Look at this site: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~thoureau/japanese.html, you’ll most likely find a lot of inspiration in it to learn Japanese.

Brazilian dude

quite funny, nice link, tnx.

Japanese grammar is annoying, especially their weird choice of prepositions to go with transitive/intransitive verbs (which also hardly makes sense to me)

norio

I read it, too, and, unfourtunately, it’s too close to the truth to be funny.  It was surely written by a very frustrated young man who has smashed his skull and torn out many strands of hair in his desperate tries to master this language which Mormon missionaries call the Language of the Devil.  
However, I can give a fourth reason to learn Japanese—live there and learn the lingo or sink.  In fact, Japanese people are very lenient to the Gaijin trying to communicate in Japanese since they all are sure no non-Japanese ever can learn it.
What baffels me most is why Japanese is so difficult;  it has no specific word order except that the verb should be placed in the end of the sentence (compare German i.e.) which by that tells you if something is happening, happens or happened (no will or has or had (compare the 99 verb forms of French i.e.)) or not or if it is a question.  The PREpositions are POSTpositions and not so difficult as ... i.e. in English (truly a hell for tests in school).  No plurals and no articles or gender (compare all Indo-European languages).

PS. Actually, if you live there, you don’t have to master Japanese.  There are foreigners who lived in Tokyo for decades only speaking TAXIGO e.g. migi/left—hidari/right—masugu/straight on. (Very necessary since no cabbie in town can find an address the mailman uses.)

What has made me slightly reluctant to dig into Japanese is the multiple readings of the Kanji. But I was rather disappointed when I learned that the University half-pace distance learning course in Japanese was cancelled this autumn.

And, bnjtokyo, I have ordered S&H and Tuttle.

I will definately post this to my friends who already boast that next year they shall take "Japanese" as a collateral subject to their respective careers, among which: Telecommunications Eng., Psycology, Biology, Mechanical Eng…

Ha, and they never got to learning German!! ¬¬

Thank you BD!!

Regards,

      WS.

PS: Funny to see that the species of Japanese students seem to be equal all around the globe.

A large part, if not the majority, of the students of Japanese in Göteborg are students at the school of economy.

Perhaps they bet on Bush’s winning the election -> the dollar will fall even quicker than now -> the US will be isolated from the civilised world, and the Japanese and the Yen will take over.

I get my inspiration more from Tom Lehrer’s

You too may be a big hero
Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, oder English, I know how to count down
Und I’m learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.

[quote author=Iterman link=board=translate;num=1094441487;start=0#2 date=09/06/04 at 05:21:01]...
There are foreigners who lived in Tokyo for decades only speaking TAXIGO e.g. migi/left—hidari/right—masugu/straight on. (Very necessary since no cabbie in town can find an address the mailman uses.)

Pity they haven’t mastered that Tokyo dialect, said to be frequent among cabbies, which pronounces «hidari» as «shidari»....

Henri

I was born in Tokyo but brought up in Nagoya, where people pronounce /sh/ as [c,] (ich-Laut).

Shinkansen (bullet train)—-> hin-kan-sen (poor and cold train-line)
Shishi (Leo)—-> hihi (baboon),
etc.

These are non-existent hyper-Nagoyanisation but I amusingly use them to the bemusement of others.

Flam

Well, yeh Henri, I know.  My Tokyo-born wife offers me koshi (backbone) when she means kohi i.e. coffee.  But on the other hand, I’ve never say räv but rev.