14 ms·

As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese)

• huytersd 2y ago
  Memorizing 3000 characters seems impossible. I know I would never be able to do it.
  • StefanBatory 2y ago
    How about memorizing 20 characters over 150 days, though? Or 10 over 300? ;) And there's a pattern to them too in the end.
  • qingcharles 2y ago
    The way I approached it: if every Japanese person can manage it, I can manage it too.
• kingkawn 2y ago
  Guess they weren’t thinking of you when they made it
• nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > Why does it have to be so complicated? I know nothing about Japanese, or Chinese. (Edit: actually that's not true, I learned this today [0]) Maybe a little about language in general from studying linguistics (for compilers), but I think the answer to your question is; Because it is able to express things that we can't in English. That is beautiful, necessary and precious. The fact that groups of people exist in the world who can have whole ideas and worldviews that we barely conceive or express at all, seems so valuable. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457
  • stickfigure 2y ago
    I don't buy this at all. Maybe "can't express as concisely".
    • bluepizza 2y ago
      Exactly. Japanese _mostly_ doesn't have plurals in the English sense (it actually does have a few plural words), but you do use counters to specify quantities, which is just another way to express plurality. I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."
      • geraldwhen 2y ago
        車は車輪がよぅつあります。 Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can use context to derive the plurality when none is given.
    • ropejumper 2y ago
      My favorite simple example of this is exclusive "we". It's not a thing in most languages, but it allows a level of passive aggressiveness that you can't achieve without it. Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we. As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity and resignment at the same time (besides other things.) The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.
• deleted 2y ago
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• eloisant 2y ago
  The Japanese grammar is pretty simple in fact, but it's very confusing coming from a European language because of how different it is. OK, once you get to the high level politeness (keigo) it can get pretty complex but you don't have to learn that until you're fluent in casual and neutral polite forms (teinei). I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it easier than Japanese. I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand the grammar logic later on.
  • brigandish 2y ago
    > I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there Your experience is not the norm, not according to research and not according to most people who've tried learning Japanese. Either you have a talent or you had a more effective method for learning, but it does undermine your judgement as something generalisable to others. Let's hope it's the method and you share it.
    • psychoslave 2y ago
      While the short time is indeed impressive compared to median learning curve, how much studies can afford a panel of people going through similar conditions of volontary complete immersion over such an extended period?
  • hoseja 2y ago
    I love when watching things in Japanese you can tell they are talking in hyperpolite register because all the words are suddenly dozen-syllable tongue twisters.
  • rauljordan2020 2y ago
    There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar notes I have from lessons - Various て forms, which have their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this - Volitional forms - X-なければ, conditionals, should/shouldn't - the "te-shimau" form - くれる / あげる - Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb categories...which were so hard to remember - しか - ばかり - ように - X-ところだ - X-ほうが-Y - Command forms, conjugations, etc.
• ksdnjweusdnkl21 2y ago
  > I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.
  • wk_end 2y ago
    Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.
    • z2 2y ago
      The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.
  • rauljordan2020 2y ago
    What's hard about Mandarin aside from memorizing the characters and pronunciations?
    • jimbokun 2y ago
      Tones.
    • gtranger 2y ago
      The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.
• pm215 2y ago
  I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar". For example, the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar lists ~に比べると as one of its grammar points, but this (meaning "compared to ~") isn't really new grammar, it's just a specific usage of particle に, a particular verb and と for if/when (in the same way "compared to X" isn't new English grammar but is a pattern of use of a particular verb). My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common root of word origins to help the way there is between say English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose. The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).
  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar". Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit. Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in surprising ways. Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see". In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English. In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do - if they mean "look", they will say 看, and if they mean "see", they will say 看到, inflecting the verb with a grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking the English distinction. In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely different words. I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they said 看 instead of 看到 while trying to speak Mandarin.
• bloppe 2y ago
  I don't speak either, but would posit that the status of Chinese as an East Asian Lingua Franca caused it to trend toward simplicity, whereas Japanese insularity (physical, cultural, and political, especially during the Edo period) provided far less incentive to simplify. I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.
  • hnfong 2y ago
    I don't think there's any trend of written Chinese toward simplicity. Broadly speaking it has evolved towards "complexity" over its history. If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win." Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer. Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese. The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.
    • marton78 2y ago
      What you're describing is written Chinese though. It's entirely possible, that prepositions / postpositions were used in spoken language.
      • hnfong 2y ago
        Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to speculate about the evolution of the spoken Chinese languages* over that time scale... * note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.
• yongjik 2y ago
  "Complicated" is in the eye of the beholder. It looks daunting to someone who didn't grow up using a heavily inflected language, but also consider the reverse direction. "A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room" means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be parsed differently. All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out which one is intended from context. ...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!
  • j7ake 2y ago
    I disagree that complicated is subjective. Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively. One way to ask this objectively is to ask, for every non-native speaker, which languages are easiest and which are hardest to learn? You can set this as a questionnaire and ask people to rank. You will find that Japanese is among the hardest to learn amongst nearly all cultures.
    • gtranger 2y ago
      Anecdotally speaking, my spouse is from China and she thinks it was easier for her to learn Japanese than English despite learning English from a young age and not having any formal Japanese education until college by which point she was already fairly conversational in Japanese from having watched variety shows and anime. We met while I was studying Japanese at college so I have a pretty good idea of where her Japanese ability stands. Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn. Point being? I think it’s subjective.
      • brigandish 2y ago
• nialv7 2y ago
  Does Chinese really not have that much grammar though? I think it may have fewer _formalized_ grammar, but there are a lot of rules that are difficult to pin down. And if you don't follow them, your Chinese will sound wrong to native speakers, even though _technically_ the grammar is fine. For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin) characters' tones change when they form words. The number one (一) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?
• emodendroket 2y ago
  I don't think Japanese is really any more grammatically complicated than any other language (the writing system is a different story but if you're comfortable with Chinese you already have an appropriate degree of Stockholm Syndrome on that front anyway). Different languages just move the complexity around to different places rather than getting rid of it. For instance, Japanese has only 3 irregular verbs in the entire language. Singular and plural need not be marked. Verb and adjective agreement aren't issues. And so on.
• dotnet00 2y ago
  I'm not too far into learning to speak/read Japanese, but have gotten pretty good at understanding it when spoken from years of only really watching/listening to Japanese media (human pattern matching ability is crazy!). My feeling has been that similar to what others have said, that the popular learning resources seem to make the early grammar seem broader than it is by teaching each sentence 'type' as a separate rule. Although I haven't put enough thought into the exact differences (and thus might be entirely wrong), I've felt the grammar is fairly intuitive (I presume due in part to my background of also speaking fluent Hindi).
  • giuscri 2y ago
    How did you get exposed to Japanese media? You lived there? Or just anime? You used English subtitles or Japanese ones?
    • dotnet00 2y ago
      Started with friends introducing me to anime in highschool (with english subtitles), which I got hooked on, then got into the music as well, and later into vtubers (so no subtitles when watching live). I haven't ever really been into other entertainment, so for a little over a decade I've been listening to japanese on a near daily basis. I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.