If you need my essays for any reason (or you just want to read them), I posted them on jfuessay.wordpress.com
I had a few days (or weeks) to think. I came up with this.
I want to learn more languages. I want to learn Spanish, Japanese, French, Polish, Korean, German, and some others. Recently I figured out that since some languages come from the same root language (like the Indo-European language), the languages are really similar. I used some of my background knowledge from learning Russian to figure out what someone said in Spanish. It’s weird. They’re on opposite sides of Eurasia, and yet they’re so similar.
It works with writing, too. I can (kinda) write in Chinese, so I can (kinda) write in Korean. And a lot of Japanese Kanji….? I can recognize from reading Chinese.
Our school teaches four (five including English) Indo-European languages, and only one language that’s not. I find that kind of dumb, since they’re pretty much similar. Japanese is its own language family, which is Japonic (I could have sworn it was a branch of Chinese).
Wow… I was looking through Wikipedia and I saw that Japanese and Korean have no relation to Chinese. But I speak Chinese rather fluently and I can see where Korean is very similar to Chinese. I haven’t had as much exposure to Japanese.
I know all this stuff is probably really obvious to you. I just didn’t think the languages were THAT related.