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I started learning Japanese around 8 years ago, and I've never been a fan of saying it's "the most difficult language to learn." It's like learning anything els

I started learning Japanese around 8 years ago, and I've never been a fan of saying it's "the most difficult language to learn." It's like learning anything else, if you enjoy learning it and are motivated enough, you'll get better. Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes." If you're learning Japanese in school, or even if you're learning it on your own, I recommend the Genki I and Genki II books, and the corresponding workbooks. If you really enjoy it and want to come to Japan to use your newly acquired language skills, I'm confident that after getting through those 2 books you'll have enough Japanese to get by and you can have fun wandering around, reading signs, chatting with strangers, etc. Don't be discouraged by people saying that Japanese is so difficult to learn. Edit: also, I hope this comment didn't come off as too negative. I think it's great that Duolingo is doing this, and if it gets more people to enjoy learning Japanese then that's fantastic.

Grue3 9y ago
It is worth saying it's an extremely difficult language to learn because most people are not prepared for what awaits them even if they learned another language before. Anyone can pick up how to read kana in a week or so, so it's easy to assume that you're almost there, and you'll be reading manga or whatever in no time. But it's just the beginning. The language is completely different. You must commit a huge amount of time every day and change the way you think. One must be mentally prepared to give up a chunk of their free time for the foreseeable future (years!), because it won't be easy. Also IME, you barely need to speak any Japanese to wander around Japan and read the signs (because they're all in English anyway). Definitely recommended regardless of language proficiency.
- empath75 9y ago
  The katakana words are often English, but it still takes some time to realize that to-re is 'toilet'
  - hudibras 9y ago
    I think every native English speaker in Japan has had the experience of carefully deciphering a long string of katakana in a restaurant menu, only to realize that they've just successfully translated Japanese to Italian...
    - iamatworknow 9y ago
      ズボン is definitely one of my favorite katakana words.
  - ShinTakuya 9y ago
    It's actually トイレ which is toire in romaji and is pronounced toileh roughly in English. I actually never had trouble with it personally. Although I struggle with other katakana words...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
creshal 9y ago
> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes." That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go where. Of course, articulating yourself correctly is the bigger (or more long-term) challenge when learning a second language, but in the case of Japanese you have a higher up-front learning curve than with most other languages.
- shawnps 9y ago
  That's a good point. I can imagine it might be difficult for someone new to Japanese to understand who is the subject of the sentence, when pronouns are dropped so frequently.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    It's part of the language I enjoy (I find myself dropping pronouns, usually "I", in written English anyway, so it feels oddly natural), but dropping "watashi wa"/"anata wa" even in something as simple as "I am <name>"/"You are <name>" (both can be said as "<name> desu"> definitely makes it more difficult to get started. I've found it to be more or less a non-issue once I got used to picking up on the context clues, but there's no easy/quick way to get there other than listening to a lot of the language.
- panglott 9y ago
  Yes, the grammar of Japanese has a very simple internal logic and is easy to learn, although quite different from European languages. The problem is all the words, and there are no cognates.
  - tragomaskhalos 9y ago
    Exactly. The claim that Japanese grammar is very difficult seems bizarre to me because the morphology is so regular, and I don't subscribe to the idea that flexibility and omission of words makes it harder either, more that you just have to attune yourself to it. No, the elephants in the room are (a) the vocab and (b) Kanji.
OriginalPenguin 9y ago
You are correct that it's like learning anything else. If you put the time in and are motivated and go about it the right way you can learn it. But it's still "the most difficult language to learn". So it's worth taking that difficulty into account. For example one can learn Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in around the same amount of time it would take to learn Japanese.
- shawnps 9y ago
  What about Chinese? As someone who's learning Japanese already, Chinese looks more difficult to me. To me it seems very subjective, some people will be better at learning one language vs. another.
  - OriginalPenguin 9y ago
    According to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, Chinese and Japanese are in the same category of difficulty (2200 hours). But, there's an important distinction. Japanese is singled out as "somewhat more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category."
  - TACIXAT 9y ago
    Tones are tricky in Chinese, on the other hand, there is no conjugation which I really appreciate.
  - zhengyi13 9y ago
    I spent 3 years learning Mandarin in college, and then spent a full 13 months at Beida in 96. I've had significantly less training in Japanese: one year in CC, but decades now of regular subbed anime, a Japanese wife, and two Japanese-speaking-first children. I think their relative complexity is broadly equivalent, but in different ways: Phonologically, Japanese is easier. No tones, and no retroflex consonants to worry about as in Mandarin (unless you don't mind sounding southern/Taiwanese). There is a pitch accent in Japanese, but apparently it varies wildly from one end of the country to the other, and it's not generally critical to comprehension, unlike Mandarin tones. Lexically, Japanese is easier, at least IME. Don't know a word? Given all the borrowing in Japanese, I've had very good luck just to mangle the English word into Japanese phonotactics, and 90% of the time, the person I've spoken to immediately knows what I mean. Syntactically, there's a lot more similarity in Mandarin's basic SVO word order to English. But Kanji. OMG. You need to learn roughly the same set of Kanji as hanzi to be high-school literate, but the Japanese set will generally have a minimum of two pronunciations per character, which vary wildly in context. Mandarin generally has one pronunciation per character, which becomes far simpler to learn.
aplc0r 9y ago
We used Genki I back in high school, and recently I picked it up again. Now I'm through Genki II and can definitely recommend them. They were both updated a few years ago with more contemporary examples and really useful culture notes for each section. Working through the listening comprehension exercises was particularly fulfilling. The one downside is that they are still meant to be used in a classroom, so there are a lot of exercises that expect you to work in groups or pairs. Of course there are plenty of ways to find a study group online these days.

