Japanese had a head start. They started learning kanji since elementary school. But They never touched romaji until They learned English. So there's that.

@@ridwana4037 Well. I'm still amazed that 終わり means owari (the end) and 終 is a fucking o.

@@ikaros9727 and it can also be tsui and shuu lol

right. just about every kanji has like two or three readings. then there are words that sound the same but have different kanji.

@@hardave yup, that was my biggest obstacle when i was learning for n2 cause the amount of kanjis to study literally doubled lmao

As a kid, learning a language is a pain and you don't understand why is it supposed to interest you. Then you grow up with being able to communicate with people all around the world using the same language.

*INTERESTINGUUU

i learn my english mostly from games, and it's pretty effective though i often makes some error when pronounce it~

i see what u did there

That was smooth

INAFF

Don't confuse her anymore plz lol

what's kind this englisk?..it's so smoooth

Learned a new meaning for the same word. That are pronounced differently, but spelled the same. More & more I realize English is confusing af

@@drowningin The fact that it's spelled the same doesn't make it the same word. They're heteronyms - two words with the same spelling, but different meaning and pronunciation.

@@Grendelynden oh, thanks

@@drowningin Any heteronyms like close?

ikr, feels happy for pekora whenever she improves her english (previously she learnt "subway" too)

also 謙譲語

Apparently English is the hardest language to learn for Japanese. I guess it’s because we have things like Close and Close. Were Japan has a different way to spell everything even things that sound the same, English is the opposite we’re everything is said differently and spelled the same.

@@fist-of-doom487 meanwhile in japanese, there are many cases where a dozen words can have the same pronunciation while meaning different things, depending on the kanji used. And even the same kanji can be pronounced a lot of different ways depending on the word its used in. Heck even the same word can have different pronunciation while using the same combination of kanji.

@@Dei_Mi_En yeah the written language is a nightmare all it’s own

True lol

Japanese is like a reverse thesaurus: Many meanings, one word

They have different Kanji, though (and I think different pitch accents as well).

@@ashwinnair3645 I mean, every single language have same words with diferrent meanings, japanese tho, has insane amounts of it, there's no helping it dude, compared to learning english, it's very difficult. Unless your language doesn't use the latin alphabet then i don't know which would be harder

@@CReiKampa48 Oh, I'm in no way saying that Japanese doesn't have 50,000 homophones, just that the specific example of "Kami" isn't exactly the best comparison.

English, where nouning verbs is a freaking pasttime.

Uraniwa ni wa niwa, niwa ni wa niwa niwatori ga iru

@@beepy6161 yes 2 birds in the garden

There's also that one about some wildlife in upstate New York 😏

@@beepy6161 I don't know Japanese well but isn't this quite distinct if it's written in kanji?

how does being nearby have ANYTHING to do with "shut off, encircle, and seal"? encircle is the closest to meaning close, and it's not even actually that close. cased closed and yes, this was intentional

And who asked?

@@asianpersuasion4901 if you encircle or surround something then you are generally near to it, if I encircle someone with my arms you assume I am very close to them rather than being Slenderman.I Closing something also makes it more secure or secret.

There’s also the phrase “closing in” on something which means getting nearer and nearer

@@asianpersuasion4901 Well, imagine a pack of unnaturally bloodthirsty wolves have surrounded, A.K.A. encircled you. They're sure as hell nearby, closing in on you, and closing off means of escape.

Meanwhile in Ph When you translate are you going down / and I'm going down is baba ba ba / ba baba

@@kaichoudp3139 This just makes me think of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

Yeah, my school did a similar thing. Do bad in tests, you go to a lower set group. Do really good, you go to a higher set group. I disliked it immensely. Had a really good maths teacher that motivated me to do well in maths. Beyond where I should of been since I was in one of the lower sets. So I got moved up a set and I didn't gel with the new teacher, so I went back to being kinda lazy/bad with maths. But never moved back down, since moving down a set was kinda shameful. Sorry long.

Fun fact, they have a funny anime about class like that

The point of it is so that everyone in the class is capable of moving at the same speed, instead of bunching students in classes regardless of ability and leaving some kids completely lost because the class is going too fast

Makes sense to me, it's not different then when you get to college and have people taking different levels of math based on what they need. Some people need more help and as such should be in a lower skilled class. There's no shame in getting extra help when you need it.

true. I used to be an English teacher in Japan. Their way of teaching English can be considered old, formal and purely academic unlike in other countries where English is taught practically. A lot of Japanese want to learn English but they don't like how it's being taught which makes them think English is super hard to learn. Not to mention that their society doesn't put importance in English makes them feel more unmotivated to learn English. But it's quite interesting to learn that the word "close" is considered Junior Level High School by their standards but to us, it's considered basic.

