What is a Language?

Learning a language is more complex than is conventionally portrayed.

When you are acquiring a language after adolescence (your brain's pathways have changed!), you are a lot more conscious about the various skills that go into acquiring it.

There are four independent skills that you must acquire and it's easy to be proficient at some and deficient at others.

There are two independent axes that can be used to classify them.

1. Whether or not you must process the information in real-time.
2. Whether the information is internally generated or coming from outside.

The four skills fall on the four corners of these ideas:

1. Hearing: real-time and external
2. Talking: real-time and internal
3. Reading: non-real-time and external
4. Writing: non-real-time and internal

As you might expect, real-time makes it harder and having the words come externally (you have no control) makes it harder.

The four skills listed above are in descending order of difficulty.

That's the generic theory. Of course, Japanese being slightly unique will mix up the order a little bit. We'll explore that in a later post.

Introduction

This blog is an attempt to put into coherent form my thoughts while learning Japanese.

I've progressed far enough that I can opine intelligently upon the unique and common features of Japanese linguistics.

The goal is to not only track my progress as I learn new things about the language but also general features that may be useful to other learners as well as lay persons.