Quote:
Originally Posted by 3catcircus
For westerners, *any* language that uses "squiggly lines" instead of the familiar alphabet is going to be doubly hard.
By the time I left South Korea after living there for 4 months, I had the Hangul characters memorized - surprisingly many words were English borrow words.
Japan, on the other hand - Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and Romaji... I only really know the ones for the train stops. Shinagawa station - three boxes and three lines. Easy-peasy. Yokohama - a spear, some squiggles, and then a T with a half of a square... The interesting thing is the realization that Tokyo and Kyoto are essentially the same sounds reversed in order but don't use the same kanji.
That's the key, I think. Seeing the foreign words and understanding their literal words in your native language is different from understanding their meanings.
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You also run into the issue with some (like me) that have done enough damage to our ears (blown my ear drums about three times now), that any language that has same sound but where you put the emphasis on it make it a different word I will likely never be able to learn, no matter how hard I try, I have a hard time with several English words that are not that close but sound the same to me. Now having said this, I do think this can add a real fun factor to the RPG if you have a good game master.