Martin Fritsche wrote: > Garth Wallace wrote: > >> I beg to differ. At least German's vocabulary is somewhat related to >> that of English. > > Yes, for example Autobahn und Kindergarten ;-)
:P Wasn't talking about words English has borrowed from German or vice-versa. Japanese has plenty of loanwords (from English mainly, but also from German and other Western languages), but the native words are totally unrelated and familiarity with any Western language will not help you learn them. There's no way to predict which Western concepts would be expressed in Japanese with a loanword or by building from Japanese roots: for instance, "bicycle" in Japanese is "jitensha", but "bus" is "basu". "Building", which you'd think Japanese would have a term for, is merely "biru" (shortened from "birudingu"; not to be confused with "biiru" with a long i, which is beer).
