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Comment by schacon

We will absolutely tackle these languages. We're releasing German for English speakers currently in order to learn better how more customers respond to the methods we're using, and German is more complex grammatically for English speakers than romance languages. Also, I didn't speak any German and I think it's important to use your product yourself.

Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. As I mentioned in the post, I studied it for several months. It is an interesting question of how best to approach learning kana and kanji, since that's a pretty difficult thing to get fast at. Memorizing a few hundred symbols isn't super hard, but getting so good at them that you can sight-read takes a lot of time and can be frustrating.

I would disagree that learning any language is easy enough, with or without learning a new writing system. That's sort of like saying that learning the piano is easy enough compared to the violin, just because it's always on key. It's still a lot of work before anyone wants to listen to you play.

No matter what language you learn, if you want to become somewhat fluent, you need to memorize several thousand abstract words, new sounds, new grammar rules, etc. It's always a lot of work in absolute terms. I only bring this up because I feel that it's somewhat harmful to say learning a language can be "easy". It often results in people trying to learn, inevitably finding out that it's still a lot of work and then giving up while blaming themselves for being "bad at languages".

parent schacon 9 years ago

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