I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
Also what’s the best resource to learn?
I had a friend who was a computer science student and did an additional major in Japanese just so he could read manga in original language. It can be done but requires a lot of dedication.
If you are a native English speaker, then learning Germanic and Romance languages will be easy because they have much in common. With Japanese, there’s no real evolutionary commonality so you really have to just learn a whole new system that doesn’t match your expectations–and from scratch. Example:
1,352
English: one-thousand three-hundred fifty-two Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two
Just the conception of how numbers work is different. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to do this, it would be fantastic. Just know that you have to develop a lot of new intuitions.
That sounds like: 一千 三百 五十 二 (In both Chinese and Japanese Kanji)
“thousand(s)” is one word, there is no separate “place” word lol, doesn’t seem that different from english tbh
I think the better way to highlight the difference with English is the 萬 (10,000) 億 (100,000,000) which becomes the new place value instead of “milllion” (1,000,000) and “billion” (1,000,000,000). 千萬 (thousand-[wan/man]; aka: thousand-[ten thousand]; aka: 10,000,000) become a new word that would be slightly more challenging for English-Only speakers.