On the other hand, the comparative of adjectives drives me ROUND THE BEND. I mean, it takes thinking because I'm not fluent but I've understood the principle and I find it perfectly logical. When I find it perfectly simple and intuitive. They treat this like it's a major grammatical difficulty and give it oodles of practice room, like this is a Major Grammar Milestone we have to work hard to clear. In the various classes I've attended, they spend a lot of time explaining 'relative clauses' to you, and there is lots and lots of practice. On grammar, I've encountered not quite as dramatic but similarly peculiar differences in what I find easy and what I find hard. It's really strange and occasionally makes me feel like my brain is defective. But not-all-that-complex Japanese pop songs? No dice. Songs were always easier songs are like a 'gateway text', where I learn vocab by maybe understanding 70% of the text and looking up the rest. This runs counter to my experiences with learning languages. I kept waiting for a sort of breakthrough moment when suddenly the 200 words they have on rotation for 90% of the songs would all fall into place, but it's not happening. I'll catch the occasional phrase ('oh, spread your wings, I got that!' \o/ 'oh, somebody wants to kiss someone!') but in general, four years after I started to learn Japanese it's basically still la-la-li-la-only-prettier sounds to me. On the other hand, I do not understand the lyrics to a single KAT-TUN song. Similarly, one night in Oosaka, at the house of an elderly Japanese couple that Solo knew, I ended up alone at the table with these two because Solo had an incident with wine and beer, and having to make conversation for a while, and I ended up talking to the guy, who didn't have any English, about how he was from Hiroshima, and about the bomb and the war.
I have had a comprehensible, ten minute conversation with two middle-aged Japanese ladies (literally ladies they were all dressed up in formalwear) on a train about 'the image of Japan in Germany and what this means for the Japanese tourism industry', and while I'm sure I was making a lot of mistakes, we understood each other's points, and they were moderately 'complex' points. anything useful?' and my answer is always, 'It depends and it is weird.' I'm sure some of you have heard this anecdote before, but it's really the best illustration of how hard I find it to judge how much I can 'do' in Japanese. People sometimes ask me, 'so how long does it take you before you can do. I'm fascinated (and sometimes perplexed) by what I find comparatively easy and what I find comparatively hard in learning Japanese.
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