[masraum]

Originally Posted by javadog

I didn't learn anything while watching Chinese martial arts movies in Singapore while growing up.

Other than they made really awful martial arts movies. But, it was all we had.

They say you can still learn languages at an advanced age. I sometimes look at Japanese or French and think, nope.

With Japanese, even if you could learn to ask where the restroom was, reading Japanese would be too huge an ask. I know people that grew up in Japan and can speak it enough to get around that can't read or write anything of any real use.

I'm looking at phone apps that translate written and spoken language.

Being able to speak a language even if it's at a grade school level would have to be hugely useful if you were traveling in a country even without being able to read/write. Reading and writing another language that does not use the roman alphabet would be a pretty big ask, I would think (at any age). Especially in places like Japan, China, and Korea. I know that Japan has 3 different "alphabets", 2 that are what we would think of as an alphabet (character = a sound) and then kanji which is more like (and based on) the Chinese characters. I don't know if Chinese has anything analogous to katakana/hiragana or if they only have the characters that stand for words/ideas. And I'm not sure about Korean at all other than that I can say "that's Korean" when I see it.