Learning, reading and/or speaking Japanese?

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I've been consulting someone who deals professionally with aspies and PDD's, and she commented the other day, that she had noticed an unusual number of her 'clients' who had problems with language and writing, found it easier to express themselves in Japanese.

My mother is japanese, and I've never been able to learn it. I always got thrown by the number of alphabets needed to learn - hiragana, katakana and kanji. The first two are phonetic and the last works on a symbolic (pictogram) system - based on ancient chinese symbols. I have an innate primitive understanding of the language when I listen to it, but am hopeless at actually speaking it.

I have three questions.

1. Do you think it is true that aspies and PDDs find it easier to communicate in Japanese over english - or has this person just found an unusual cross section of our community?

2. If the former is true, then is it the language structure, grammer, sound etc that makes it easier, or is it the written language?

3. If it is the written communication, over the spoken structure, is it the use of pictograms to represent whole ideas and concepts that makes it easier? ... and in that case, would chinese be equally if not more desirable seeing as it does not seem to deal with phonetic writing?

Ok, I bet I've used all the wrong words here, cos it's been a long time since my linguistic studies, but hopefully you will know what I mean.

I think that many people on the spectrum would have an easier time with the Japanese Language. My theory is that people with Apperger's and Autism tend to think more in pictures than they do in words. And that's where the Pictograms come into play. It would be interesting to see what everybody else thinks.

I've never taken japanese, but back in high school, it was offered as a course, and from what I can remember hearing, compared to spanish, german, and french, japanese was fairly easy to pick up on.

I have heard from many sources that Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn. Unlike, Spanish, French and German, Japanese is in an entirely separate language family from English. However, many of the more modern Japanese words have been borrowed from English. My dad, who went to Japan many times on business, learned only a few phrases in Japanese. Japanese is a language I would like to learn and is very useful for engineers who frequently work with Japanese, but haven't because of its complexity.

This confirms what my mother has said - Japanese structure is very rigid and difficult to learn - the sounds are not so hard, but the gramatical rules are radically different to ours. That is why I am curious about chinese - apparently it is a much easier language to learn structurally and gramatically, and also uses pictograms - perhaps an easier option than Japanese?

i think that being composed entirely of pictograms makes chinese harder- u have to learn a new character (or combination of characters) for every word!! i am doing japanese at high school and hope to continue to learn it at university. are these people native japanese speakers, people who happen to know it, or have they been taught it as part of therapy?

Apparently these people learnt japanese as a second language to english, and found it easier to express themselves in their new language. Venom, I'm with you on the pictograms - so many of them! - but when you think of them as concepts rather than specific words, maybe it's easier. Also, a lot of them are derivatives of each other....
Imagine being able to read concepts with no definable vocal language attached - you could create your own sound associations - from one word to 15 to explain each one... maybe that's what art is - we just haven't standardised the translation yet. Sorry - I'm rambling.
Back to the point. I've just got back from china, and I noticed certain characters appearing in 'exit' 'entry' and direction signs. When I asked my mum what each individual character meant, she found it hard to translate them back into english, but the overall meaning was clear to her.

it's interesting to see holes in translation, when concepts and ideas in one language have no equivalent in another. In japan the teacher will say "yoku dekimashita" to the students, which means "you did well". The literal translation is very strange though- it means "you were able to, well"

The study of linguistics and language as symbols is really fascinating. You can tell a lot about a culture through the way they represent ideas through language. Apparently the latin based languages cover philosophy and emotions much more effectively than english. Many words have no english equivalent. It's interesting that some native english speakers chose to write books in french rather than english. I've always thought it interesting that the word 'no' is easier to articulate than the word 'yes' in the English language. Most languages seem to be the other way round. Maybe english speakers tend to need to say 'no' more often...

Japanese? Hmm....I think I'm good at saying Japanese names from all of the Japanese cartoons I watch, but I don't know anything in Japanses except konnichiwa. Is that how you spell it?...

I'm gonna post something very off-topic, but not totally off-topic.

