General

[quote=Maoden]@yumtoast154 @midvinter
Ahahaha, jealous because I can write a haiku and you guys can't? You don't have to get so defensive.[/quote]

because copy and pasting a random haiku on the web takes a lot of skill. btw, the first person you quoted already passed JLPT 1, so he's by no means illiterate in Japanese.

OT: just study whichever you're more interested in (and more likely to stick with). expect to spend a lot of time (think years) to have any mastery in the language.

too lazy to pastebin and switch keyboards

@Midvinter: It's rare to actually find people that speak Japanese on Basil, let alone in Kansai dialect. I'm honestly impressed, , except I haven't been in a Japanese class in at least 2 years so I'm probably down to the 1,500 kanji I learned in grade school. This thread is really making me feel bad for not keeping my commie and weeaboospeak in shape.
oh, and

@Maoden: Well, I'm not really jealous that you can shamelessly copy-paste a poem from Saigyou, which is why it's in a "dead dialect" and broken into lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saigy%C5%8D

Oh hey, I found the poem line-for-line. Get told.
http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/text/view/76

Japanese. You have Hiragana which is the basic component of the Japanese writing system. Then you have Katakana for foreign words and lastly you use Kanji, which are Chinese characters, with Hiragana to form sentences, names, dates, etc. There are a bunch of word forms, like the te form and I adjectives. And you have particles which modify verbs, adjectives or nouns in a sentence; act as a counter and etc.

[quote=Maoden]That's what I thought. You two are just pulling numbers and ideas out of your ass when you can't even use the language yourself. Now that's [b]sad[/b].
http://pastebin[.]com/mTWNuY1H
Ahahaha, time to wash your clowns. Remove [][/quote]
>kyukana
>dead dialect of the language
>old pronunciations of kana
>broken into multiple lines for no reason

So, am I supposed to make fun of your attempt at classical Japanese or something?
It should have been like this, not whatever the hell you wrote.
http://pastebin.com/Z80txBZ3

Also, let me be like you, and type in a completely different dialect.
Except it's not a dead one.
http://pastebin.com/UX1cbc9H

"Exchange" with this one, as there was nothing for me to reply back to your's with.

[quote=Maoden]That's what I thought. You two are just pulling numbers and ideas out of your ass when you can't even use the language yourself. Now that's [b]sad[/b].[/quote]
You're the one not posting a Pastebin link here.

edit:
>expecting you to flaunt that 50,000 kanji
>it's just 4 kanji covered in JLPT 5-1
>posts a random haiku about man, >feels, and Autumn
http://pastebin.com/ZjkmjzB2

pls senpai, are we still exchanging those "sentences"?

[quote=Maoden]>people thinking they actually know Japanese
>ishiggydiggy
If ya'll are so confident, then why don't we exchange some Japanese sentences through Pastebin?[/quote]
>completely ignoring others' rebuttals and resorting to >le green meme arrow
>thinking using a quote after posting will update the quote status bar
>thinking that Japanese university students learn more than 15k kanji in their life time
>inb4 Googling some archaic kanji to slap randomly around

If you honestly think you need to learn more kanji than there actually are to be literate, I really can't emphasize how deluded or elitist you are. 2,000 kanji is more than enough to hold a conversation.

[quote=Midvinter]Passing JLPT1 doesn't deem you as literate, it deems you as competent. You shouldn't take Japan's official designations to mean anything, as there is deep-rooted linguistic racism in Japan, that gaijin are too stupid to properly learn the language. It's why people in Japan will act amazed if you're able to speak any Japanese, because they consider you some lower animal that isn't capable of learning it. So whatever the Japanese government says is "competent", is them throwing a bone to dumb gaijin, to make them think they're better at Japanese than they actually are. If you want to break past this barrier, then it's necessary to learn a minimum of 10000 characters and 70000+ words to offset your cultural identity.[/quote]
Except passing as JLPT1 means you ARE literate. The exam tests you on 2,000 kanji you'll see on a daily/weekly basis, and they're the exact same kanji Japanese high school students learn. Unless if OP is trying to read/write/talk like a college graduate, there's no need to learn 10,000 kanji to prove your fluency to the yello piggus.

kawaii desu?

[quote=uOnPeriod]So learn Korean?
How many dialects/letters are there?[/quote]
Why are you trying to learn the easiest of the two languages? It's impossible to master a language if you don't actually want to learn it.

The Korean alphabet only uses <.35 consonants and vowels, but I hear speaking is harder than writing unlike Japanese which is easier to speak than write. I'm not Korean nor am I proficient in Korean, so that's all I can say without looking like a retard.

So learn Korean?
How many dialects/letters are there?

Korean > Japanese > Chinese in terms of ease.

Korean/hangul/whatever they call it uses a set of phonetic alphabets. Japanese uses 2 alphabets and approximately 2,000 simplified Chinese characters. Chinese uses, well, Chinese characters -- except you need to know 10,000/15,000+ to be reading/writing at a college-level status.

I don't know what @above is talking about. There's no need to know 10k characters to be considered literate in Japanese, considering the language practically cycles through only 400-500 kanji 70% of the time. Hell, even the highschool Japanese AP exam tests <900 kanji and the JLPT1 tests for 2k kanji. And as an fyi, passing JLPT1 deems you as literate.

Only 2000 characters? Yeah, nah, it's well over 10000.
As an individual who is proficient in both languages, I'll have to say Japanese is harder.

Perhaps 2 years to become decent in Korean, as supposed to 5 or 6 years with Japanese.
Decent is not perfect, however.