I am a Japanese. The Japanese character sets are Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonograms and have a small number of characters, so they are easy to memorize like the alphabet. However, there are over 25,000 kanji, and even if we limit ourselves to the kanji that Japanese people use in their daily lives, there are over 2,000. For ordinary Japanese people, memorizing kanji is a life's work. Those facts make Japanese learners who only use around 26 characters hopeless or irritated. However, from my point of view, it is no different from you who have memorized the spelling of a huge number of words. Kanji also have a pictogram aspect, which makes them fun for learners. Every Kanjis have meanings, so we can know the meaning of a word even if we don't know how to pronounce it. In short, Japanese is a language that requires a lot of effort in the early stages of learning, but it accelerates the learning speed of intermediate learners.
I noticed that and i agree with it when you get the fundamentals down All i do now is study a kanji or 2 every day and eventually i will just be fluent I get noticeably better each day just got to try and output what i learn too.
@@Heuroya I am American ( English American is my main language ) that's learning Japanese. Honestly? imo, I find Hiragana/Katakana pretty simple. It's Kanji that troubles me. Sure, I don't have all Hiragana/Katakana memorized yet, i am working on it. Been doin Japanese for a few months now. I can introduce myself, and say some sentences in Japanese. But by no means, do I consider myself at a Conversational level yet. Just taking a little break due to work and the stress of December. I am also wanting to learn the following languages, Arabic ( whatever dialect everyone starts off with first ), Russian, and Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese. Why? I like me a challenge. I am just learning by myself off of youtube and whatnot.
Been learning Japanese for over a year now and while I work my way through learning new vocabulary and grammatical structure, what sets Japanese apart from the other language I'm familiar with (Spanish) is that Japanese is also HEAVILY context and cultural based, so it's not just knowing what words you CAN use, it's also learning WHEN you'd use one phrase as opposed to another. For me personally this is what truly ignites my brain and makes me want to learn as much about the culture and to unravel the puzzle that is such a dense, wonderful, sometimes frustrating language! I also find kanji really fascinating as learning how to write the characters definitely reminds you that it was all based on brush strokes, so the creation of kanji is such a mix of art and language.
From a Korean perspective, Japanese is the easiest language for me to learn. The accent/pronunciation, grammar, and 50% of the vocabulary are all exactly the same. The only real difficulty is learning Kanji, but it’s actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. Japanese to me is like Spanish to an English speaker.
It is probably the same when the languages have similar roots. Korean and Japanese might be quite similar to Thai and Mandarin. Many words are regarded in both languages but for the latter there are with different meanings. Chinese characters are more simplified than Japanese ones. The structures are pretty much the same between Thai and Mandarin.
6 years, 1 hour a day is a small price to pay to have that language for the rest of your life (as long as you don’t abandon it obviously). I think Japanese is probably easier than the other languages in that category due to availability of quality learner content, but obviously the State Department doesn’t take that into account since they have their own training course.
@@user-ih9pq8dz4nIt depends on the course you are doing. In theory, one could definitely become fluent by doing that. However it would probably be better to do 5-6 hours a day for 3 years.
That time studying only takes into account the time studying in class, i bet a lot of students study by themselves in addition to the study time listed.
Japanese seems to have a simple grammar and no tricky sounds. Yes, the vocabulary has nothing in common with English aside from 'borrowings', but that would also apply to Malay. The real difficulty is with the writing system. Japanese sounds as if it coud map easily into a Latin alphabet. Such would put Japanese in the range of Malay and Bahasa Indonesian, both of which have ittle shared vocabulary with English.
@@PaulBrower-qr8hf I already know Danish and English at high levels, enough to talk about philosophical concepts or political theory or other high level language. The progression speed can probably be attributed to this. I Have studied japanese for probably lower than 2 hours each day(had many days where I did not study in the start or did not use Anki+context) for 1.5 years, Would like to disagree on grammar. Grammar is hard when it becomes colloqial and nonkeigo, luckily I haven't seen many natives use complex grammar in any way verbally. Verbs are sometimes conjugated multiple like 食べませんでしたら (keigo) if not able to eat. 食べたなかった -tai form conjugated like an I-adjective. 食べそう unofficial conjugation, seems like wanting to eat. 食べながら the worst ones are verbs conjugated into passive, then conjugated 1-2 times I do not know if this is correct, but this is passive+ている form+negative+colloquial need to do. 食べられていなきゃ eating (I) need to do. And then there is the female and male speech patterns which also conjugate verbs according to mood. Company words and grammar and service industry phrases and grammar. Chinese seems so much easier, but I enjoy the media so I do not really care. My level is very airy, because I learn words from the context of the media, but I would guess I am solidly at around n3-n2 level, so I'll keep going and enjoying the process.
I have been learning Japanese for a year and a half, and I still consider myself a beginner. I passed N5 a while ago, but I don't think I would be able to pass N4 yet. I study about an hour to an hour and a half per day. I enjoy it immensely, so it isn't a burden. The only reason I do it is because I enjoy it. I have absolutely no need to know Japanese, it's purely a hobby. I need to keep my brain active and use up spare time wisely. What I'm starting to notice now is the internal logic of Kanji, and it's exciting to see! I am self-studying with the occasional Italki lesson. Loving it!!
I started learning like 2 months ago and once I found out about the existance of the radical I begun doing memorization each day for like a week (a really intensive week) and know I can learn the kanjis a lot easier
This sounds almost exactly like me! I only started in July though. It is VERY fun to learn for me unlike European languages like Spanish that are so boring to me.
I'm exactly where you are, @christopherfleming7505 - about a year and a half in, finally starting to be able to converse about slightly more complicated topics than the weather, lol. It's a hobby for me too, but I am hard on myself because I'm a perfectionist, and I'm having to learn to relax a lot more. There are so many wonderful resources online for language learning, I can't imagine trying to do this without the internet. I have a wonderful teacher from iTalki who is very patient and kind.
that's awesome and very similar to me. I learn just for fun will probably never be able to visit Japan and actually use it. I enjoy learning it and just playing games and watching anime/youtube in japanese to enjoy the media in it's true form. これからも一緒に日本語を頑張りましょう！
I'm a Latino-American who's studied Japanese on and off. I honestly would give the hardest language title to Arabic. The writing and grammar are vastly different from English, the word order is the opposite of English, there are 4 different versions of every letter, you can study what you think is Arabic, go travel somewhere and not understand anybody because Arabic dialects are so different from each other. I can already see that I won't be able to study Arabic until I'm confident with my other languages. Arabic words 90% of the time are just constants, that's hard enough. Japanese is a lot to handle but it's super logical. Plus, I know I will never work or live in Japan long-term so I don't need to remember the exact stroke order of every kanji. I just need to know how to read them, so that's what I practice. I think the hardest thing about Japanese is making sure you're speaking formal or informal in the right context, and pronunciation sometimes.
They put Japanese and Arabic in the same category so in difficulty I’d say they are quite close to each other. Don’t get me wrong I don’t speak any of these languages. But I think Japanese might be a bit more difficult just for the crazy amount of characters. Arabic only has 28 (if I remember correctly) meanwhile Japanese has 46 in katakana, 46 in hiragana and an endless amount of kanji. And then you come to formality and honorifics and that combination might make it the hardest language to learn in a diplomatic sense. Do you agree or do you think Arabic poses some difficulty’s I’ve skipped over?
i mean you are discarding the hardest aspect of Japanese which is to be fully fluent in kanji which is 3000 characters give it or take, including the correct strokes. in your particular case, which i think you imply the need to travel to different countries of the arabic peninsula then yes, it'd be difficult to master different dialects of arabic (the same can be said to many languages too, this is a dumb point to objectively rank the difficulty of any language), meanwhile you say you wouldn't need to learn how to write kanji, and then don't mention the sheer amounts of time that takes to learn (without learning the correct stroke order) 2000 plus kanji. i'm sorry, Arabic is difficult but you don't need to learn thousands of ideograms. Even with all the four variations of each character its way less than Japanese Kanji... And i'm not even including the two syllabic systems. The pronunciation in Arabic can be tricky because the consonants but to be honest it's just a matter of learning a few dozens of phonems. Same as any other language. I'd put Mandarin or Korean pronunciation above Arabic in terms of pronunciation difficulty, just because the tonal devilry :)
As a brazilian who learned to speak japanese from zero as a 4h language, Theyre right, japanese is hard as f. Hell you need over 20k words just to be proficient. The grammar is also unlike anything else, since its the only language in its language family
@@Afreshio You dont need to know over 3k characters. i learned to speak japanese and only know 2.5k at best. You dont even need to actevely learn kanji(but its really tho). The real problem are the over 20k words you have to learn just to achieve basic proficiency, and the alien way grammar works. Japanese is my 4th language, and im brazilian
I agree. As an English speaker Japanese is easier to learn in terms of speaking than Chinese is, or even Korean in my view. Proficient Chinese speech learning is much harder and requires a lot more study. As for reading, both use variants on Chinese characters so it is not more or less difficult in that respect. The fact that Japanese has Kanji+ Hiragana + Katakna makes it easier to read than Chinese, not harder. You can see more clearly with Japanese as a beginner what the sentence is saying even if you don’t know all the kanji used. Chinese is written entirely in characters so you need to know more of them to work out what is being said, and it is harder to guess. The Kanji are also at least a bit more simple than traditional Chinese characters, although not by much I would accept. Chinese also has more hidden context culturally that you need to know to make sense of certain phrases - like when quotes from Classical Chinese are used to summarise an issue or problem, knowing what the historic or literary reference is usually is required, and a literal translation makes little sense. As far as I’ve seen you don’t really get that in Japanese at all, it is easier to access for a foreigner.
If you know Chinese, then yeah probably you’re right. If you’re from Europe or other Indo-European regions, any other European language would basically be your own language with a funny accent and on steroids. They all share a ton of words and influence each other significantly. But let’s not forget that anything is easy with the right attitude.
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm already fluent in 3 languages and tried to learn Korean, German and Dutch and currently I live in Japan and have been learning Japanese for the past year. I can't say that grammar, writing systems or even kanji are impossibly hard, I'd say the worst part is just the amount of time and effort you have to put in to be at least somewhat decent at Japanese. If I were to invest the exact amount of time in learning German, I'd already be close to a B2 level, but my Japanese is still barely upper N4-N3
@@EvgenyUskovexcept for who the fk needs to learn Hungarian? Japanese, Korean, Chinese are much more popular and famous across the world and more..."profitable" So it's highly incorrect to compare these languages. No matter how difficult is Japanese - people will be learning it because anime, manga and so on. How much do you know about Hungary tho?
@@sourcandy5512 Who cares how much anyone knows about ANY language? Your metric for importance is based only on dominant languages and “profitability”. Maybe not everyone cares about those things? Maybe someone has a particular fascination with a culture from their own lived experiences. Also, media in almost every language exists. Not everyone cares to read comics or watch anime, but it does help as a medium for language consumption. Anyone can find basically anything if they look hard enough, though.
I’m surprised you left out keigo, sonkeigo, and tameguchi. Depending on the level of politeness, words can be completely different and verbs are conjugated differently. Osaka also has its own dialect, and it is used extensively in the area, compared to other dialects in their respective areas and prefectures. There’s also the extensive use of onomatopoeia compared to English. Almost any verb and emotion seems to have an onomatopoeia alternative, so much so that there are dictionaries with just sound words. Furthermore, there are Japanese-English words, false friends, that use English words but mean different things in Japanese. It’s a very rewarding language to learn, if nothing but for the joy of 成功感, the feeling of accomplishment that humans strive for. I love the Japanese language.
I think its clear the video is done by someone who has no experience with the language. Especially because they made hiragana/katakana/kanji the hardest part. Everyone learns hiragana and katakana immediately and then that pretty much isn't hard at all.
As native Ukrainian speaker who studied English and Russian previously Japanese kanji is much easier to learn then spelling of most English language words such "thought" "without" and other bunch of words where English people omit or add new sounds without any reason for it 😂
Once you get enough kanji down to get a feel for their patterns, they’re much easier than English words. Kanji are based of pictures, so you can kind of get a feel for the word based on the kanji combinations. For English, even if you know suffixes and prefixes, sometimes you have no idea what a word is just by looking at it
As someone who is fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and is currently fast tracking Japanese, my advice is practice full immersion. Aside from sitting down an hour a day on my textbooks, I mostly read Japanese news, listen to JPop, go on websites in Japan, etc. I actively zone out languages I know and basically pretend I am a Japanese person.
@@missplainjane3905japanese people understand japanese and use it throughout their day. youre not making a point here, stop starting unnecessary arguments
If you are learning as a requirement for a job it is hard but if you learn it because you like Japan or some aspect of Japan it is very enjoyable and it sounds beautiful
As a Japanese, what's surprising for me is that many people learn to speak good Japanese without formal education or without even visiting Japan. The majority of us can't even communicate in English after studying it for 6 years at school, so I would say that Japanese is much easier than English.
