The sorry state of Europe.

[MattNYCParticipant 2329]

Tiga K wrote:

teaching myself some Japanese (for 3 years now though I’ve taken a break recently), and because of that I am effective at learning a language in case I need to leave for some place else.

Damn, isn’t teaching yourself Japanese really hard? I’ve had some progress with self-taught Spanish & Portuguese, but they have enough in common with English & each other to make it a bit easier. Of course, self-teaching Japanese gives you another great reason to visit Japan – aside from testing out your language skills in the native land – i hear the view @ Mt Fuji is unbelievable. What made you want to be able to speak (read?) Japanese?

I started traveling when i was a teenager – parents wanted to do the religious tour of Rome. The history, architecture, food & women (at the time i was a teenager) were all great. Overbearing religion – not so much. Anyway, that started the travel bug for me. Since then (~20 years later) i’ve been to 19 countries between Europe & Central/South America. My travel lately has been to do volunteer work & practice my Spanish in Latin America, & most recently my Portuguese (which needs a hell of a *lot* of work!) & volunteer work in Brazil. I was also married to a Colombian girl for a while, so that gave me another reason to travel there (Bogota’s full of girls to have fun with, just don’t marry any of them like i did oops … lol).

My next trip will probably be in maybe Jan or Feb – there are a few schools in Latin America that teach surfing in the morning, then Spanish or Portuguese in the afternoon. That sounds like a killer vacation in my book. 🙂

[Tiga KParticipant 1693]

@ Matt

Japanese isn’t as hard as some people make it out to be, but it definitely isn’t easy. If you’re thinking of the characters used in written Japanese, they are composed of familiar sub-characters, so its not like I have to learn thousands of unique characters. Here is an example that suits this website well:

I got into Japanese for three reasons: I knew a guy who could speak and write and thought it was badass, I almost failed an introductory Spanish class and felt like I owed language learning some payback, and then anime and music is my last reason. Now I just find the culture interesting and the difference between japanese and English intrigues me. The two languages couldn’t be any more different.

Thanks for sharing your adventures. It sounds very interesting.

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