Grue3 9y ago

It is worth saying it's an extremely difficult language to learn because most people are not prepared for what awaits them even if they learned another language before. Anyone can pick up how to read kana in a week or so, so it's easy to assume that you're almost there, and you'll be reading manga or whatever in no time. But it's just the beginning. The language is completely different. You must commit a huge amount of time every day and change the way you think. One must be mentally prepared to give up a chunk of their free time for the foreseeable future (years!), because it won't be easy. Also IME, you barely need to speak any Japanese to wander around Japan and read the signs (because they're all in English anyway). Definitely recommended regardless of language proficiency.

empath75 9y ago
The katakana words are often English, but it still takes some time to realize that to-re is 'toilet'
- hudibras 9y ago
  I think every native English speaker in Japan has had the experience of carefully deciphering a long string of katakana in a restaurant menu, only to realize that they've just successfully translated Japanese to Italian...
  - iamatworknow 9y ago
    ズボン is definitely one of my favorite katakana words.
- ShinTakuya 9y ago
  It's actually トイレ which is toire in romaji and is pronounced toileh roughly in English. I actually never had trouble with it personally. Although I struggle with other katakana words...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

creshal 9y ago

> Also I'm surprised when people assume the grammar is difficult - to me, the "flexible grammatical structures" as mentioned in the article are a good thing because it gives you more leeway to make "mistakes." That makes speaking the language easier, but it makes understanding sentences harder in the beginning, because you get a bucket of word soup dumped on your head and have to figure out what is supposed to go where. Of course, articulating yourself correctly is the bigger (or more long-term) challenge when learning a second language, but in the case of Japanese you have a higher up-front learning curve than with most other languages.

shawnps 9y ago
That's a good point. I can imagine it might be difficult for someone new to Japanese to understand who is the subject of the sentence, when pronouns are dropped so frequently.
- stordoff 9y ago
  It's part of the language I enjoy (I find myself dropping pronouns, usually "I", in written English anyway, so it feels oddly natural), but dropping "watashi wa"/"anata wa" even in something as simple as "I am <name>"/"You are <name>" (both can be said as "<name> desu"> definitely makes it more difficult to get started. I've found it to be more or less a non-issue once I got used to picking up on the context clues, but there's no easy/quick way to get there other than listening to a lot of the language.
panglott 9y ago
Yes, the grammar of Japanese has a very simple internal logic and is easy to learn, although quite different from European languages. The problem is all the words, and there are no cognates.
- tragomaskhalos 9y ago
  Exactly. The claim that Japanese grammar is very difficult seems bizarre to me because the morphology is so regular, and I don't subscribe to the idea that flexibility and omission of words makes it harder either, more that you just have to attune yourself to it. No, the elephants in the room are (a) the vocab and (b) Kanji.

OriginalPenguin 9y ago

You are correct that it's like learning anything else. If you put the time in and are motivated and go about it the right way you can learn it. But it's still "the most difficult language to learn". So it's worth taking that difficulty into account. For example one can learn Spanish, Swedish and Vietnamese in around the same amount of time it would take to learn Japanese.

shawnps 9y ago
What about Chinese? As someone who's learning Japanese already, Chinese looks more difficult to me. To me it seems very subjective, some people will be better at learning one language vs. another.
- OriginalPenguin 9y ago
  According to the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, Chinese and Japanese are in the same category of difficulty (2200 hours). But, there's an important distinction. Japanese is singled out as "somewhat more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category."
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  Tones are tricky in Chinese, on the other hand, there is no conjugation which I really appreciate.
- zhengyi13 9y ago
  I spent 3 years learning Mandarin in college, and then spent a full 13 months at Beida in 96. I've had significantly less training in Japanese: one year in CC, but decades now of regular subbed anime, a Japanese wife, and two Japanese-speaking-first children. I think their relative complexity is broadly equivalent, but in different ways: Phonologically, Japanese is easier. No tones, and no retroflex consonants to worry about as in Mandarin (unless you don't mind sounding southern/Taiwanese). There is a pitch accent in Japanese, but apparently it varies wildly from one end of the country to the other, and it's not generally critical to comprehension, unlike Mandarin tones. Lexically, Japanese is easier, at least IME. Don't know a word? Given all the borrowing in Japanese, I've had very good luck just to mangle the English word into Japanese phonotactics, and 90% of the time, the person I've spoken to immediately knows what I mean. Syntactically, there's a lot more similarity in Mandarin's basic SVO word order to English. But Kanji. OMG. You need to learn roughly the same set of Kanji as hanzi to be high-school literate, but the Japanese set will generally have a minimum of two pronunciations per character, which vary wildly in context. Mandarin generally has one pronunciation per character, which becomes far simpler to learn.

aplc0r 9y ago

We used Genki I back in high school, and recently I picked it up again. Now I'm through Genki II and can definitely recommend them. They were both updated a few years ago with more contemporary examples and really useful culture notes for each section. Working through the listening comprehension exercises was particularly fulfilling. The one downside is that they are still meant to be used in a classroom, so there are a lot of exercises that expect you to work in groups or pairs. Of course there are plenty of ways to find a study group online these days.