I don’t know if I agree, schooling is not very good in general. Every US student takes language in high school and often middle school, but most US citizens barely speak one language. Learning languages in a school setting I think is not very good. The most optimal way is by yourself and with a native speaker helping you, even hired help if you don’t have any native friends. I would say Japanese is harder to learn to write but in terms of speaking I’d say they’re fairly similar for natives of either language, since they are so different japanese will have a hard time learning English structures and all the weird rules and pronunciations and English speakers will have to do the same for japanese.
I think it’s more so better resources and references to the accurate daily spoken language ☝🏽 which Japan supersedes a lot of the world thanks to anime.
I do see that, but I reckon its due to the amount of resources to learn Japanese for English speakers compared to the reverse. I've been self-studying Japanese for about 2 years now and used so many different types of resources. Its more than what I would've done at school had the language been a choice of study.
That's because the amount of time Japanese students spend on input activities such as listening is virtually nothing compared to the massive amount of time the self-taught Japanese learners you're talking about, most of whom are very motivated to learn Japanese, spend on watching anime or something. Japanese students indeed lean English for 6 years, but they just do grammar stuff and hardly listen to English spoken by native speakers. The self-taught Japanese leaners, on the other hand, always listen to authentic Japanese spoken by native speakers for a couple of hours per day.
A few other characteristics of Japanese that makes it harder for English speakers: 1- SOV worder order, instead of English SVO worder order (eg Tomu ga ringo wo taberu -> Tom apple eats) 2- Postpositions instead of English prepositions ( eg Boku ga gakkou ni iku -> I school to go) 3- Commonly drops the subject from a sentence so the listener has to deduce it from context (eg gakkou ni iku -> school to go) 4- Several levels of politeness forms, from different verb conjugations to entirely different words ( Ringo wo kuu (casual), Ringo wo taberu (informal), Ringo wo tabemasu (standard polite), Ringo wo meshi agaru (formal) ). Also there's dozens of variations for the word 'I' and 'You', depending on social hierarchy. 5- Verbs which inflect based on intent or emotion, for which English typically would add a word before the verb ( taberu (to eat), taberareru (it's possible to eat (edible)), tabesaseru (compel someone to eat), tabesaserareru (to be compelled by someone to eat), tabetagaru (wish to eat), tabetakunai (do not wish to eat), tabereba (if you eat it, then...) etc.
Bro, the word order is NOT hard it literally TELLS YOU how to use the word order "object particle" "subject particle". Secondly, thr thing that is hard is the は particle. That's really hard.
yeah and the SOV combined with the different concepts that dont exist in english, combined with the way adjectives are used and how past tense verbs are used as adjectives and etc etc etc, make it take a very long time just to become acclimated to the flow of it, let alone actually learning 20k words with essentially no alphabet or surefire way to read a word with the "letters" because each letter can have like 10 different sounds, depending on the word lol. then you have the politeness levels. particles. pitch accent (words that have the same "spelling" but can be said with 3 different pitches to mean 3 different words). and an ungodly amount of homophones. i swear every word has like an average of 5 homophones lol. some having 20 and others having just 2 or 3.
I think it sounds more complicated than it seems for the sov thing. We can understand "there's an apple that Tom ate" in English. Not that learning it isn't complicated for English speakers and that it's not a lot to learn but our whole sentence structure changes based on tense.
@@ultraprincesskenny6790 fun fact if people grew up doing a Yoda impression since he spoke in a SOV way they would be able to understand it more easily
All the romance languages, germanic languages, and slavic languages all come from a single language called Proto Indo European (PIE) meaning the core vocab, and grammar, and the language themselves are all related to one another, whereas Japanese is from a completely different language family meaning you cannot get much more unrelated and different than any PIE language and Japenese.
You forgot to mention that Japanese has multiple words to say one thing and one word can have multiple meanings on top of pitch accent where hashi can mean bridge or chopsticks based on purely pitch.
English also had multiple worlds to say one thing. Have you never seen a thesaurus? Pitch accent is also difficult, sure, but English is not easier on that front either. Not only are are letters simply not pronounced, letters can be pronounced differently based on the word, some words can be pronounced the same with different spelling, and some words defy all logic and are pronounced nothing like they’re written.
I took both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese in University, 6 semesters of each. Mandarin, you only read the characters one way. In Japanese, the readings of each character change depending on context. Plus there are many exceptions to the rule. Its not even in the same league as each other. A famous Japanese linguist himself once said Chinese is a logical language, Japanese is an ad-hoc language. Chinese as a tonal language, the learning curve is difficult for some people, but after that initial challenge, the grammar is mostly logical and easy to build sentences with. Japanese starts out simple--very easy to make all the sounds, after all. Hiragana and Katakana are simple, nothing challenging there. But the difficulty curve with Japanese is intense. The grammar is even difficult for native Japanese speakers to use correctly (Keigo, or polite speech is very involved compared to easy to learn 'respectful' words in Chinese). If you want to learn Japanese, I suggest to prepare yourself for a difficult journey.
Funny thing about the US department of state numbers: it doesn't take into account private study time. It's just classroom hours. So the number of hours spent is actually way, WAY higher. As someone who has 500+ hours alone on Anki, and lord knows how many thousands as a total, the numbers they posted on that site are most definitely not enough to become fluent. The few people I've come across who I'd consider fluent (not Korean nor Chinese, since they have an advantage), probably spent over 15,000 hours in the language.
For me becoming conversationally fluent in Japanese took around 2 to 2.5 years (but I also spend like 2.5k hours in the language, mostly immersion), moved to Japan around the 2 year mark and use it every day these days! My personal theory is you don't really need 2k Kanji for everyday life a lot of the standard daily use Kanji (常用漢字) really don't come up all that often, although you'll probably still need a lot haha. Learn them, read a lot eventually you get used to them and then they turn into something really great, as you'll be able to guess the meaning of unknown words thanks to Kanji. The alphabet is certainly often enough used in Japanese to count it imho even if it's only for short abbreviations like OL, SE, JK, w (this one is great)
Wow!! I feel a little better now. I have been studying Japanese for two years now. I thought my progress was moving slow. Now I know; it will take more time!!!
I passed JLPT level 1 (the hardest) way back in 2009. I started my Japanese language studies in college in for 2 years in 2001. I lived in Japan from 2005 until 2011 casually studying on my own. I knew it was hard, but I had so much fun over the years learning it, it really didn't feel like the challenge that it actually was; probably because I took it easy, but still a really enjoyable time of my life.
I got fluent in Japanese 15 years ago, was also studying Chinese at same time but gave up Chinese because I couldn't get 'into' it as much. I have dozens of rpgs I cleared in Japanese language and always have stuff I look forward to playing or doing in the language, just in rpg games alone I reached their recommended 3000 hours or whatever in just a couple years lol And I've been watching anime since the 90's and my MAL states I have 321.8 days ( 7728 hours), it's safe to say I have over 10,000 hours in the language, also lived with Japanese people and only used the language in Japanese chatrooms for several hours a day for several months at points too, so I'm way over their recommended amount, and those figures were from several years ago, so 2000-3000 hours isn't that much time if you are really immersing yourself and love what you are doing.
From a Chinese perspective, Japanese is not that bad. The accent/pronunciation is relatively easy to pronounce. No consonant clusters. A lot of vowels and initial consonants. Chinese characters are also pretty helpful. One just has to remember the simplified Japanese characters and traditional Chinese characters because both are used. A lot of shared vocabulary too because of logographic borrowing and the exchanging of ideas. For me, the real difficulty comes down to the complexity in grammar. Japanese grammar is agglutinative, and there is a lot of layers of politeness. Also, how Japanese people read off Chinese characters is quite different from the Korean way. Koreans are very direct. The Hangeul syllables correspond to the Chinese-characters one-to-one. In Japanese, there may be Kanji and there is a specific reading for the Kanji.
At the start I always expected to have such times like 6 years to fluency and stuff, but now, 3 years in I can already comfortably chat with natives even about some deeper topics and books aren't impossible to read anymore. I think a lot of people see it as discouraging to need so much time of their lives to get fluent in a language, but a lot of people fail to see that you are already basic conversational after only a few years
@@rastaarmando7058 perhaps it does apply *more* to Chinese, but the study of basic radicals, pattern recognition and exposure is the best formula to “learn” kanji. If people want to learn Japanese, they shouldn’t cower from kanji: it doesn’t have to be as intimidating as many think. Kaname Naito has an amazing, three-minutes-long video on the subject titled “You Don’t Have to Study Kanji” that pretty much explains it, but basically the advice is people have to learn the kanji *from* the vocabulary and it will often come almost naturally.
another reason is, Japanese is literally not a tonal language but it does have tone and the tones is not represented in any written form. So you have to spend another half life to master the tone by mimicking the way the native speakers do and you always be recognized by local that you are a foreigner even you spent years to learn.
Yep. there are so many comments here that either don't know or don't care that there are tones. Bad pronunciation is easy, but actually pronouncing words correctly is hard especially if you can't (like me) pick up the differences. I guess ignorance is bliss!
While Japanese and English haven't been exchanging words for very long, the back-and-forth trade is quite rapid compared to other languages Look at the word "anime" Japanese version of an English Word that is used in English Or "karaoke" Used in English, based on a Japanese compound that is half based on an English word (oke being contraction of orchestra)
I'm actually an American in the process of learning Japanese right now, haha. I've master hiragana and katakana. I'm dipping my toe in the water when it comes to kanji. I pretty much understand their sentence structure and everything. Just have to learn the actually words like verbs and nouns. I plan to go to Japan in July of 2024, so I hope to be near-fluent by then if that isn't too far-fetched.
Another thing often overlooked when talking about Japanese is the confusing sentence structure and word conjugation. Which has successfully driven me insane
I kind of agree with this. I have studied several languages and Japanese feels like the most difficult. This is partially because of kanji but also because there are a lot of nuances in the language.
Kanji is easy if you studied Chinese, I'm American born, but studied Cantonese with Traditional Chinese writing/characters every weekend for like 12 years lol. Japanese on'yomi sounds very similar to Cantonese too, characters like 70-80% have same meaning or easy to understand approximately what its saying
Japanese is not easy indeed, but I do think it is a beautiful language and that makes it enjoyable to learn instead of a burden, I love to see how many of the words have a root and reason to be, they're not arbitrary words that you have to memorize, but each word is usually a composition from a set of smaller words, this even helps on figuring out whenever you hear a new word to know how to break it and decipher what it might actually mean without having to look it up.
“Fluency” always needs to be defined when speaking about a language and these US department times until basic fluency are no different. It’s a very basic fluency. So that you can have one on one conversations with natives and doesn’t mean you’re literate in Japanese once you complete the course either. Just able to hold a one on one conversation. This does NOT mean keeping up with natives speaking to each other. That’s yet many more hours of studying. Good luck.
I speak Japanese as a 2nd language but not perfectly. Enough to make friends and have good conversations and have a good time and enough to not make daily life there difficult for me, however I can't read a newspaper. My fluency is all in speaking, writing is extremely difficult... Reading is hard as well, but my reading is well above my writing because of how much I text people in Japanese. It's a weird feeling being able to read a text and understand it but then if you gave me a piece of paper and took away that text and asked me to write it for you, I almost guarantee that I can't in many cases. It's such a tough language with many crazy intricacies... but at the same time that's why I love it. There's always something you don't know! It's a great undertaking and truly a life's work, but I chose it and I'm happy I did.
I'm only a year and a half in to my Japanese learning journey. I have a wonderful teacher from iTalki, and I'm starting to do as many conversation classes as I can find on my level. The good part about Japanese is that katakana and hiragana only have one sound per symbol. Kanji is a lot to learn, but not impossible. I highly recommend WaniKani. I'm currently on level 40 out of 60 and can read pretty well -- not great because there are a lot of words I don't know yet, but that's the point of reading, isn't it, to learn new words. And the way kanji works is so cool -- putting symbols together to make a new word is so clever and cool. Word order is a challenge, subtle nuance words/endings is difficult - it's something that doesn't exist in English. Often I'll make a sentence and my teacher will say, "Grammatically, that's a perfect sentence. But we wouldn't say it like that..." So there are those cultural differences in how you would say something. That's, I think, impossible to learn from a textbook. I keep at it every day, though. Reading the comments here has inspired me.
Two writing systems. Hiragana and katakana are basically two versions of the same letter, like upper and lower case. NOBODY writes in romanized Japanese. Kana (hiragana + katakana) can be learned in a day. It's kanji that is the major hurdle. For this you'll need patience. Lots and lots of patience. 🥵 The grammar is logical and easy; it's teachers who don't understand Japanese language structure themselves who confuse students. そんなに難しくないよ！😊
@@danielantony1882you can't learn it in week either, you will still struggle to read full sentences without getting frustrated until you're at least 3-6 months in.
