Man on Bridges <[email protected]> wrote:
> However Greek and Italian are both socalled SOV languages, so that could > possibly make things a lot easier for both of them as they both can remain > in the SOV pattern, > while for them to communicate in English they both have to go from SOV to > SVO and vice versa. > Japanese is SOV. I have never had a problem switching back and forth. I think in Japanese when speaking or reading it, albeit with interference from English. Sometimes vice versa. People should avoid translation in their minds. Language training should discourage that. Some people who try to learn a third language as adults have reported a lot of interference from language #2. More than #1. Edwin O.Reischauer learned English first, then Japanese as a child. Toward the end of his life he suffered a stroke that wiped out his ability to speak Japanese, but left him able to understand it. That's strange! Reischauer took Japanese lessons from a Japanese friend of mine when he was ambassador, while he was being shaved in the morning. He would hand my friend the day's Yomiuri newspaper in Japanese. Reischauer would look at the English edition and read the editorial aloud in Japanese. My friend would smoke a cigarette and say "Yup. Yeah. That's it . . . No, that's sendou, not syudou" The embassy had an interpreter who I have heard was phenomenally good. As a joke, Reischauer would sometimes start to speak in Japanese to a Japanese audience, and the interpreter would translate it into English. Not unlike the interpreter scene in Woody Allen's "Bananas." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF-AcR14Km8 - Jed
