broknkyboard

It's about the same difficulty as Hiragana, you just find less occasions to use it so you get less practice. After you've learned it it's important to refresh your memory every now and then and you should be fine.

Library. A lot of people come really close to getting it right then mess up the stress on certain parts, it should be Lie-Braery phonetically with no stressing on the first R.

My favorite proverb is an old Greek one that says something along the lines of:

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never lie in."

Where I'm from the dialect is so casual and removed from the original language that it's almost impossible to get it wrong, and English is a second language anyway so just getting the words out with some semblance of order is acceptable.

At seventeen, your brain is basically a sponge. Encourage yourself to read books with substance and limit the romance and the sci-fi. You have already developed your imagination and creative side, now is the time to add culture to your thoughts.

I have to disagree about the limiting sci-fi thing. A lot of science fiction books contain deeper messages and complex analogies.

It all depends on the context, but I usually use more complex words in writing/chatting and stick with the simpler words when having a face-to-face conversation with someone.

Yes and no, in Arabic I have a definite and obvious accent (courtesy of the local dialect) but it doesn't affect my English.

Dialects are different forms of the original language. In some cases (such as Algeria in North Africa) the dialect combines two different languages. The Algerian dialect combines French (a result of several years of French occupation) and Arabic. I'm pretty sure only Algerians understand other Algerians.

Unfortunately, no. There are around two hundred of them actually, some based on the area they originated from, others based on the languages of the country the language was created in.

I've gotta say I don't think that's how it works, your name doesn't change when you say/write it in Japanese. Sure, maybe you can translate your name into it's basic definition then translate that to Japanese, but the chart would still be wrong in that case.

I was watching an interview (English audio, Arabic interpreter) once and I noticed the interpreter was getting quite a few things wrong, I thought it was funny until about halfway through when things got really messed up and I realized the interpreter was messing up things on purpose (it was an infamous political figure speaking). It ended up on the news the next day and the people who messed up the interview lost a lot of credibility, it was a really stupid move and I have no idea why they thought they could pull it off, I mean we have basic English as part of our public education system.

Reading the answers in this thread kinda made me question why I'm learning a third language to begin with...

I don't need to communicate with more people, chances of it coming handy in my work are pretty slim, and I'm not thinking of moving to another country... I guess I'm just in it for the challenge and the new perspective.

Cursing in Japanese is inelegant, vague, and harsh, but I'll be damned if it isn't satisfying. It's also famous for being open to interpretation; based on your tone one word could have several different meanings.

Well in terms of amount of speakers it goes:

-Mandarin

-English

-Spanish

However many people believe that Mandarin should not be considered one of the top 3 since it's mainly spoken by the natives of only one country (China), and that country usually teaches other languages as part of their regular educational curriculum. With that in mind the top 3 should be:

-English

-Spanish

-Arabic (the native language of several middle eastern countries)

I mainly use it while typing since I haven't yet figured/gotten used to typing in Japanese and I'm constantly checking the meaning and pronunciation of words with friends over chat. Other than that I prefer to use the Japanese characters as much as possible so as to practice writing and reading. 

I'd have to say Katakana is the harder of the two, seeing as a lot of the characters look alike, with the differences between some of them sometimes being the angle of the slope of a line. Although I've found more occasions to practice Katakana so I guess it kinda stuck faster than Hiragana.

Mainly because it's so different from the languages that I do know. English and Arabic are (in their own respect) are similar to a lot of the languages out there, and Japanese really seemed like the a really removed language from both of them so it would definitely provide a welcome challenge.

All the time! I only notice when I'm halfway through the sentence and realize that I only know the word in a foreign language.

Pros for one universal language:

Better communication, job opportunities in different countries, ease-of-access for the scientific comunity, and easier international trading.

Cons for one universal language:

Decline in diversity of thinking, death of thousands of great expressions and mannerisms that relate to specific languages, and basically losing most of our touch with our cultures and older traditions/heritage.

Also, if I were to pick a universal language it would be a variant of English properly adjusted to make more sense and include more vocabulary and meanings.

Something like this could probably never be implemented properly, and the language chosen would be ruined and grafted to bits by all the joining countries trying to adjust to it.

Scrolled over an old conversation of mine one day and realized I do this, so I decided to just stop altogether. Two days and a few abruptly stopped conversations later my friend tell me I seem bored and/or depressed....

I guess my over-use was really that obvious

Here's the standard for fluency in reading Japanese:

Learn all the Hiragana and Katakana characters.

Learn 1500-2000 Kanji characters.

It's definitely better that you watch subbed anime, since most anime often have breaks in their dialogue where only a few words are spoken at a time, making it easier to pick out a new word. However, this is at best a supplement to actual Japanese studying, and isn't nearly enough on it's own.

It comes in handy when you need one or two single words, but the whole thing quickly falls apart if you try to translate a phrase that's even slightly complex. I've also seen a few funny instances when trying out things in Arabic (for some reason 'super man' used to translate to 'Pikachu', I have no idea why).

I have to know about 2000?! I thought I'd be done by 800 or so...

I currently know about 200 characters so I guess I'm only 10% done, down from 25%.

Mine is the character 時 for time! Sometimes I just randomly write it on things within my reach, and I occasionally have to explain why my arm has weird inscriptions on it to people who don't even know I'm studying Japanese...