The given arguments alone are far from being enough to explain the difficulty to reach mastery of Japanese. Thy explain the difficulty to reach intermediate level, but then the struggle is different and, in my experience, has more to do with : - acquiring the breadth of vocabulary and getting the subtles nuances between similar words ; - relearning kanjis with the many not-so-common readings ; - and mastering the different casual and honorific speeches and appropriately switching between them.
As a native English speaker who has spent 25 years studying Japanese very much off and on but still somewhat frequently... yes, it's hard, I still am not conversational and I will probably die of old age barely having reached conversational let alone fluent. That is, unless I suddenly decide to radically study but where's the time? *sigh* and I would love to learn Mandarin too.
Typically, there are hiragana captions over written kanji, and katakana and hiragana shouldnt be too difficult because there arent many characters. Chinese writing however has probably 100 times the amount of Japanese characters, and they dont reflect a syllable, they reflect an idea, verb, object, or state. And Mandarin is tonal, so the amount of repetition and memory required to read as well as the many different tones that can cause easy mistakes makes the Chinese language much more difficult in my opinion. With the popularity of anime in the U.S. you can argue that many of the younger generations are being exposed to the language, whereas there isnt much Chinese content for exposure. Even though I study Chinese, I had already burned out before when learning the writing which is why now I only focus on reading, speaking and listening. Learning how to read and speak are already like two different languages on their own, but the writing is extremely tedious because every character has some complexity, whereas the english writing system is simple with many exceptions. Anyways, Japanese is a beautiful language and I watch anime and study it on the side. Best of luck on your language learning journeys, whichever one you choose!
It's been a few days and I want to change my opinion above and add why. While it is true that Chinese writing is more voluminous than Japanese, recently, I have been introduced to Japanese grammar and it is mind numbing. There are almost 50 conjugations due to there being two kinds of verbs, Ichidan and Godan, each used to describe certain nuances such as passive forms, negative forms, past forms, volitional forms, etc, as well as polite forms, passive (habitual) forms, forms such as when something just happens to you, forms as in when you are being forced to do something, and the negative, forced to NOT do something and much, much more. So I want to change my opinion and agree with this video declaring that Japanese is even more difficult than the most difficult languages to learn. As I have just been introduced to Japanese grammar, my sense as a native English speaker is that the verb conjugation is extremely convoluted, and I have not even learned anything about adjectives, nouns, pronouns, sentence structure, etc. HOPEFULLY, I dove into the deep end first and the verb conjugations are the hardest part. Anyways, I may be decompressing from the lesson as I am writing this, but I still think that Japanese is a very beautiful language, so if that is what you are learning, more power to you. I will try and not be discouraged. I find it interesting because this is my first time being exposed to a language that heavily relies on conjugations to communicate, and I wonder how that will enhance neural plasticity as I learn this language.
@@OK-otic I agree with you. I tried learning a bit of Japanese in middle school due to a brief Anime phase and my older sibling studying it a bit in school, but dropped it after a couple months. Over the past few months however, I have been learning Chinese and feel like I've made much more progress in saying basic things and understanding the "vibe" of the language. Like with Chinese I could try stringing together a sentence and say something vaguely coherent. In Japanese I have never had that.
I'm not sure why people are so hung up on how "hard" kanji is... I've been studying Japanese for the past 3 years, and I'm about to pass N2. Kanji is probably what gives me the least amount of problem. What I find the most difficult is getting used to the word order. For short sentences of course I have no problem, but longer sentences will trip me up for sure.
I have also done 3 years and currently studying to get past N2. I agree, the kanji really isn’t as much of a problem as people make them out to be. It’s just pattern recognition, something you will need to learn to read properly in any other language anyways. Only difference is that you can’t see the pronunciation as easily.
honestly… japanese makes so much sense to me grammatically. the sounds are similar to spanish too (i speak english and spanish fluently) i’m learning Chinese along with japanese. chinese is definitely harder imo. i think the reason it isn’t above japanese is because of the sentence/grammar structure.
a lot of the japanese text you showed in this video is actually in chinese fonts (way too many youtubers do this). also would have liked to see you mentioned pitch accent which is probably nearly as difficult as tones for english speakers to learn
There is one other aspect of Kanji that increases the difficulty. Many (perhaps all) Kanji have several different pronunciations and meanings, which i my limited study has proven to be the hardest part of learning them and also how to use them.
Japanese is extremely difficult language. one Kanji can have 10 different readings. one word can have 10 synonyms. the onomatopoeia, honorifics, the 4-character compound words, oh my god the list is endless. i've been exposed to the language over 20 years but each day, i still encounter words that i have not heard or seen before. a lifetime is not enough for me to fully grasp Japanese.
Japanese is difficult in general because of the multitude of linguistic and cultural nuances built into the language that take years to truly master. This includes little things like using honorifics when referring to someone else and you, the speaker, using the correct personal pronoun, pronunciation, and phrasing for your gender. Interestingly enough, while the grammar is quite different for speakers of European languages, it's supposedly easier for speakers of Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Korean to familiarize themselves with Japanese grammar. Despite all this, I actually don't consider Japanese *too* hard of a language. Now, I don't claim to know Japanese at all beyond an exceedingly basic level, but I do strongly believe that the infinite amount of content in Japanese and resources to learn the language help immensely in learning it, even if it ends up taking you, let's say, 10 years to achieve mastery. I would actually go as far to say that learning Arabic is harder than Japanese. The Arabic script typically doesn't write vowels (the words are less defined in the first place) and there is not as much content in the Arabic that is actually spoken by real people. Modern Standard Arabic may be used for the news, but it's weird because even though it's called "Modern Standard Arabic", it's apparently based on Classical Arabic, or in other words, the Arabic used in the Quran. This solution does not lend itself way to practical communication between modern varieties of Arabic, with native speakers describing foreigns that try to use it to communicate with them as sounding "weird", because again, virtually no one speaks it in the vernacular. Furthermore, Arabic is, in reality, more like different languages under the umbrella of Arabic, so the "Arabic" in Morocco is really a different language from the one spoken in Egypt/the Levant. If you learn Arabic, you basically have to go out of your way to find resources for what is really multiple languages which sometimes seem *more* distant than, let's say, Portuguese is from Italian.
I missed that... And now that I look into it more, it turns out that "ke" is replaced by "te" as well... On the katakana side, both the character and romaji are "te", and on the hiragana side, the character is "ke", but the romaji is "te"...
I'm learning all writing systems at once, it's not as hard as people say in terms of memorization once you understand how long it'll take to actually become proficient. There are ways to take short cuts so you can at least get by with some japanese if you had to go to japan. Memorize a bunch of common words using flashcards or whatever method works for you along with common phrases which is really important. You can learn how to properly use a handful of particles in only a month or two if you really get into it. Learning how to structure sentences early on is also super important imo, because it helps you make sense of what to do with all the random words you pick up. Once you feel you have a good vocabulary it helps if you read manga/japanese novels and watch anime. Ignore subtitles and only focus on the words/ how sentences are structured, google everything you're confused about and eventually you'll begin understanding a lot of what you're hearing even if it's not as enjoyable as just watching with the subtitles on. For manga and books, start with childrens books that use simple words, slowly work your way up. If you follow any japanese media try interacting with japanese people online, nothing better than learning from the natives, if you plan on going to japan, make friends with the locals. A lot of people tend to only befriend other foreigners while in japan but locals can teach you so much. Another thing to note is if you're going to to learn as fast as possible is that romaji is your best friend. It's easier to write memorize things when you can read them easily. If you're using flashcards, eventually remove all romaji on the words you're best at until eventually getting rid of it all. And make sure to take breaks as to not overload your mind. This is just the method i'm using + some tips i've heard from others
Ive been learning Japanese for 6 months now and I can read hiragana and katakana I know most of the particles and I think I need to just have more immersion and words to expand my vocabulary hiragana and katakana are the easy part sentence structure and learning all the words is the hard part I just need more time to get immersed in and I need to learn more words also learning all the kanji is difficult
I think what’s important is this is for diplomats, not people just wanting to learn a different language. Diplomats basically need to become native level fluent in the other language as it’s highly important for their job. Meanwhile, for language enthusiast, you don’t necessarily have to reach that level. Japanese is still insanely hard, don’t get me wrong, but I think it doesn’t take as much time mentioned in this video to become at a level where you can communicate with Japanese peope(which imo, is basically the goal of language learning).
Yeah, the grain of salt that the viewer needs to take with this video is that any language has its difficulty reduced when you _want_ to learn it I was able to at least reach basic conversational Japanese level after about 4 years of study I took a combined total of 5 years of formal education in public school for Spanish and spent an additional 4 years living in a region with a high density of Spanish speakers and facilities in Spanish. I still don't feel like I can even construct a sentence in Spanish.
I want to learn Japanese because it sounds cool. Communication is secondary. If I were the last man on Earth, I would learn Japanese and the 39 other languages I plan to learn; naysayers notwithstanding.
Calling Japanese hard can be an understatement because there are reasons why Japanese have 3 writing systems. Because 漢字("Kanji" or "Han characters") were originally Chinese, they're characters that represent words or ideas, they're based on pictographs of real-life things. And due to Chinese influence, Kanji spread to Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. When Kanji was invented, the Japanese didn't have a writing system at the time, they just communicated the way they communicated. When Kanji came to them, they were confused because it's hard to use Japanese terms in Kanji, also considering that Chinese and Japanese use different sounds, see onyomi and kunyomi. So, Japanese took some Kanji and oversimplified them, turning them into ひらがな("Hiragana"), so any Japanese can use words of their origin. But 2 isn't enough, so they took parts of some Kanji and turned them into カタカナ(Katakana), which is for words of foreign origin just like you said, this was used so that Buddhist monks can transliterate Chinese words unfamiliar to them. Using all 3 writing systems, makes text readable, if Japanese text is only Kanji, then it'll be very difficult and boring, and if it were only Hiragana, it's just so simple that it looks childish. Only Hiragana can also cause confusion, like "My mom likes flowers" would be 母は花好き("haha wa hana suki"). If it were just Hiragana it would look like this ははははなすき("ha ha ha ha na su ki"). This on its own can cause confusion because は is pronounced "ha", but it's pronounced "wa" as a particle. Kanji can also help identify homonyms, like 四("shi", 4) and 死("shi", death). Japanese also couldn't come up with the idea of spaces between words, so be grateful, English speakers. Back when video games were introduced, due to memory limitations, it was very difficult to type Kanji into the game, so they used spaces between certain words like an English speaker could. There's a lot to talk about, but I've made my point.
While the writing systems part of Japanese is tricky initially, I was able to more or less memorize katakana and hiragana within a few months of studying an hour or two per day. The tricky part is not only the kanji (which seem fairly achievable, just a new learning curve to get over), but the gramatical structure since it accounts for so many things in ways that are very much not English-ey.
Been studying Japanese for 16 years now, I speak it everyday, never been to japan though. I use vrchat (a social vr and desktop application) to make friends from other countries and exchange language & culture!
I took a year of Japanese in college 15 years ago. All i can say is katakana and romaji are clutch af lol. know some of the hiragana used in sentences no/to/etc. Mades travel easier. Much easier time in japan than i had in france lol.
Japanese really is difficult, even for someone like me who speaks Mandarin and already knew all the Japanese Kanji already. Simply because there is no spacing in Japanese, so if a sentence were written in Hiragana only there is no way of knowing which character forms which word.
I am not surprised to hear it is the hardest. Just from the surface level dive ive done into some languages, it seemed the most confusing to me. The writing system especially.
No, I'm general western lenguages are easier, you don't have to memorize 2k Kanji just 24 new letters, you don't struggle with different levels of formal speech.
After learning some Japanese, I am honestly surprised people claim this language is anywhere near the hardest ones to learn. Outside of memorizing Kanji, JP was surprisingly easy relative to where it usually ranks in difficulty.
"After learning some Japanese" The keyword here is "some". How much is "some"? Are you even at the 10,000 words mark yet? If not, you're not even at a stage where you can even see the summit of the huge mountain you're climbing. By 15k+ it's sort of seeable, but it really "sets in" how much is still in front of you when you get to about 20,000 words. And yes, I'm using word count because it's the easiest and probably most accurate way of somewhat pinning down someone's knowledge in a language. That word count is obviously coupled with thousands upon thousands (way more than this video claims, since the US statistics only count classroom hours) of immersion and study.
