{"id":4158,"date":"2016-08-07T15:29:01","date_gmt":"2016-08-07T22:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=4158"},"modified":"2026-01-09T14:26:32","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T22:26:32","slug":"learning-japanese-through-spanish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=4158","title":{"rendered":"Learning Japanese through Spanish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I love to learn new languages, and I&#8217;ve been working on my espa\u00f1ol for a few years now.  But I&#8217;m also tempted by Japanese.  I took some classes on Japanese years ago, and I&#8217;ve been lucky enough to visit Japan twice &#8211; each time renewing my interest in the language!  But who has time to learn two languages?<\/p>\n<p>It occurred to me that there might be a way to learn them both AT THE SAME TIME.  What if I tried to learn Japanese&#8230; in Spanish?  That way I could leverage my (larger but still only lower intermediate) understanding of Spanish to learn Japanese.<\/p>\n<p>I sought out some Japanese language learning materials aimed at Spanish speakers.  They learn Japanese too, right?  And I found this delightful website called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhk.or.jp\/lesson\/spanish\/\">Hablemos en japon\u00e9s<\/a>.  It uses anime-style graphics and schoolgirl voices to illustrate sample dialogs.  Each 10-minute lesson is conducted in Spanish (with adult Spanish voices)!  <\/p>\n<p>Here is a screenshot from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhk.or.jp\/lesson\/spanish\/learn\/list\/1.html\">Lesson 1<\/a> (I encourage you to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nhk.or.jp\/lesson\/spanish\/learn\/list\/1.html\">check out the whole thing<\/a>):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/2016-07-30-soy-anna.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=400 src=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/2016-07-30-soy-anna.png\" alt=\"Soy Anna\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4159\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/2016-07-30-soy-anna.png 674w, https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/2016-07-30-soy-anna-150x86.png 150w, https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/2016-07-30-soy-anna-300x172.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 674px) 100vw, 674px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gone through the first three lessons and enjoyed them greatly.  (And already I learned that &#8220;haga clic&#8221; is how you tell someone to (make a) click!)  At this language learning level, I already know both the Spanish and Japanese lesson content, but refreshers never hurt, and listening to the explanations in Spanish requires concentration.  But who doesn&#8217;t want to know how to ask where the bathroom is in multiple languages?<\/p>\n<p>I still haven&#8217;t figured out why Anna, who&#8217;s from Thailand, is somehow a native Spanish speaker (she writes in her diary in Spanish).  But it&#8217;s convenient for me! There are 48 lessons total &#8211; enough to keep me busy for a while. :)<\/p>\n<p>Sayonara and adi\u00f3s!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I love to learn new languages, and I&#8217;ve been working on my espa\u00f1ol for a few years now. But I&#8217;m also tempted by Japanese. I took some classes on Japanese years ago, and I&#8217;ve been lucky enough to visit Japan twice &#8211; each time renewing my interest in the language! But who has time to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,67],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4158"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5672,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4158\/revisions\/5672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}