you to know a little German. If you take two semesters of Japanese, they'll expect nothing and just give you an A. The difficulty of the language and the difficulty of the class aren't always related.

As for cost of living, Japan just isn't all that expensive, for a developed country. They experienced little or no inflation since the bubble burst around 1992. The real reason not to live there is the work culture.
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby Speakeasy » Sat Nov 23, 2019 10:55 pm

seito wrote:This may be counter-intuitive, but if you just need the credits, Japanese may be the easier option. If you take two semesters of German, most colleges will expect you to know a little German. If you take two semesters of Japanese, they'll expect nothing and just give you an A. The difficulty of the language and the difficulty of the class aren't always related...
I disagree that relying on the low expectations and leniency of the admissions board concerning reputedly-difficult subjects is a good wager in one's academic career. The OP could easily fail the course and receive no credits at all and, without a massive, sustained effort at learning Japanese to at least the A1 level, if not the A2 level, that is precisely what would happen. German may not be a walk in the park, but it is a lot safer than diving into shark-infested waters! ;)
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Re: Help which do i pick?

Postby Querneus » Sun Nov 24, 2019 4:53 am

Speakeasy wrote:
seito wrote:This may be counter-intuitive, but if you just need the credits, Japanese may be the easier option. If you take two semesters of German, most colleges will expect you to know a little German. If you take two semesters of Japanese, they'll expect nothing and just give you an A. The difficulty of the language and the difficulty of the class aren't always related...
I disagree that relying on the low expectations and leniency of the admissions board concerning reputedly-difficult subjects is a good wager in one's academic career. The OP could easily fail the course and receive no credits at all and, without a massive, sustained effort at learning Japanese to at least the A1 level, if not the A2 level, that is precisely what would happen. German may not be a walk in the park, but it is a lot safer than diving into shark-infested waters! ;)

I'm not sure... As seito said, the difficulty of basic Japanese courses may be brought down a lot by the department and professor. Although maybe I'm speaking too much from personal experience here, when one semester I took a Japanese course for absolute beginners and the expectations for students in the course turned out to be abysmally low. In particular we spent far more time getting used to hiragana and katana than I'd ever advise.

And then I'd be in my higher-level French class, where I'd hear some of my classmates say they really enjoyed the French class because the difficulty was appropriate, as opposed to their German class, which was supposedly in the same level, where the pace was brutal.

I am also reminded me of a friend from Wales when, many years ago, he took the bottom-level Arabic course at Cambridge University, and he ended up very annoyed that the first course turned out to consist of mostly getting used to the Arabic script ("something I did the week before the class started", he'd say), with very little vocabulary or grammar taught. (Funnily, he ended up majoring in Arabic, and even worked as an academic translator for a sheikh in the UAE, but that's a long story for another day...)
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