@@m8onethousand some as in good enough for casual speech. Though I am never convinced that word count is a good measure. Especially when a lot of the words are basically made from building blocks. JP grammar is also very consistent, the hard part other than Kanji is usually understanding concepts that aren't really present in western languages as much. As for JP phonetics, those were very easy for me. People like to say, "wait till you learn about pitch accent" but even with pitch accent, it's easy. As a comparison, to me, Chinese and Korean are a lot more daunting with their pronunciation. Chinese reading seems double as hard to get into exactly because there's only Kanji and nothing else. JP uses 3 writing systems, but they give you clues on how the sentence is structured so it's easier to get into and start reading. As for business JP, I just don't have a reason to learn it, I know there are some weird politeness things but I don't think people tend to overfocus on this. My point was, people shouldn't be too afraid to jump into learning this language. I just hope people don't go "oh, hardest language, I better not even try"
@@jurajojo2543You still said nothing about your skill level (everyone who's spent even a couple of months can speak casually), so I'm going to assume you're not at a skill level where you're able to see the huge mountain in front of you. Vocabulary count is the easiest and more consistent way of knowing how deep a person is in a language. It's the single most important factor for comprehension, especially the more complex the Japanese is. For things like the JLPT (just citing it as an example since that's what a lot of Japanese learners love to talk about), there's usually targetted study, plus it doesn't test output, not to mention, N1 is at best low-low intermediate INPUT ability. In other words: even the hardest JLPT test meant for testing foreigner's Japanese input ability isn't enough to get people to see how huge the mountain in front of them actually is. "Especially when a lot of the words are basically made from building blocks." Good thing we're talking about JAPANESE, where that's NOT a problem in comparison to other languages where you get word count bloat. If you knew a thing or two about Japanese, you'd know why your statements makes 0 sense, and you're just trying to muddy the waters. For example, no one on earth counts things like 読み as a lexeme (word unit), unless it's one of those nouns which acquired sort of its own definition. No one does that for the absolute vast majority of verb compounds either (there are a couple which have become almost like set phrases at this point), nor different particle/aux uses (see: to-adverbs/taru/nari/etc.) depending on the nuance meant. The Japanese word count EVERYONE ON EARTH WHO IS INTELLECTUALLY HONEST uses is pretty close to the way English words are counted, so once again: no idea why you made such an irrelevant statement. But just to re-state why word count is the easiest and most consistent method to see how deep someone is in a language: With word count it shows how out of their way a person went to actually learn and immerse in the language. No JLPT speedrunner is going to learn 20k+ words. They're going to learn the about 10k words they need for their JLPT N1, which barely puts you at low-low intermediate Japanese INPUT ability. Ultimately, when people claim Japanese isn't a hard language to learn, they're speaking emotionally and without any data to back it up. The US department of state have been teaching diplomats languages for decades, and all they said is the following: Japanese is the language that takes diplomats the most time to learn. If you don't think: TIME AND EFFORT NEEDED TO BE GOOD AT A TASK = hard. Then I'm sorry to tell you, but your arbitrary definition of what "hard" is bears no impact in reality. Every single language on earth has the same process of learning. No language is unique in the sense that it requires X, Y, C mental ability to learn. The only difference is how much time it takes you to learn a language compared to others, and that's entirely based on how similar/different a language is compared to the languages you speak, which puts Japanese AS THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN FOR ENGLISH SPEAKERS.
Well the good thing about Japanese it actually does have a lot of loan words too. I would say there are a lot of european countries that have less english loan words. But yeah there are allso a lot of words that are entirely different in Japanese where as many words in other languages then english often are at least a tiny bit similar.
I was in the Army and took the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, which is a test to determine aptitude for learning languages, and when I crushed it they told me that Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean were the hardest. Japanese was never mentioned. I have personally dabbled in both Mandarin and Japanese, and Japanese was way easier. I spent a long time trying to perfect one phrase in Mandarin to say to my future mother-in-law while I was dating my future wife. I was certain I had the inflections of every word down and she just looked at me like I was speaking Greek.
It definitely is in my opinion, especially if you're learning how to actually read, and then extra time to write. I really wish each Kanji had just one reading like chinese. I would happily learn 10 times the amount of kanji if I could actually read words with an actual alphabet lol. You basically have to learn each word as it's own unique thing. You never know what reading a kanji is going to use. There's hundreds of them with like 10+ readings 💀 Not to mention chinese having super nice grammar similar to english. Japanese needs a complete rewiring of your brain to get used to speaking backwards and all the weird grammar concepts, politeness levels, marking partilces that aren't even actual words but just used to mark words as an object, a target, an area to do things, an area that's a target, etc etc.
Japanese is the easiest “hard” language to learn, especially with the extreme amount of free resources readily available. There are significantly harder languages out there, Japanese is just the most popular.
from a resource and motivation standpoint sure, it's easier to stay motivated with plenty of resources and media to enjoy. from a complication and hours spent standpoint, hard disagree. it's not only classified at the same amount of hours as the 2 other hardest to learn languages from the department of whatever that teaches languages in a government job, it also has many more factors that make it more difficult than those other 2. If we are talking about pure conversation class, and not learning how to actually read, then yes, it can be considered easier than maybe a few other languages. @@2oqh
4:30 While you can totally get away with rudimentary pronunciation and people won't mock you, sounding natural is actually really hard because JP has relatively few building blocks available for words, so there's a shitton of homophones that are differenciated only by pitch accents, which you have to go out of your way to learn, vary by region and you just have to brute force input 3000 words.
As far as Japanese learning from an English background, I would say yes and no for it being more difficult than the other languages. As someone who has the native languages of Cantonese and English, I actually find Mandarin to be way harder than Japanese. In Japanese, there are no tones. What you see is what you get. Mandarin has four, Cantonese has a whopping nine! Just working yourself to a basic conversational proficiency isn’t that difficult. However, learning how to get to higher level is definitely more challenging.
Wow this makes me a proud polyglot. I speak Cantonese and Chinese since I'm born as Chinese. I speak Malay language as that is my national language. Finally is English. I would say Japanese is the hardest language.
For the asians, who are not based culturally on Chinese hieroglyphs, Japanese system of writing is hard. You need to be associated with it in early years to get feel of them. To memorize over 2000 symbols is just unimaginable and plus other 3 systems are too complex. Need to prepare to spend substantial part of your life in order to learn them.
Took Japanese for 3 years in high school. I barely know anything anymore, but one thing I do know is that if you're ever in Japan, and you really need to communicate something to a local, try to say the English word in a Japanese way. All you really need to understand is that the Japanese alphabet follows the sounds ahh, eee, ooo, eh, oh. So going down the alphabet, you have ha, hee, hoo, heh, ho...ka, kee, koo, keh, ko, etc... So if you're spelling Japanese words using English letters (called Romaji), you're never just using one letter at a time if that makes sense. When visiting Japan, at the end of our trip, all of my friends had vastly different flight times so they were freaking out about finding their way to the airport without any help. Even though I believe there's an actual Japanese word for airport, I told them to just say this phonetically to the taxi driver: er roo poruto....Magically, it worked! haha
When I began learning it, I did it without any expectation of reference back to English. I actually appreciated that there weren't any similarities, because the words in Japanese did not overlap with anything I've done. Thus I could not make the mistake of substituting a word that is similar in some 3rd language. I either knew the word or I didn't. The grammar isn't that hard, I dont know why there is so much struggle.
The average weeks does not mean to reach mastery. It means to reach proficient level to do start the career in the FSI. FSI even recommends after finishing those many weeks to travel into the country of the target language and stay for a year.
Most definitely not for Japanese. Japanese is 2200 class hours. Not including all the practice and study outside of class. Finally a minimum of a year spent in the target language country. It is considered one of the most intense language courses to go through. The livelihood of applicants hinge on it. @@2oqh
This video sees most of the difficulties in the writing system. This, however, doesn't really explain it, because Korean also belongs to the hardest set of languages, and the Korean script can be learned in one or two days. What I find most difficult as a German: 1.) The most important part - the verb - comes last. So you always have hard-to-comprehend sentences with embedded parts. 2.) Nothing is obligatorically marked, everything is optional. There's no grammatical sex, no singular or plural, no person - often not even a subject if the context allows. Both factors - verb coming last and nothing being specified - makes it hard to follow and easy to lose track. Oh, yeah, and the writing obviously. 😅
For the word order, there is a common word order. Also, German likes to put verbs at the end, too. Your brain will adjust lol I think one thing very difficult for me is that they tend to use entire sentences to describe one noun 😭 and then go on to continue the point. It’s so confusing sometimes
@@ariellev9185, in German, verbs go in the end in certain times, side sentences, passive voice etc. But there are tricks to reduce the damage those things do - there are options. And good writers make use of them. In Japanese, there is no option. What you need to know most always comes last. Your mentioned attribute clusters are just another example of that. Ame ga futte iru hi ni au ni dekaketa ore no... Ugh!
@@ariellev9185I agree the entire sentences + noun suck expecially since like... There are sentences where you can't tell if it's one big modifier, or a modifier modifying the modifier, or a copula and then a modified phrase
3月1日は日曜日で祝日、晴れの日でした。 1st of march was sunday, holiday and sunny day. Sangatsu tsuitachi wa nichiyoubi de hare no hi deshita. All 日 have different pronunciations.
If you learn Japanese out of context (speedrunning kanji and vocab without going into foundations first) then you're in for a bad time This is how most Japanese learners I've seen try to learn the language and often they don't last long because they burn themselves out.
Arabian is the most difficult language to me . Honestly, the Japanese grammar, writing systems or are possible to learn depends how much effort we put on ... I feel that Japanese language is a beautiful sound juts like music
Also just felt like adding - Kanji in Japanese or Chinese characters in China are much better (I think) and easier and more intuitive for me from a dyslexic point of view. Dyslexia makes latin alphabet languages harder for me, whereas it seems like my brain is much much more prepared to learn the characters. I can easily learn and remember a character through its shape and meaning/radicals etc, than I can the spelling of english words that have lots of vowels in them, or just bizzare spellings that make no sense to me at all. I don't come across the same frustrating issues with characters that I do when reading latin alphabet. Might be brain overcompensating who knows.
I've often wondered if Finns can learn Japanese easier. I've read than Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and Finnish (?) are Altaic languages with similar structure. Apparently there are genetic similarities too
I’m very thankful to have started learning Japanese when I was an early teenager. I started studying Japanese at around 14 yrs old so wrapping my mind around how Japanese functions fundamentally wasn’t as much of an issue. If I had started at 17 or so I think it would e been a lot harder.
@@flashgordon6510 You can do it!! 💪 I started when I was 39, studied for a couple years, then stopped. Now I’m starting again, a decade later! 😁 Love it! ❤
I think that the most hard languages are 日本语[different and many pronouncations of kanji] and 韩语[sets of alphabetical letterings which are inconsistent, one stack of these is said as oppyo and another as geuk, the endings is what confuses me]
I am an Eastern European, and for me japanese language (not writing, but pronunciation) is the easiest among all Asian languages. And most comfortable for my larynx.
The State Department doesn't classify any language as "the hardest to learn." They instead group languages into different categories based on their difficulty for native speakers of English. Japanese is within the most difficult language category, but there's no "most" difficult language according to the State Department.
To say whether Japanese hard or not, I would prefer to use JLPT as the standard example of Japanese proficiency test. It has 5 level from N1-N5, including minimal hour and exact number of requirement to pass each level like vocabulary, grammar and listening (文字、語彙、文法、読解、聴解) in general. You are free to choose the level, but the learning speed and the pass rate depends on your native language and motivation to learn I think. For example, if you already a native level at chinese, you will have advantage with kanji. Kanji is basically selected chinese character (about 2000+ to be considered good enough for N1) some being simplified mixed with a little bit of Japan own national character system. If you are korean, the grammar is a little bit similar, since japanese language root from Ural Altaic family, like turkish and korean. But, to be even considered master or fluent in Japanese using JLPT standard, it depend on the usage of the language itself. Most company in Japan prefer N2 if you are looking for a standard job, and maybe even N1 for a specialized job, or at least be able to use language at business level. If you can passed N2, you are considered to be able to live and communicate with little to no problem in japan, with N1 to be considered as native speaker level.
Japanese N1 is not even close to being a native speaker, don't forget these tests do not even include speaking or writing aspects, there are many people who pass but still struggle to communicate. JLPT N1 is just enough to be functional in daily life and to consume some (not too difficult) native materials. Also JLPT pass score is quite low, so you can get N1 with a lot of room for error. But N1 is still as good starting point so I do still recommend learners to try and aim for N2/N1. There's also the Business Japanese Proficiency Test (BJT) , it seems a bit more accurate in testing your ability to communicate in a working environment, but it is lesser known.
@@ami4511 True, that's why I said N1 to be "considered" as native speaker level, but the irony is, I bet maybe not even all japanese people will be able to pass N1, on academic level. Language knowledge needed between test and daily life can be so different based on its practicality. To be able to comprehend a language on native level is indeed very challenging and the proficiency level will be vary between speakers. Also not every company prefer JLPT, but majority does.
As if 2000 Kanji weren’t difficult enough, each kanji has multiple readings (pronunciation) depending on context. I learnt Japanese together with people from China and even they had difficulty with this aspect.
If you learn katakana and you lift up the hood of your Japanese car most of the parts are labeled in Katakana but the words are the English words: Kaaburetoru for Carburetor.