Sometimes when I think of language is that, the language has been constructed in such a way over the world that it fits the communication of the majority of people. ASD people are not the majority.

Thus their communication can't be very successful.

I love learning languages, and I think Japanese would be fun (and difficult) to learn. I've already learnt a ton of Spanish, and I am currently in the beginning stages of learning French and German. I think symbols might make it easier for people on the spectrum.

For a while, I was really addicted to Japanese puzzles magazines, such as the one at http://www.gakken-koukoku.com/mag.cgi?mode=show&no=24 ; now I am only semi-addicted.

These magazines are fascinating. You can do most of the puzzles without understanding Japanese. I have been able to understand a few words like Oekaki (Picture), and the colors, but that's pretty much it. I have a few books about how to learn Japanese (basically, Kanji), but that's on the back burner for now.

"Kawai", I believe, is Japanese for "cute."

I know this topic is a bit older, but there is not much in this forum about Japanese, so I want to bring it up again.

I think it really depents. Chinese is a totally different language than Japanese. The only thing they have in common is the ancient writing system who is based on pictograms.

Japenese isn't hard to pronounce, but it has a lot of roules how to saw things in what way and how to be polite. If you just learn the words, but not the social roules to it ppl might think you are being rude.
If you learn a language, you also have to learn standart expressions, the social roules and the culture to it, otherwise you wouldn't fully understand it.

Teaching myself Japanese has become my new favourite obsession. I've always adored Japanese culture, movies, manga, anime etc. and I really want to go to Japan someday. So one day I just thought: Why not? I only started about a month ago, but I've already learned hiragana, katakana and a bit (maybe 20) kanji. I've also learned basic nouns (about 50), basic grammar and just learned to count from 1-9999 today (which is surprisingly easy). I'm in school so most of my studying happens over the weekend, but luckily I started in a vacation week (We have a mid-october vacation in Denmark), so I managed to teach myself hiragana and katakana without much interruption. DISCLAIMER: I'm a noob at Japanese so don't take anything I write too serious.

But don't get me wrong.. Japanese is super hard. I find the pronunciation quite easy (with the exception of the japanese R-sound) especially compared to Chinese, which I was forced to take last year at school. The grammatical structure is backwards from English, but a treat if you're German. There are nice things with Japanese like nouns are never in plural and grammar is not that complicated. I have a horrible handwriting but actually I really like writing kana (Hiragana and katakana=Kana). It feels really awesome to do and quite fulfilling. The pain in the ass is kanji. Hiragana and katakana will get you far but kanji is tough. Definitely my least favourite part of learning Japanese. I do have an AMAZING online textbook called Text Fugu, which I highly recommend for self-learners though. Japanese is all about finding the motivation and making time to study. I haven't regretted starting one bit and I really love it.

I don't know what about Japanese appeals to Aspies though. I think a large part of it could be because of manga/anime with a lot of Aspies obsessing over it and wanting to read manga and understand anime. Japanese is both really logical, really illogical and truly fascinating. I love how you can indulge yourself into another culture through the language. Japan is also a quite aspie-friendly or at least have more of a aspie mindset (opinion alert), which could also reflect in the language.

On last note on the whole pictogram thing that I actually learned today:
The kanji for big is 大 and the kanji for person is 人
大+人 = adult
I just found that funny.

Online ressources:
Firefox/Chrome add on called Rikaichan/Rikaikun which translate Japanese characters + explanation and pronounciation and hovering your mouse over them
Textfugu (first lesson free)
Jisho.org (dictionary)
Tae Kims guide to japanese
Anki (flashcard game which I use everyday for learning kanji, vocab etc.) Iknow.jp also recommended
Games:
realkana.com and frenzy (hiragana and katakana)
Awesome list with many more: http://www.tofugu.com/2010/04/06/tofugu ... resources/

...And the majority of the Japanese vocabulary that is of Sino-Japanese origin. Japanese would be drastically different without Chinese influence.

All of these references to Chinese characters as pictograms is grating on my nerves. Most are phono-semantic compounds.