As far as Japananese goes, what I'm mostly interested in is being able to carry on a decent conversation with Japanese people, since I know the language is really hard for anything more than that, and currently I just don't have a lot of time on my hands. My aim would be at knowing the language well enough to be able to have both casual and business conversations, and get around in the country. So I am not interested in being able to read scientific magazines or novels (yes, I have read noir's rant on Japanese, hence ). I would just prefer to have a good and functional command of the language.
I have a few questions left about Japanese:
- How useful do you believe the language is in international business? (if you have any experience in that field) E.g. as opposed to, say, Mandarin Chinese, or German?
- Is a command of Japanese helpful when traveling in Korea, China or other East Asian countries?
- Since my interest is mostly on being able to have conversations and for business purposes, does it suffice to learn only the kana?
- Is there any way to get a certificate to prove that you have a certain degree of proficiency in Japanese, without knowing the Kanji? (I know that to pass the JLPT, one must study Kanji also)
- Does Japanese demand a huge amount of vocabulary to learn?
On to Russian. I am already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet and the concept of grammatical cases. Russian doesn't have a reputation of being easy, but I am fairly certain it's not nearly as difficult as Japanese, simply due to its simpler writing system and the fact that it's closer to English, French or German. If I choose Russian, I would aim at developing conversational skills, but I'd also very much like to be able to read the language (e.g. newspapers) and maybe some literary works as well. Here are a few more questions:
- How useful is Russian, really? Especially in business?
- Does Russian have many irregularities in its grammar (e.g. verb conjugation)?
- How long does it take to reach a decent level of proficiency, say, about mid-intermediate?
- Is there a huge gap between literary or formal Russian, and the spoken language, as appears to be the case with Japanese?
- Does Russian require a huge amount of vocabulary to get by?
I would very much appreciate if you could help me out on this one. Any additional thoughts are welcome.
Thank you.