Weird, I kinda picked it up without ever learning it, I dont need subtitles and can understand 90%+, if the conversations dont delve into some niche topic. That being said I cant read Kanji and I bet if I spoke it my grammar would suck if I were to try to create more complex ideas with compound sentences.
What makes Japanese even harder is that people in the Kansai region in western Japan speak with the Kansai dialect, which is totally different from the standard textbook Japanese that non-native Japanese people learn.
It took me about two weeks to learn hiragana and katakana and I think that's how you should start. The grammar is pretty simple with only a few irregularities so that shouldn't take too long either. The vocabulary will grow if you just get yourself going. Kanji isn't an impassable obstacle as you can go around it to some extent by using hiragana instead.
![[柴犬ASMR]曼玉Manyu&小白Bai 毛发护理Spa asmr](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0TsXQ7z2Dh4/mqdefault.jpg)
I am a Japanese. The Japanese character sets are Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonograms and have a small number of characters, so they are easy to memorize like the alphabet. However, there are over 25,000 kanji, and even if we limit ourselves to the kanji that Japanese people use in their daily lives, there are over 2,000. For ordinary Japanese people, memorizing kanji is a life's work. Those facts make Japanese learners who only use around 26 characters hopeless or irritated. However, from my point of view, it is no different from you who have memorized the spelling of a huge number of words. Kanji also have a pictogram aspect, which makes them fun for learners. Every Kanjis have meanings, so we can know the meaning of a word even if we don't know how to pronounce it. In short, Japanese is a language that requires a lot of effort in the early stages of learning, but it accelerates the learning speed of intermediate learners.
I noticed that and i agree with it when you get the fundamentals down All i do now is study a kanji or 2 every day and eventually i will just be fluent I get noticeably better each day just got to try and output what i learn too.
@@AmbitiousEnough😊👍
@@Heuroya I am American ( English American is my main language ) that's learning Japanese. Honestly? imo, I find Hiragana/Katakana pretty simple. It's Kanji that troubles me. Sure, I don't have all Hiragana/Katakana memorized yet, i am working on it. Been doin Japanese for a few months now. I can introduce myself, and say some sentences in Japanese. But by no means, do I consider myself at a Conversational level yet. Just taking a little break due to work and the stress of December. I am also wanting to learn the following languages, Arabic ( whatever dialect everyone starts off with first ), Russian, and Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese. Why? I like me a challenge. I am just learning by myself off of youtube and whatnot.
Respect
Been learning Japanese for over a year now and while I work my way through learning new vocabulary and grammatical structure, what sets Japanese apart from the other language I'm familiar with (Spanish) is that Japanese is also HEAVILY context and cultural based, so it's not just knowing what words you CAN use, it's also learning WHEN you'd use one phrase as opposed to another. For me personally this is what truly ignites my brain and makes me want to learn as much about the culture and to unravel the puzzle that is such a dense, wonderful, sometimes frustrating language! I also find kanji really fascinating as learning how to write the characters definitely reminds you that it was all based on brush strokes, so the creation of kanji is such a mix of art and language.
From a Korean perspective, Japanese is the easiest language for me to learn. The accent/pronunciation, grammar, and 50% of the vocabulary are all exactly the same. The only real difficulty is learning Kanji, but it’s actually not that hard once you get the hang of it. Japanese to me is like Spanish to an English speaker.
It is probably the same when the languages have similar roots.
Korean and Japanese might be quite similar to Thai and Mandarin. Many words are regarded in both languages but for the latter there are with different meanings. Chinese characters are more simplified than Japanese ones. The structures are pretty much the same between Thai and Mandarin.
What about when you get to つ or ず? 😊
@@Momo-qo7isthai and mandarin aren’t related. Burmese is distantly related to mandarin, however
@@kevinMariothat's pretty easy ngl
@@hikariosu5736 I have Korean friends who can't pronounce ずっと properly to save their lives lel
6 years, 1 hour a day is a small price to pay to have that language for the rest of your life (as long as you don’t abandon it obviously). I think Japanese is probably easier than the other languages in that category due to availability of quality learner content, but obviously the State Department doesn’t take that into account since they have their own training course.
lmao 1 hour a day for 6 years will not get you anywhere close to fluency
@@user-ih9pq8dz4nIt depends on the course you are doing. In theory, one could definitely become fluent by doing that. However it would probably be better to do 5-6 hours a day for 3 years.
That time studying only takes into account the time studying in class, i bet a lot of students study by themselves in addition to the study time listed.
Japanese seems to have a simple grammar and no tricky sounds. Yes, the vocabulary has nothing in common with English aside from 'borrowings', but that would also apply to Malay. The real difficulty is with the writing system. Japanese sounds as if it coud map easily into a Latin alphabet. Such would put Japanese in the range of Malay and Bahasa Indonesian, both of which have ittle shared vocabulary with English.
@@PaulBrower-qr8hf
I already know Danish and English at high levels, enough to talk about philosophical concepts or political theory or other high level language. The progression speed can probably be attributed to this.
I Have studied japanese for probably lower than 2 hours each day(had many days where I did not study in the start or did not use Anki+context) for 1.5 years, Would like to disagree on grammar.
Grammar is hard when it becomes colloqial and nonkeigo, luckily I haven't seen many natives use complex grammar in any way verbally.
Verbs are sometimes conjugated multiple like 食べませんでしたら (keigo) if not able to eat.
食べたなかった -tai form conjugated like an I-adjective.
食べそう unofficial conjugation, seems like wanting to eat.
食べながら
the worst ones are verbs conjugated into passive, then conjugated 1-2 times
I do not know if this is correct, but this is passive+ている form+negative+colloquial need to do.
食べられていなきゃ
eating (I) need to do.
And then there is the female and male speech patterns which also conjugate verbs according to mood.
Company words and grammar and service industry phrases and grammar.
Chinese seems so much easier, but I enjoy the media so I do not really care.
My level is very airy, because I learn words from the context of the media, but I would guess I am solidly at around n3-n2 level, so I'll keep going and enjoying the process.
I have been learning Japanese for a year and a half, and I still consider myself a beginner. I passed N5 a while ago, but I don't think I would be able to pass N4 yet.
I study about an hour to an hour and a half per day. I enjoy it immensely, so it isn't a burden. The only reason I do it is because I enjoy it. I have absolutely no need to know Japanese, it's purely a hobby. I need to keep my brain active and use up spare time wisely.
What I'm starting to notice now is the internal logic of Kanji, and it's exciting to see! I am self-studying with the occasional Italki lesson. Loving it!!
I started learning like 2 months ago and once I found out about the existance of the radical I begun doing memorization each day for like a week (a really intensive week) and know I can learn the kanjis a lot easier
This sounds almost exactly like me! I only started in July though. It is VERY fun to learn for me unlike European languages like Spanish that are so boring to me.
I'm exactly where you are, @christopherfleming7505 - about a year and a half in, finally starting to be able to converse about slightly more complicated topics than the weather, lol. It's a hobby for me too, but I am hard on myself because I'm a perfectionist, and I'm having to learn to relax a lot more. There are so many wonderful resources online for language learning, I can't imagine trying to do this without the internet. I have a wonderful teacher from iTalki who is very patient and kind.
that's awesome and very similar to me. I learn just for fun will probably never be able to visit Japan and actually use it. I enjoy learning it and just playing games and watching anime/youtube in japanese to enjoy the media in it's true form. これからも一緒に日本語を頑張りましょう！
あなたの話すおもしろかったんです。頑張って下さい
I'm a Latino-American who's studied Japanese on and off. I honestly would give the hardest language title to Arabic. The writing and grammar are vastly different from English, the word order is the opposite of English, there are 4 different versions of every letter, you can study what you think is Arabic, go travel somewhere and not understand anybody because Arabic dialects are so different from each other. I can already see that I won't be able to study Arabic until I'm confident with my other languages. Arabic words 90% of the time are just constants, that's hard enough.
Japanese is a lot to handle but it's super logical. Plus, I know I will never work or live in Japan long-term so I don't need to remember the exact stroke order of every kanji. I just need to know how to read them, so that's what I practice. I think the hardest thing about Japanese is making sure you're speaking formal or informal in the right context, and pronunciation sometimes.
They put Japanese and Arabic in the same category so in difficulty I’d say they are quite close to each other. Don’t get me wrong I don’t speak any of these languages. But I think Japanese might be a bit more difficult just for the crazy amount of characters. Arabic only has 28 (if I remember correctly) meanwhile Japanese has 46 in katakana, 46 in hiragana and an endless amount of kanji. And then you come to formality and honorifics and that combination might make it the hardest language to learn in a diplomatic sense. Do you agree or do you think Arabic poses some difficulty’s I’ve skipped over?
i mean you are discarding the hardest aspect of Japanese which is to be fully fluent in kanji which is 3000 characters give it or take, including the correct strokes.
in your particular case, which i think you imply the need to travel to different countries of the arabic peninsula then yes, it'd be difficult to master different dialects of arabic (the same can be said to many languages too, this is a dumb point to objectively rank the difficulty of any language), meanwhile you say you wouldn't need to learn how to write kanji, and then don't mention the sheer amounts of time that takes to learn (without learning the correct stroke order) 2000 plus kanji.
i'm sorry, Arabic is difficult but you don't need to learn thousands of ideograms. Even with all the four variations of each character its way less than Japanese Kanji... And i'm not even including the two syllabic systems.
The pronunciation in Arabic can be tricky because the consonants but to be honest it's just a matter of learning a few dozens of phonems. Same as any other language. I'd put Mandarin or Korean pronunciation above Arabic in terms of pronunciation difficulty, just because the tonal devilry :)
As a brazilian who learned to speak japanese from zero as a 4h language, Theyre right, japanese is hard as f. Hell you need over 20k words just to be proficient. The grammar is also unlike anything else, since its the only language in its language family
@@Afreshio You dont need to know over 3k characters. i learned to speak japanese and only know 2.5k at best. You dont even need to actevely learn kanji(but its really tho). The real problem are the over 20k words you have to learn just to achieve basic proficiency, and the alien way grammar works.
Japanese is my 4th language, and im brazilian
@@joaovitormendescerqueira6985 japanese grammar is almost identical to korean grammar
As a native Chinese speaker, Japanese is easier to learn than other languages
I agree. As an English speaker Japanese is easier to learn in terms of speaking than Chinese is, or even Korean in my view. Proficient Chinese speech learning is much harder and requires a lot more study. As for reading, both use variants on Chinese characters so it is not more or less difficult in that respect. The fact that Japanese has Kanji+ Hiragana + Katakna makes it easier to read than Chinese, not harder. You can see more clearly with Japanese as a beginner what the sentence is saying even if you don’t know all the kanji used. Chinese is written entirely in characters so you need to know more of them to work out what is being said, and it is harder to guess. The Kanji are also at least a bit more simple than traditional Chinese characters, although not by much I would accept. Chinese also has more hidden context culturally that you need to know to make sense of certain phrases - like when quotes from Classical Chinese are used to summarise an issue or problem, knowing what the historic or literary reference is usually is required, and a literal translation makes little sense. As far as I’ve seen you don’t really get that in Japanese at all, it is easier to access for a foreigner.
If you know Chinese, then yeah probably you’re right. If you’re from Europe or other Indo-European regions, any other European language would basically be your own language with a funny accent and on steroids. They all share a ton of words and influence each other significantly. But let’s not forget that anything is easy with the right attitude.
You _do_ get a decent amount of idioms in Japanese though. @@glasgowmcglasgowfacevotegr7049
Maybe foto y Is easier. Buy for the latinos and europenas Is so hard to learn. It takes much dedication. Plus 3000 kanjis at least. Thats killing me
I'm hoping after I get more time with Japanese and Korean, Chinese will be a little easier to pick up
Respect to people who know japanese and english fluently and they are not their 1st language
Thanx!
Thank you I'm taking the JLPT
I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm already fluent in 3 languages and tried to learn Korean, German and Dutch and currently I live in Japan and have been learning Japanese for the past year. I can't say that grammar, writing systems or even kanji are impossibly hard, I'd say the worst part is just the amount of time and effort you have to put in to be at least somewhat decent at Japanese. If I were to invest the exact amount of time in learning German, I'd already be close to a B2 level, but my Japanese is still barely upper N4-N3
imagine yourself a japanese trying to study something like hungarian
@@EvgenyUskovexcept for who the fk needs to learn Hungarian?
Japanese, Korean, Chinese are much more popular and famous across the world and more..."profitable"
So it's highly incorrect to compare these languages. No matter how difficult is Japanese - people will be learning it because anime, manga and so on. How much do you know about Hungary tho?
don't think about silly knowledge classifications and just have fun learning it, just like how language simp said
@@sourcandy5512 I know a japanese person who went to Hungary because it was easier to get into med school there.