@@kongo_bongo1683 that sounds super interesting! Have any other cool stories to share?

At least 'hashi' has a pitch difference to convey different things. English is just a hot mess tbh

@@jayzenstyle Close has a different pronouciation too, at least in American English. The "not open" version is pronouced like halfway between a "z" and "s" sound. Whereas the "nearby" version has the normal "s" sound.

@@leonguyen896 "it's getting close, quick, close the door!" eeyup.

Well the Kanji are completely different so it's easy to distinguish

Lol

i wish my school has this system. I remembered spending most of my time in math class being bored because the teacher is explaining the same theory multiple times to those that didn't understand it.

Not in my school 🤔

Same in the UK

Same in Vietnam

Sound backwards, specially in school where grading does not matter, like at all, here the only point when grading is important are the last 3 years of highschool, which can get you into better colleges or allow you to get student subsidies.

homonyms synonyms antonyms You need a freaking grasp of Latin to excel at English.

but some how it works. if any non native speaker sees "he's close to close the distance" typed or written they would be utterly confused if they dont know context or the difference in pronunciation and meaning.

Blame the Romans, French and the Vikings. Also the English themselves for borrowing so many words from their colonies and neighbors lol

@@01100101011100100111 latin and greek gets you very far in English

@@user-pj1ec5om5g the most simple language to master, utterly fucked by themselves to split words.

Honestly to japanese noobs kawaii and kowai are basically the same...

at least they have different spelling lol

spelling really doesnt matter , its gonna be a problem in non-native ear as they sound the same (especially lacking context)

@@aomafura3374 Kanji have inconsistent pronunciation based on context though. Which is exactly how close (near) and close (opposite of open) are spelled the same, but sound different. Except kanji can sound completely different. By itself 二(means 2) is pronounced ni, and 人(means person) is pronounced hito. You'd expect 二人(which means 2 people) to be pronounced nihito, but it's actually FUTARI. Like what?!!! You might know that jouzu and umai both mean good or skilled. You hear this a lot when the JP girls are complimenting the EN girls' Japanese (nihongo jouzu or nihongo umai). The kanji for jouzu is 上手 and the kanji for umai is 上手い (the last character isn't a kanji; it's hiragana to differentiate the two). Just absolutely confusing for 2nd language learners.

I watch them bc I'm a weeb. The fact that my Japanese has improved enough that I generally can get when they're saying makes it more fun lol

Technically they're homonyms because they're pronounced different.

An approximation in Japanese of the pronunciation would be クロズ Ku-Ro-Zu for close (shut) and クロス Ku-Ro-Su for close (near).

Holy hell, that's a lot. You must have a high population of people to do that though.

tclose?

@@Bonezee yes their use of subject markers and verbs are reversed to english as well. は for example here is ha but can be pronounced as "wa" and わ the actual wa itself is rarely used. Not only that if you try to read stuff thats not formal and entertainment such as twitter tweets from vtubers you can see they use katakana rules with hiragana and some hiragana as katakana or vice versa for "stylizing" and slang.

Yes, but not quite. Hashi at least is written differently while close isnt ^^

It’s not that they’re spelled the same, they just sound the same but are written differently. In speech, as well as being differentiated by context some of them use different pitch accents in standard Japanese. There’s a clip of Pekora talking about the difference between 箸 (haꜜshi, meaning chopsticks) and 橋 (ꜜhashi, meaning bridge) as an example of this.

@@CHR1SZ7 Do all of them sound different though? Otherwise it's just like English.

That is indeed one way to look at it but goes over the head. Although it is mainly about borrowing form multiple languages

@@comradeofthebalance3147 Close isn't borrowed from multiple languages though. It's the same word that has developed two separate meanings.

@@NotASummoner I was speaking in general

@@comradeofthebalance3147 But when two words sound the same don't they generally have the same origin? The different origins tend to affect different words meaning similar things I think.

@@NotASummoner Well I cannot comment on whether it is true to be generally or not. However, I do have to say that some words are certainly coming from different languages in the sense of the meaning. Close is one of them

Meanwhile British people replaced the "-ize" of some words with "-ise" because they thought "-ize" was "Too American" despite those particular words being originally spelled with "-ize".

Don't a lot of languages have that though?

I suppose it is if you can't compare it with other languages. People love saying it's unbelievably difficult which just isn't the case.

Yeah.. japanese have a bajillion of these things. Funny how she consider this being hard when they themselves does this all the time

Wrong.. they are written differently in kanji. Also it's genius 天才 and natural disaster 天災. Ten years old 十歳 is pronounced じゅうさい . You're combining English 10 there..

@@sorahow287 I mean Japanese has them, it's not like you can see the Kanji when people are talking. Context is incredibly important there.