At lunchtime today, a Japanese lady at work kindly offered to spend an hour with me practicing Japanese conversation. I get to practice reading and writing, but I rarely get the opportunity to speak.

Let me tell you I found it so hard, stopping and stammering several times a sentence. I have no idea what she thought of me. And she had to repeat herself slowly several times for me to understand her.

We get Japanese visitors at work and we have to speak English to them slowly and carefully. Now that the boot was on the other foot, I can understand what they must be going through.

The two languages really are very different. Japanese has a few English borrowings but that's about it. The word order, sentence structure, and verb tenses are all different to European languages. Adjectives are really verbs, adverbs are really nouns, numbers are more often adverbs than adjectives, there are no articles.

Hopefully we'll have another round next week...



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