Quote:
Originally Posted by p47koji
This is an interesting thread. Good question to have asked... 
I'm somewhere in the middle; after being raised in L.A., I suddenly found myself in a regular classroom with hundreds of other Japanese kids (Nihon Jidousha Seibi Gakko)...complete with Japanese textbooks. It was sink or swim...
How many kanji can you learn? At the end of four months, I was able to read all mechanics-oriented textbooks without any problem. How many kanji was that? Who knows? But don't ask me to pick up a book on politics... I'd be lost.
But as someone said - if you don't use it, you lose it. Even my mother (who is Japanese and saw B-29s in the skies above Tokyo) cannot read Japanese now after immigrating to the US in 1960.  |
ah well you know, its like thsi with everything, though your moim could remember it quite fast if she tried to go back to it. I spent nearly 2 years in Japanese private school from 2002 and learned 1.7k kanji in 1.5 year, but the school was 4h a day plus i studied another 6 at home every day, and i learn really fast. Then, I started to work in Japanese company working with Japanese clients, so my language skill went even higher, but after that i entered a company where i work mainly in English and my kanji pool shrinked. The most ridiculous thing is that I may not know some every day used kanji, but I know quite a lot of those which are not used, and that is because of calligraphy studies. Nonetheless, the point is, that remembering something you have learned is easier than learning from scratch. Similar to sports - muscles have a memory. So a person that trained before, will get fit much faster after a long break, than someone that did not do sports at all (given that both are at the same age).