>>3308677I feel dumb replying to this at all and dumber for my not that uninformed take in linguistics but
>That is entirely based on the fact they're learning fucking phrases and spoken English.While true, they absolutely learn no grammar at all, it also has to do with the fact that many of those constructs are not available in the Japanese language at all.
>Latin, for all it's uselessness as a spoken or written language, at least beyond a scientific lingua franca outside of English, is the best way to learn European grammar.While Latin may be the basis for all the constructs we see today, for the purpose of actually learning them you NEED to actually use the language in order to get any fluency. In that regard, Latin sadly lacks active speakers and, more critically, an agreed upon pronounciation.
Why do Japanese suck at english? 3 main reasons:
- they hated it as kids and never really need it as adults generally
- usually get taught by some Japanese dude who never went abroad, and also mostly written english
- Letter system vs. Syllable system, featuring good old "english pronounciation makes NO fucking sense" - just google GHOTI (fish)
How do we fix this?
Make them learn German or Spanish/Portuguese first. Most Japanese I went to University with struggled with English, not so much with German because at least the Vowels are the same. Spanish is quite friendly for syllables apparently and doesn't have many exceptions in pronounciation. Portuguese for whatever reason has tons of bilinguals speaking Japanese as well. All of these teach you european grammar. German in particular teaches you CASES which is the thing you somehow talked about in your OP without even mentioning them.
tl;dr: Latin would be a good starting point but is way less feasible than German or Spanish/Portuguese, also english is fucking retarded.