@@sourcandy5512 Who cares how much anyone knows about ANY language? Your metric for importance is based only on dominant languages and “profitability”. Maybe not everyone cares about those things? Maybe someone has a particular fascination with a culture from their own lived experiences.
Also, media in almost every language exists. Not everyone cares to read comics or watch anime, but it does help as a medium for language consumption. Anyone can find basically anything if they look hard enough, though.
I’m surprised you left out keigo, sonkeigo, and tameguchi. Depending on the level of politeness, words can be completely different and verbs are conjugated differently. Osaka also has its own dialect, and it is used extensively in the area, compared to other dialects in their respective areas and prefectures. There’s also the extensive use of onomatopoeia compared to English. Almost any verb and emotion seems to have an onomatopoeia alternative, so much so that there are dictionaries with just sound words. Furthermore, there are Japanese-English words, false friends, that use English words but mean different things in Japanese. It’s a very rewarding language to learn, if nothing but for the joy of 成功感, the feeling of accomplishment that humans strive for. I love the Japanese language.
I know, right? They left out the most difficult aspect of the language.
I think its clear the video is done by someone who has no experience with the language. Especially because they made hiragana/katakana/kanji the hardest part. Everyone learns hiragana and katakana immediately and then that pretty much isn't hard at all.
@@hrimgor indeed. I learned those before I even did vocab
成功感？？Probably you meant to say "達成感"
Well who cares anyway
As native Ukrainian speaker who studied English and Russian previously Japanese kanji is much easier to learn then spelling of most English language words such "thought" "without" and other bunch of words where English people omit or add new sounds without any reason for it 😂
Moreover, correct English pronunciation is at least as hard as the Japanese pitch accent.
Exactly!!
Once you get enough kanji down to get a feel for their patterns, they’re much easier than English words. Kanji are based of pictures, so you can kind of get a feel for the word based on the kanji combinations. For English, even if you know suffixes and prefixes, sometimes you have no idea what a word is just by looking at it
As someone who is fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, and is currently fast tracking Japanese, my advice is practice full immersion. Aside from sitting down an hour a day on my textbooks, I mostly read Japanese news, listen to JPop, go on websites in Japan, etc. I actively zone out languages I know and basically pretend I am a Japanese person.
@@missplainjane3905didn’t you read the comment?
@@missplainjane3905japanese people understand japanese and use it throughout their day. youre not making a point here, stop starting unnecessary arguments
If you are learning as a requirement for a job it is hard but if you learn it because you like Japan or some aspect of Japan it is very enjoyable and it sounds beautiful
yes
As a Japanese, what's surprising for me is that many people learn to speak good Japanese without formal education or without even visiting Japan. The majority of us can't even communicate in English after studying it for 6 years at school, so I would say that Japanese is much easier than English.
I don’t know if I agree, schooling is not very good in general. Every US student takes language in high school and often middle school, but most US citizens barely speak one language. Learning languages in a school setting I think is not very good. The most optimal way is by yourself and with a native speaker helping you, even hired help if you don’t have any native friends.
I would say Japanese is harder to learn to write but in terms of speaking I’d say they’re fairly similar for natives of either language, since they are so different japanese will have a hard time learning English structures and all the weird rules and pronunciations and English speakers will have to do the same for japanese.
I think it’s more so better resources and references to the accurate daily spoken language ☝🏽 which Japan supersedes a lot of the world thanks to anime.
I do see that, but I reckon its due to the amount of resources to learn Japanese for English speakers compared to the reverse. I've been self-studying Japanese for about 2 years now and used so many different types of resources. Its more than what I would've done at school had the language been a choice of study.
it took me 3 years and still not B2 :)
I am chinese btw
That's because the amount of time Japanese students spend on input activities such as listening is virtually nothing compared to the massive amount of time the self-taught Japanese learners you're talking about, most of whom are very motivated to learn Japanese, spend on watching anime or something. Japanese students indeed lean English for 6 years, but they just do grammar stuff and hardly listen to English spoken by native speakers. The self-taught Japanese leaners, on the other hand, always listen to authentic Japanese spoken by native speakers for a couple of hours per day.
A few other characteristics of Japanese that makes it harder for English speakers:
1- SOV worder order, instead of English SVO worder order (eg Tomu ga ringo wo taberu -> Tom apple eats)
2- Postpositions instead of English prepositions ( eg Boku ga gakkou ni iku -> I school to go)
3- Commonly drops the subject from a sentence so the listener has to deduce it from context (eg gakkou ni iku -> school to go)
4- Several levels of politeness forms, from different verb conjugations to entirely different words ( Ringo wo kuu (casual), Ringo wo taberu (informal), Ringo wo tabemasu (standard polite), Ringo wo meshi agaru (formal) ). Also there's dozens of variations for the word 'I' and 'You', depending on social hierarchy.
5- Verbs which inflect based on intent or emotion, for which English typically would add a word before the verb ( taberu (to eat), taberareru (it's possible to eat (edible)), tabesaseru (compel someone to eat), tabesaserareru (to be compelled by someone to eat), tabetagaru (wish to eat), tabetakunai (do not wish to eat), tabereba (if you eat it, then...) etc.
Bro, the word order is NOT hard it literally TELLS YOU how to use the word order "object particle" "subject particle". Secondly, thr thing that is hard is the は particle. That's really hard.
yeah and the SOV combined with the different concepts that dont exist in english, combined with the way adjectives are used and how past tense verbs are used as adjectives and etc etc etc, make it take a very long time just to become acclimated to the flow of it, let alone actually learning 20k words with essentially no alphabet or surefire way to read a word with the "letters" because each letter can have like 10 different sounds, depending on the word lol.
then you have the politeness levels. particles. pitch accent (words that have the same "spelling" but can be said with 3 different pitches to mean 3 different words). and an ungodly amount of homophones. i swear every word has like an average of 5 homophones lol. some having 20 and others having just 2 or 3.
Mate based off of what you listed Korean or Chinese should be the hardest not Japanese
I think it sounds more complicated than it seems for the sov thing. We can understand "there's an apple that Tom ate" in English. Not that learning it isn't complicated for English speakers and that it's not a lot to learn but our whole sentence structure changes based on tense.
@@ultraprincesskenny6790 fun fact if people grew up doing a Yoda impression since he spoke in a SOV way they would be able to understand it more easily
All the romance languages, germanic languages, and slavic languages all come from a single language called Proto Indo European (PIE) meaning the core vocab, and grammar, and the language themselves are all related to one another, whereas Japanese is from a completely different language family meaning you cannot get much more unrelated and different than any PIE language and Japenese.
True
You forgot to mention that Japanese has multiple words to say one thing and one word can have multiple meanings on top of pitch accent where hashi can mean bridge or chopsticks based on purely pitch.
It's a high context language so usually that helps but you're right, pitch matters for proper pronunciation.
English also had multiple worlds to say one thing. Have you never seen a thesaurus? Pitch accent is also difficult, sure, but English is not easier on that front either. Not only are are letters simply not pronounced, letters can be pronounced differently based on the word, some words can be pronounced the same with different spelling, and some words defy all logic and are pronounced nothing like they’re written.
@@2oqh Its not to the same degree, its not even close.
I took both Japanese and Mandarin Chinese in University, 6 semesters of each. Mandarin, you only read the characters one way. In Japanese, the readings of each character change depending on context. Plus there are many exceptions to the rule. Its not even in the same league as each other. A famous Japanese linguist himself once said Chinese is a logical language, Japanese is an ad-hoc language. Chinese as a tonal language, the learning curve is difficult for some people, but after that initial challenge, the grammar is mostly logical and easy to build sentences with. Japanese starts out simple--very easy to make all the sounds, after all. Hiragana and Katakana are simple, nothing challenging there. But the difficulty curve with Japanese is intense. The grammar is even difficult for native Japanese speakers to use correctly (Keigo, or polite speech is very involved compared to easy to learn 'respectful' words in Chinese). If you want to learn Japanese, I suggest to prepare yourself for a difficult journey.
Funny thing about the US department of state numbers: it doesn't take into account private study time. It's just classroom hours. So the number of hours spent is actually way, WAY higher. As someone who has 500+ hours alone on Anki, and lord knows how many thousands as a total, the numbers they posted on that site are most definitely not enough to become fluent. The few people I've come across who I'd consider fluent (not Korean nor Chinese, since they have an advantage), probably spent over 15,000 hours in the language.
I'm so bad about using Anki. The personal study is a grind.
For me becoming conversationally fluent in Japanese took around 2 to 2.5 years (but I also spend like 2.5k hours in the language, mostly immersion), moved to Japan around the 2 year mark and use it every day these days!
My personal theory is you don't really need 2k Kanji for everyday life a lot of the standard daily use Kanji (常用漢字) really don't come up all that often, although you'll probably still need a lot haha. Learn them, read a lot eventually you get used to them and then they turn into something really great, as you'll be able to guess the meaning of unknown words thanks to Kanji.
The alphabet is certainly often enough used in Japanese to count it imho even if it's only for short abbreviations like OL, SE, JK, w (this one is great)
What's OL and SE?
@@danielantony1882
OL is office lady
SE is software engineer
Ah, I see.@@hecate6834
What is JK? 😮
@@hannylemus8728 女子高校生 JoshiKouousei means female high school student
Wow!! I feel a little better now. I have been studying Japanese for two years now. I thought my progress was moving slow. Now I know; it will take more time!!!
I passed JLPT level 1 (the hardest) way back in 2009. I started my Japanese language studies in college in for 2 years in 2001. I lived in Japan from 2005 until 2011 casually studying on my own. I knew it was hard, but I had so much fun over the years learning it, it really didn't feel like the challenge that it actually was; probably because I took it easy, but still a really enjoyable time of my life.
I got fluent in Japanese 15 years ago, was also studying Chinese at same time but gave up Chinese because I couldn't get 'into' it as much. I have dozens of rpgs I cleared in Japanese language and always have stuff I look forward to playing or doing in the language, just in rpg games alone I reached their recommended 3000 hours or whatever in just a couple years lol
And I've been watching anime since the 90's and my MAL states I have 321.8 days ( 7728 hours), it's safe to say I have over 10,000 hours in the language, also lived with Japanese people and only used the language in Japanese chatrooms for several hours a day for several months at points too, so I'm way over their recommended amount, and those figures were from several years ago, so 2000-3000 hours isn't that much time if you are really immersing yourself and love what you are doing.
I wish there were link or resources to refer to and sources of reference to this but other than that solid Video! Loved this thank you for sharing 🙏🏽🤗
brb learning japanese
你学习了日本语也吗？
Thanks for this video! It’s so interesting and I want to show this video to all my American family 😁
From a Chinese perspective, Japanese is not that bad. The accent/pronunciation is relatively easy to pronounce. No consonant clusters. A lot of vowels and initial consonants. Chinese characters are also pretty helpful. One just has to remember the simplified Japanese characters and traditional Chinese characters because both are used. A lot of shared vocabulary too because of logographic borrowing and the exchanging of ideas. For me, the real difficulty comes down to the complexity in grammar. Japanese grammar is agglutinative, and there is a lot of layers of politeness. Also, how Japanese people read off Chinese characters is quite different from the Korean way. Koreans are very direct. The Hangeul syllables correspond to the Chinese-characters one-to-one. In Japanese, there may be Kanji and there is a specific reading for the Kanji.
“Tegami”, am I right?
At the start I always expected to have such times like 6 years to fluency and stuff, but now, 3 years in I can already comfortably chat with natives even about some deeper topics and books aren't impossible to read anymore. I think a lot of people see it as discouraging to need so much time of their lives to get fluent in a language, but a lot of people fail to see that you are already basic conversational after only a few years
If y’all are good at recognizing patterns, what many argue to be the hardest part (kanji) will become easy lol.
Yep. I'm autistic and kanji-learning isn't hard at all.
the problem that each of them have several readings, your argument applies more to Chinese than Japanese.
@@rastaarmando7058 perhaps it does apply *more* to Chinese, but the study of basic radicals, pattern recognition and exposure is the best formula to “learn” kanji. If people want to learn Japanese, they shouldn’t cower from kanji: it doesn’t have to be as intimidating as many think. Kaname Naito has an amazing, three-minutes-long video on the subject titled “You Don’t Have to Study Kanji” that pretty much explains it, but basically the advice is people have to learn the kanji *from* the vocabulary and it will often come almost naturally.
another reason is, Japanese is literally not a tonal language but it does have tone and the tones is not represented in any written form. So you have to spend another half life to master the tone by mimicking the way the native speakers do and you always be recognized by local that you are a foreigner even you spent years to learn.
Yep. there are so many comments here that either don't know or don't care that there are tones.
Bad pronunciation is easy, but actually pronouncing words correctly is hard especially if you can't (like me) pick up the differences.
I guess ignorance is bliss!
