Depending on which English definition of "Land" you're using, it can be 地,大地,国 or something else.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.Japan is often called "the land of the rising sun," so that might be where you got that from. The kanji 日本 means "origin of the sun."
edited 9th Jan '11 12:49:27 PM by INUH
Infinite Tree: an experimental storyThe latter is also commonly pronounced "Nippon" as well.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.I honestly don't think that I could bring myself to learn Japanese. I'd feel like such a dirty weeaboo. Irrational, but oh well.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.It's not exactly an easy language to learn. If I were not Japanese myself, I doubt I would've bothered.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.No offense, but I'm not too convinced that a native speaker knows how hard it is to learn their language.
Er, are you a native speaker?
edited 9th Jan '11 1:19:10 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.I've learned both Japanese and English while growing up but was never quite proficient at either, although better at English. After a while, I kinda stopped bothering with Japanese for the most part but has gone back into it.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.Ah. Well, still, native language acquisition is a very different process from L2 acquisition.
Though, it's probably objectively more difficult for a native English language speaker to learn Japanese than, say, French.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.I imagine they would, given the number of common glyphs, such as (as I just learned) the numbers.
And the problem with the first thing is that it's hard to see from the outside. For example, I used to think that my native language was difficult to learn, after I learned some grammar and some of another language, but having heard testimonials from foreigners I'm no longer so sure.
edited 9th Jan '11 1:42:44 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.It would be difficult seeing it objectively, I agree.
In any case, is your native language Chinese? Thinking of it as Japanese without the kana makes it seem rather difficult, but I suppose it's probably simpler than that.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.It feels like tropers who wish to learn Japanese also want to learn Chinese and/or Russian, for some reason. Maybe I'm just imagining things.
Yes, I tried RTK too. I found it useful.
It did get boring, but I don't think there's a method to learn over 2000 of anything that won't get dull after a while.
edited 9th Jan '11 2:00:21 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!Nah, it's English, I'm boring and average for this part of the internet. I just intend to learn Chinese *.
Chinese and Japanese aren't even in the same language family, and from what I can tell from my reading, they're extremely dissimilar grammatically. But the same is (to a lesser extent) true of English and Latin, and the vocabulary still helps, so yeah.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.If I can remember correctly, Japanese is sometimes considered part of the Altaic group of languages, with Chinese, but a lot of the time it's considered it's own separate language group.
And yeah, from what I've seen, Chinese languages are extremely isolating, more so than English, whereas Japanese is agglutinative.
edited 9th Jan '11 2:03:58 PM by Zersk
ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅCounterpoint: Altaic theory is a bunch of crap >_>
And actually, Wikipedia doesn't include Sino-Tibetan languages in Altaic.
EDIT: Need to stop mixing all these words up
edited 9th Jan '11 2:06:19 PM by Tzetze
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.I was skeptical about learning Japanese, too, and I admit to feeling a little dirty about it, but in the end, I'm doing it for my future as a translator type person. And it's... fun. Kinda. I'm not really finding the language hard to learn at all. If I studied as hard as I did that one day of my holidays, every day, I would be like nigh-fluent by now.

Let me correct some things:
本 can mean "book" or "origin" depending on context, not "land". 人 isn't "people", but "person". People is 人人, often written as 人々.
Most other stuff were corrected later.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.