Thread:BunsenH/@comment-40050922-20190823000707/@comment-24577221-20190824173638

You've got the same rules as everyone else: don't repeat a code, not more than 5 codes, etc. September 11th or whenever.

Unfortunately, I can recognize only a few words of Japanese, and only when they're written in this alphabet -- not at all if they're written in Japanese symbols (if that's the right word). Most of them involve food. I'm fluent in several computer languages, but only one human language: English. I can read French reasonably well, but I don't understand spoken French as well as that, and I'm not very good at expressing myself in French. I can read some German, thanks to a course I took in university. And I'm fairly good at recognizing the Latin and Greek "roots" of words in the various languages that originated in those two, so sometimes I can figure out some of the meaning of Italian, Spanish, and so on.

I'm just not very good with languages. I'm very good at recognizing patterns, but not at memorizing large amounts of sort-of-random bits of information. I didn't do very well in history classes in school, for example. In university, I did quite well in my chemistry courses (that was my subject), except for one part of organic chemistry. I was able to see and use the patterns -- structures with oxygen atoms do similar kinds of things, for example -- but I was no good at remembering "named" chemical reactions; that is, reactions named after the person who discovered them. Good grief, when the "Hofmann rearrangement" is the same as the "Hofmann degradation", but different from the "Hofmann elimination"... I don't understand how anyone can keep track.

The mess of details in English is different for me, somehow. (And Englsh is one of the worst languages for inconsistencies, because of everything it has stolen from other languages.  To quote an acquaintance of mine, James Nicoll: "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.")  I assume that it's because I absorbed it while I was growing up, and am still learning new bits of it as I encounter them. It's not like having to learn all of the details of a new language, in a short time.

I can use translation systems such as Google Translate, of course.

Re: "arigato" --- You're welcome!