Every language has tones
@@cheerful_crop_circle I think you’re right
While Japanese and English haven't been exchanging words for very long, the back-and-forth trade is quite rapid compared to other languages
Look at the word "anime"
Japanese version of an English Word that is used in English
Or "karaoke"
Used in English, based on a Japanese compound that is half based on an English word (oke being contraction of orchestra)
as someone who watches a fair amount of anime, it is a bit funny to hear people pronounce words like tsunami and karaoke
@@bombintheseeinq hahaha "kaREEoky" 👌
Or carry-OAK-ee.
@@jbwhetstone is that North American or British pronunciation?
@@347Jimmy North American, and more specifically Texan., but this is what I hear across the US.
I am leaning China out of curiosity and passion. Just asking will it help me in working in China etc,?
I'm actually an American in the process of learning Japanese right now, haha. I've master hiragana and katakana. I'm dipping my toe in the water when it comes to kanji. I pretty much understand their sentence structure and everything. Just have to learn the actually words like verbs and nouns. I plan to go to Japan in July of 2024, so I hope to be near-fluent by then if that isn't too far-fetched.
それは無理（むり）があるけど、頑張って（がんばって）ね☆
@@phen-themoogle7651 それくらい思った、でもありがとう！
すごいな
Another thing often overlooked when talking about Japanese is the confusing sentence structure and word conjugation. Which has successfully driven me insane
Bruh its not that confusing >:(
I kind of agree with this. I have studied several languages and Japanese feels like the most difficult. This is partially because of kanji but also because there are a lot of nuances in the language.
Ramen 🍜
yep. to become truly fluent, it's the hardest language for an english native and probably everyone except koreans.
Kanji is easy if you studied Chinese, I'm American born, but studied Cantonese with Traditional Chinese writing/characters every weekend for like 12 years lol. Japanese on'yomi sounds very similar to Cantonese too, characters like 70-80% have same meaning or easy to understand approximately what its saying
Japanese is not easy indeed, but I do think it is a beautiful language and that makes it enjoyable to learn instead of a burden, I love to see how many of the words have a root and reason to be, they're not arbitrary words that you have to memorize, but each word is usually a composition from a set of smaller words, this even helps on figuring out whenever you hear a new word to know how to break it and decipher what it might actually mean without having to look it up.
“Fluency” always needs to be defined when speaking about a language and these US department times until basic fluency are no different. It’s a very basic fluency. So that you can have one on one conversations with natives and doesn’t mean you’re literate in Japanese once you complete the course either. Just able to hold a one on one conversation. This does NOT mean keeping up with natives speaking to each other. That’s yet many more hours of studying. Good luck.
I speak Japanese as a 2nd language but not perfectly. Enough to make friends and have good conversations and have a good time and enough to not make daily life there difficult for me, however I can't read a newspaper. My fluency is all in speaking, writing is extremely difficult... Reading is hard as well, but my reading is well above my writing because of how much I text people in Japanese. It's a weird feeling being able to read a text and understand it but then if you gave me a piece of paper and took away that text and asked me to write it for you, I almost guarantee that I can't in many cases. It's such a tough language with many crazy intricacies... but at the same time that's why I love it. There's always something you don't know! It's a great undertaking and truly a life's work, but I chose it and I'm happy I did.
I'm only a year and a half in to my Japanese learning journey. I have a wonderful teacher from iTalki, and I'm starting to do as many conversation classes as I can find on my level. The good part about Japanese is that katakana and hiragana only have one sound per symbol. Kanji is a lot to learn, but not impossible. I highly recommend WaniKani. I'm currently on level 40 out of 60 and can read pretty well -- not great because there are a lot of words I don't know yet, but that's the point of reading, isn't it, to learn new words. And the way kanji works is so cool -- putting symbols together to make a new word is so clever and cool. Word order is a challenge, subtle nuance words/endings is difficult - it's something that doesn't exist in English. Often I'll make a sentence and my teacher will say, "Grammatically, that's a perfect sentence. But we wouldn't say it like that..." So there are those cultural differences in how you would say something. That's, I think, impossible to learn from a textbook. I keep at it every day, though. Reading the comments here has inspired me.
Two writing systems. Hiragana and katakana are basically two versions of the same letter, like upper and lower case. NOBODY writes in romanized Japanese. Kana (hiragana + katakana) can be learned in a day. It's kanji that is the major hurdle. For this you'll need patience. Lots and lots of patience. 🥵
The grammar is logical and easy; it's teachers who don't understand Japanese language structure themselves who confuse students.
そんなに難しくないよ！😊
Isn't there still some use of Romaji like with typing on a keyboard etc.?
それな。けど、文法のせいで悔しくなるところが一杯あるわ。
You can't learn kana in a day, that's cap
Yes, you can. I learned it in a week, and I wasn't even trying. @@MarkyNomad
@@danielantony1882you can't learn it in week either, you will still struggle to read full sentences without getting frustrated until you're at least 3-6 months in.
The given arguments alone are far from being enough to explain the difficulty to reach mastery of Japanese. Thy explain the difficulty to reach intermediate level, but then the struggle is different and, in my experience, has more to do with :
- acquiring the breadth of vocabulary and getting the subtles nuances between similar words ;
- relearning kanjis with the many not-so-common readings ;
- and mastering the different casual and honorific speeches and appropriately switching between them.
The nuances behind the words SUCK as they aren't in your face and you have to do RESEARCH.
As a native English speaker who has spent 25 years studying Japanese very much off and on but still somewhat frequently... yes, it's hard, I still am not conversational and I will probably die of old age barely having reached conversational let alone fluent. That is, unless I suddenly decide to radically study but where's the time?
*sigh* and I would love to learn Mandarin too.
Typically, there are hiragana captions over written kanji, and katakana and hiragana shouldnt be too difficult because there arent many characters. Chinese writing however has probably 100 times the amount of Japanese characters, and they dont reflect a syllable, they reflect an idea, verb, object, or state. And Mandarin is tonal, so the amount of repetition and memory required to read as well as the many different tones that can cause easy mistakes makes the Chinese language much more difficult in my opinion. With the popularity of anime in the U.S. you can argue that many of the younger generations are being exposed to the language, whereas there isnt much Chinese content for exposure. Even though I study Chinese, I had already burned out before when learning the writing which is why now I only focus on reading, speaking and listening. Learning how to read and speak are already like two different languages on their own, but the writing is extremely tedious because every character has some complexity, whereas the english writing system is simple with many exceptions.
Anyways, Japanese is a beautiful language and I watch anime and study it on the side. Best of luck on your language learning journeys, whichever one you choose!
It's been a few days and I want to change my opinion above and add why. While it is true that Chinese writing is more voluminous than Japanese, recently, I have been introduced to Japanese grammar and it is mind numbing. There are almost 50 conjugations due to there being two kinds of verbs, Ichidan and Godan, each used to describe certain nuances such as passive forms, negative forms, past forms, volitional forms, etc, as well as polite forms, passive (habitual) forms, forms such as when something just happens to you, forms as in when you are being forced to do something, and the negative, forced to NOT do something and much, much more.
So I want to change my opinion and agree with this video declaring that Japanese is even more difficult than the most difficult languages to learn. As I have just been introduced to Japanese grammar, my sense as a native English speaker is that the verb conjugation is extremely convoluted, and I have not even learned anything about adjectives, nouns, pronouns, sentence structure, etc. HOPEFULLY, I dove into the deep end first and the verb conjugations are the hardest part. Anyways, I may be decompressing from the lesson as I am writing this, but I still think that Japanese is a very beautiful language, so if that is what you are learning, more power to you. I will try and not be discouraged. I find it interesting because this is my first time being exposed to a language that heavily relies on conjugations to communicate, and I wonder how that will enhance neural plasticity as I learn this language.
@@OK-otic I agree with you. I tried learning a bit of Japanese in middle school due to a brief Anime phase and my older sibling studying it a bit in school, but dropped it after a couple months. Over the past few months however, I have been learning Chinese and feel like I've made much more progress in saying basic things and understanding the "vibe" of the language. Like with Chinese I could try stringing together a sentence and say something vaguely coherent. In Japanese I have never had that.
Oh wow. Well, I only recently started learning Japanese. Thanks for the video.
I'm not sure why people are so hung up on how "hard" kanji is... I've been studying Japanese for the past 3 years, and I'm about to pass N2. Kanji is probably what gives me the least amount of problem. What I find the most difficult is getting used to the word order. For short sentences of course I have no problem, but longer sentences will trip me up for sure.
I have also done 3 years and currently studying to get past N2.
I agree, the kanji really isn’t as much of a problem as people make them out to be. It’s just pattern recognition, something you will need to learn to read properly in any other language anyways. Only difference is that you can’t see the pronunciation as easily.
I agree
honestly… japanese makes so much sense to me grammatically.
the sounds are similar to spanish too (i speak english and spanish fluently)
i’m learning Chinese along with japanese. chinese is definitely harder imo. i think the reason it isn’t above japanese is because of the sentence/grammar structure.
Wow… where can I sign up to learn Danish?
I need to learn the language
I have been studying Japanese for about 6 years now on my own, I know around 2200 characters, and I still need a dictionary often when reading lol.
a lot of the japanese text you showed in this video is actually in chinese fonts (way too many youtubers do this). also would have liked to see you mentioned pitch accent which is probably nearly as difficult as tones for english speakers to learn
There is one other aspect of Kanji that increases the difficulty. Many (perhaps all) Kanji have several different pronunciations and meanings, which i my limited study has proven to be the hardest part of learning them and also how to use them.
Japanese is extremely difficult language. one Kanji can have 10 different readings. one word can have 10 synonyms. the onomatopoeia, honorifics, the 4-character compound words, oh my god the list is endless. i've been exposed to the language over 20 years but each day, i still encounter words that i have not heard or seen before. a lifetime is not enough for me to fully grasp Japanese.
Me too. 😅
(I’m a Japanese)
Japanese is difficult in general because of the multitude of linguistic and cultural nuances built into the language that take years to truly master. This includes little things like using honorifics when referring to someone else and you, the speaker, using the correct personal pronoun, pronunciation, and phrasing for your gender. Interestingly enough, while the grammar is quite different for speakers of European languages, it's supposedly easier for speakers of Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Korean to familiarize themselves with Japanese grammar. Despite all this, I actually don't consider Japanese *too* hard of a language.
Now, I don't claim to know Japanese at all beyond an exceedingly basic level, but I do strongly believe that the infinite amount of content in Japanese and resources to learn the language help immensely in learning it, even if it ends up taking you, let's say, 10 years to achieve mastery. I would actually go as far to say that learning Arabic is harder than Japanese.
The Arabic script typically doesn't write vowels (the words are less defined in the first place) and there is not as much content in the Arabic that is actually spoken by real people. Modern Standard Arabic may be used for the news, but it's weird because even though it's called "Modern Standard Arabic", it's apparently based on Classical Arabic, or in other words, the Arabic used in the Quran. This solution does not lend itself way to practical communication between modern varieties of Arabic, with native speakers describing foreigns that try to use it to communicate with them as sounding "weird", because again, virtually no one speaks it in the vernacular. Furthermore, Arabic is, in reality, more like different languages under the umbrella of Arabic, so the "Arabic" in Morocco is really a different language from the one spoken in Egypt/the Levant. If you learn Arabic, you basically have to go out of your way to find resources for what is really multiple languages which sometimes seem *more* distant than, let's say, Portuguese is from Italian.
I agree fully!
This is why I feel SO proud of myself even though I still have more room to grow, I can communicate in Japanese which took years. 🎉❤
No mention of Keigo?
pardon me^^ just pointing out the katakana ko error at 3:44
I missed that... And now that I look into it more, it turns out that "ke" is replaced by "te" as well... On the katakana side, both the character and romaji are "te", and on the hiragana side, the character is "ke", but the romaji is "te"...
@2:39 is that a robot time traveler in the crowd?
I'm learning all writing systems at once, it's not as hard as people say in terms of memorization once you understand how long it'll take to actually become proficient. There are ways to take short cuts so you can at least get by with some japanese if you had to go to japan. Memorize a bunch of common words using flashcards or whatever method works for you along with common phrases which is really important. You can learn how to properly use a handful of particles in only a month or two if you really get into it. Learning how to structure sentences early on is also super important imo, because it helps you make sense of what to do with all the random words you pick up. Once you feel you have a good vocabulary it helps if you read manga/japanese novels and watch anime. Ignore subtitles and only focus on the words/ how sentences are structured, google everything you're confused about and eventually you'll begin understanding a lot of what you're hearing even if it's not as enjoyable as just watching with the subtitles on. For manga and books, start with childrens books that use simple words, slowly work your way up. If you follow any japanese media try interacting with japanese people online, nothing better than learning from the natives, if you plan on going to japan, make friends with the locals. A lot of people tend to only befriend other foreigners while in japan but locals can teach you so much. Another thing to note is if you're going to to learn as fast as possible is that romaji is your best friend. It's easier to write memorize things when you can read them easily. If you're using flashcards, eventually remove all romaji on the words you're best at until eventually getting rid of it all. And make sure to take breaks as to not overload your mind. This is just the method i'm using + some tips i've heard from others
Ive been learning Japanese for 6 months now and I can read hiragana and katakana I know most of the particles and I think I need to just have more immersion and words to expand my vocabulary hiragana and katakana are the easy part sentence structure and learning all the words is the hard part I just need more time to get immersed in and I need to learn more words also learning all the kanji is difficult
2:37 Whats with the robot in the background?
