How different my neighbor languages are!!

Hi 🙂
It’s curious, because you choose two language family: romance and germanic
http://goo.gl/jb48g (語族：ja.wikipedia.org)
The reason why both family lenguages use the latin alphabet is because of the christianization
http://goo.gl/e5mzI (拉丁字母發展史：zh.wikipedia.org)
I add you in face book

Hi,
I edited your comment name.
> It’s curious, because you choose two language family: romance and germanic
Yeah, I know about it. But they all are branches of Indo-European languages.
Since the Christianization made them use the Latin-alphabet, they increasingly became resembling each other for a long time.
I think, at any rate, their differences are smaller than the difference between Japanese and Korean.
I feel Japanese language resembles Korean, but linguists say they don’t belong to the same language family.
They say my mother tongue is an isolated language. Probably, we may be poor at foreign languages because of about 200 years closure of the country and this.
BTW, I add you in it, too.

Hi,
> the country was… close?
Yes, that’s what I meant.
Our country had closed itself during 1639–1854. Please read the link below, though it doesn’t explain the much details.
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku

Hi,
I don’t know about it really, but, I feel Japanese language resembles Korean definitely.
So, I think this. (^_^)
If Japanese students don’t meet English but Korean as the first foreign language, they would feel the foreign language more familiar to themselves. Unfortunately, we, I mean Japanese, assume foreign languages are very different from our mother tongue because of learning English as the first foreign language. Most of them think that they cannot get better at English forever. And they begin to feel a feeling of needless inferiority for languages. Oh miserable, we are! (^^;)

(reading it again, the “hey” may sound rude, I didn’t mean that. It was something like please)

Hello,
I was reading your blog and found this discussion quite interesting.
I had not thought much about the many different writing systems used in the world. If most of the world uses latin, cyrillic, arabic or greek scripts, which all have common origin, then in Asia people really have surprisingly many different writing systems, even if the differences in languages are not that big. I wonder if it’s because of having old civilizations, but even so, why would they need to have different scripts? Not all of them are old – people have been creating totally new systems even in the last few centuries (Korean, for example). Elsewhere people just add a few letters to the Latin alphabet to be able to write their language. I remember how I met someone from India and told them about the difficulties of having to translate everything in the European Union into nearly 30 different languages. She said they had the same problem in India, but not only were there 30 different languages, but also a dozen and more different writing systems. Even so, I find the Japanese system of using several different “alphabets” at the same time most fascinating.
I think that Japanese and English are relatively similar compared to others, such as African or American or even Chinese. Sadly, I do not know any Korean, but from what I know being the languages of neighbouring countries can have as much influence as being in the same language family. Since the European countries interact very closely, the words and languages are bound to become similar. Of course, these days almost any language is influenced by English and taken words from there. As to what is considered a language and what a dialect, is often decided by politics – if there is a different country, it is considered a different language, even if it is very similar. For example, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish people understand each other well if they all just speak in their own languages. Ah, also I’d like to point out that Finnish is actually not an Indo-European language. That means that it should be about as difficult to translate between Finnish and Spanish as between Japanese and Spanish. Of course, being in the same region and sharing the cultural background brings more similarities.
I myself find that it is a good idea to choose a not very similar or simple language as your first foreign language. Well, having English as a first foreign language might also have the benefit of learning the Latin alphabet, which makes it a lot easier to learn the next European languages. On the other hand, English pronunciation is difficult to learn, compared to Japanese, Spanish or Finnish. For me, the first foreign language was French, which has a lot more variety in verbs etc than English, so I would consider it more difficult. I also learned the Cyrillic alphabet at an early age and I think that having done these things made it a lot easier to learn the next languages. Actually learning English as a third language was a little confusing, because it was so similar to French and I thought I already knew everything and made mistakes because of that. Of course, if you don’t use the language, you will never get good at it. I think Japan is certainly large enough that people don’t actually need to use English and so it is easy to forget what they have learned. I know that even watching TV in a different language was of more help than simply studying it at school.