I think what’s important is this is for diplomats, not people just wanting to learn a different language. Diplomats basically need to become native level fluent in the other language as it’s highly important for their job. Meanwhile, for language enthusiast, you don’t necessarily have to reach that level. Japanese is still insanely hard, don’t get me wrong, but I think it doesn’t take as much time mentioned in this video to become at a level where you can communicate with Japanese peope(which imo, is basically the goal of language learning).
Yeah, the grain of salt that the viewer needs to take with this video is that any language has its difficulty reduced when you _want_ to learn it
I was able to at least reach basic conversational Japanese level after about 4 years of study
I took a combined total of 5 years of formal education in public school for Spanish and spent an additional 4 years living in a region with a high density of Spanish speakers and facilities in Spanish.
I still don't feel like I can even construct a sentence in Spanish.
I want to learn Japanese because it sounds cool. Communication is secondary. If I were the last man on Earth, I would learn Japanese and the 39 other languages I plan to learn; naysayers notwithstanding.
Calling Japanese hard can be an understatement because there are reasons why Japanese have 3 writing systems. Because 漢字("Kanji" or "Han characters") were originally Chinese, they're characters that represent words or ideas, they're based on pictographs of real-life things. And due to Chinese influence, Kanji spread to Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. When Kanji was invented, the Japanese didn't have a writing system at the time, they just communicated the way they communicated. When Kanji came to them, they were confused because it's hard to use Japanese terms in Kanji, also considering that Chinese and Japanese use different sounds, see onyomi and kunyomi. So, Japanese took some Kanji and oversimplified them, turning them into ひらがな("Hiragana"), so any Japanese can use words of their origin. But 2 isn't enough, so they took parts of some Kanji and turned them into カタカナ(Katakana), which is for words of foreign origin just like you said, this was used so that Buddhist monks can transliterate Chinese words unfamiliar to them. Using all 3 writing systems, makes text readable, if Japanese text is only Kanji, then it'll be very difficult and boring, and if it were only Hiragana, it's just so simple that it looks childish. Only Hiragana can also cause confusion, like "My mom likes flowers" would be 母は花好き("haha wa hana suki"). If it were just Hiragana it would look like this ははははなすき("ha ha ha ha na su ki"). This on its own can cause confusion because は is pronounced "ha", but it's pronounced "wa" as a particle. Kanji can also help identify homonyms, like 四("shi", 4) and 死("shi", death). Japanese also couldn't come up with the idea of spaces between words, so be grateful, English speakers. Back when video games were introduced, due to memory limitations, it was very difficult to type Kanji into the game, so they used spaces between certain words like an English speaker could. There's a lot to talk about, but I've made my point.
Ok… come up with spaces between words then
Truth! The struggle is real.😓
While the writing systems part of Japanese is tricky initially, I was able to more or less memorize katakana and hiragana within a few months of studying an hour or two per day. The tricky part is not only the kanji (which seem fairly achievable, just a new learning curve to get over), but the gramatical structure since it accounts for so many things in ways that are very much not English-ey.
Been studying Japanese for 16 years now, I speak it everyday, never been to japan though. I use vrchat (a social vr and desktop application) to make friends from other countries and exchange language & culture!
I took a year of Japanese in college 15 years ago. All i can say is katakana and romaji are clutch af lol. know some of the hiragana used in sentences no/to/etc. Mades travel easier. Much easier time in japan than i had in france lol.
Japanese really is difficult, even for someone like me who speaks Mandarin and already knew all the Japanese Kanji already. Simply because there is no spacing in Japanese, so if a sentence were written in Hiragana only there is no way of knowing which character forms which word.
I am not surprised to hear it is the hardest. Just from the surface level dive ive done into some languages, it seemed the most confusing to me. The writing system especially.
On the flip side, it means that Japanese speakers also face equally challenging tasks when it comes to acquiring English proficiency.
No, I'm general western lenguages are easier, you don't have to memorize 2k Kanji just 24 new letters, you don't struggle with different levels of formal speech.
Very true, Japanese have consistently the lowest scores at English exams among all the major asian countries.
Yeah , Japanese and English are almost the complete opposites of each other
After learning some Japanese, I am honestly surprised people claim this language is anywhere near the hardest ones to learn.
Outside of memorizing Kanji, JP was surprisingly easy relative to where it usually ranks in difficulty.
Yes.. I agree...
Try to get to comfortable speaking state
"After learning some Japanese"
The keyword here is "some". How much is "some"? Are you even at the 10,000 words mark yet? If not, you're not even at a stage where you can even see the summit of the huge mountain you're climbing. By 15k+ it's sort of seeable, but it really "sets in" how much is still in front of you when you get to about 20,000 words.
And yes, I'm using word count because it's the easiest and probably most accurate way of somewhat pinning down someone's knowledge in a language. That word count is obviously coupled with thousands upon thousands (way more than this video claims, since the US statistics only count classroom hours) of immersion and study.
@@m8onethousand some as in good enough for casual speech. Though I am never convinced that word count is a good measure. Especially when a lot of the words are basically made from building blocks.
JP grammar is also very consistent, the hard part other than Kanji is usually understanding concepts that aren't really present in western languages as much.
As for JP phonetics, those were very easy for me. People like to say, "wait till you learn about pitch accent" but even with pitch accent, it's easy.
As a comparison, to me, Chinese and Korean are a lot more daunting with their pronunciation. Chinese reading seems double as hard to get into exactly because there's only Kanji and nothing else. JP uses 3 writing systems, but they give you clues on how the sentence is structured so it's easier to get into and start reading.
As for business JP, I just don't have a reason to learn it, I know there are some weird politeness things but I don't think people tend to overfocus on this.
My point was, people shouldn't be too afraid to jump into learning this language. I just hope people don't go "oh, hardest language, I better not even try"
@@jurajojo2543You still said nothing about your skill level (everyone who's spent even a couple of months can speak casually), so I'm going to assume you're not at a skill level where you're able to see the huge mountain in front of you. Vocabulary count is the easiest and more consistent way of knowing how deep a person is in a language. It's the single most important factor for comprehension, especially the more complex the Japanese is. For things like the JLPT (just citing it as an example since that's what a lot of Japanese learners love to talk about), there's usually targetted study, plus it doesn't test output, not to mention, N1 is at best low-low intermediate INPUT ability. In other words: even the hardest JLPT test meant for testing foreigner's Japanese input ability isn't enough to get people to see how huge the mountain in front of them actually is.
"Especially when a lot of the words are basically made from building blocks."
Good thing we're talking about JAPANESE, where that's NOT a problem in comparison to other languages where you get word count bloat. If you knew a thing or two about Japanese, you'd know why your statements makes 0 sense, and you're just trying to muddy the waters. For example, no one on earth counts things like 読み as a lexeme (word unit), unless it's one of those nouns which acquired sort of its own definition. No one does that for the absolute vast majority of verb compounds either (there are a couple which have become almost like set phrases at this point), nor different particle/aux uses (see: to-adverbs/taru/nari/etc.) depending on the nuance meant. The Japanese word count EVERYONE ON EARTH WHO IS INTELLECTUALLY HONEST uses is pretty close to the way English words are counted, so once again: no idea why you made such an irrelevant statement.
But just to re-state why word count is the easiest and most consistent method to see how deep someone is in a language: With word count it shows how out of their way a person went to actually learn and immerse in the language. No JLPT speedrunner is going to learn 20k+ words. They're going to learn the about 10k words they need for their JLPT N1, which barely puts you at low-low intermediate Japanese INPUT ability.
Ultimately, when people claim Japanese isn't a hard language to learn, they're speaking emotionally and without any data to back it up. The US department of state have been teaching diplomats languages for decades, and all they said is the following: Japanese is the language that takes diplomats the most time to learn. If you don't think: TIME AND EFFORT NEEDED TO BE GOOD AT A TASK = hard. Then I'm sorry to tell you, but your arbitrary definition of what "hard" is bears no impact in reality. Every single language on earth has the same process of learning. No language is unique in the sense that it requires X, Y, C mental ability to learn. The only difference is how much time it takes you to learn a language compared to others, and that's entirely based on how similar/different a language is compared to the languages you speak, which puts Japanese AS THE HARDEST LANGUAGE TO LEARN FOR ENGLISH SPEAKERS.
Well the good thing about Japanese it actually does have a lot of loan words too. I would say there are a lot of european countries that have less english loan words. But yeah there are allso a lot of words that are entirely different in Japanese where as many words in other languages then english often are at least a tiny bit similar.
I was in the Army and took the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, which is a test to determine aptitude for learning languages, and when I crushed it they told me that Arabic, Mandarin, and Korean were the hardest. Japanese was never mentioned. I have personally dabbled in both Mandarin and Japanese, and Japanese was way easier. I spent a long time trying to perfect one phrase in Mandarin to say to my future mother-in-law while I was dating my future wife. I was certain I had the inflections of every word down and she just looked at me like I was speaking Greek.
It definitely is in my opinion, especially if you're learning how to actually read, and then extra time to write. I really wish each Kanji had just one reading like chinese. I would happily learn 10 times the amount of kanji if I could actually read words with an actual alphabet lol. You basically have to learn each word as it's own unique thing. You never know what reading a kanji is going to use. There's hundreds of them with like 10+ readings 💀
Not to mention chinese having super nice grammar similar to english. Japanese needs a complete rewiring of your brain to get used to speaking backwards and all the weird grammar concepts, politeness levels, marking partilces that aren't even actual words but just used to mark words as an object, a target, an area to do things, an area that's a target, etc etc.
Japanese is the easiest “hard” language to learn, especially with the extreme amount of free resources readily available. There are significantly harder languages out there, Japanese is just the most popular.
from a resource and motivation standpoint sure, it's easier to stay motivated with plenty of resources and media to enjoy.
from a complication and hours spent standpoint, hard disagree. it's not only classified at the same amount of hours as the 2 other hardest to learn languages from the department of whatever that teaches languages in a government job, it also has many more factors that make it more difficult than those other 2.
If we are talking about pure conversation class, and not learning how to actually read, then yes, it can be considered easier than maybe a few other languages. @@2oqh
4:30 While you can totally get away with rudimentary pronunciation and people won't mock you, sounding natural is actually really hard because JP has relatively few building blocks available for words, so there's a shitton of homophones that are differenciated only by pitch accents, which you have to go out of your way to learn, vary by region and you just have to brute force input 3000 words.
As far as Japanese learning from an English background, I would say yes and no for it being more difficult than the other languages.
As someone who has the native languages of Cantonese and English, I actually find Mandarin to be way harder than Japanese.
In Japanese, there are no tones. What you see is what you get. Mandarin has four, Cantonese has a whopping nine!
Just working yourself to a basic conversational proficiency isn’t that difficult. However, learning how to get to higher level is definitely more challenging.
Wow this makes me a proud polyglot. I speak Cantonese and Chinese since I'm born as Chinese. I speak Malay language as that is my national language. Finally is English.
I would say Japanese is the hardest language.
For the asians, who are not based culturally on Chinese hieroglyphs, Japanese system of writing is hard. You need to be associated with it in early years to get feel of them. To memorize over 2000 symbols is just unimaginable and plus other 3 systems are too complex. Need to prepare to spend substantial part of your life in order to learn them.
0:10 I love how you threw a "na" on there. 😂
Took Japanese for 3 years in high school. I barely know anything anymore, but one thing I do know is that if you're ever in Japan, and you really need to communicate something to a local, try to say the English word in a Japanese way.
All you really need to understand is that the Japanese alphabet follows the sounds ahh, eee, ooo, eh, oh. So going down the alphabet, you have ha, hee, hoo, heh, ho...ka, kee, koo, keh, ko, etc...
So if you're spelling Japanese words using English letters (called Romaji), you're never just using one letter at a time if that makes sense.
When visiting Japan, at the end of our trip, all of my friends had vastly different flight times so they were freaking out about finding their way to the airport without any help. Even though I believe there's an actual Japanese word for airport, I told them to just say this phonetically to the taxi driver: er roo poruto....Magically, it worked! haha
When I began learning it, I did it without any expectation of reference back to English. I actually appreciated that there weren't any similarities, because the words in Japanese did not overlap with anything I've done. Thus I could not make the mistake of substituting a word that is similar in some 3rd language. I either knew the word or I didn't. The grammar isn't that hard, I dont know why there is so much struggle.
The average weeks does not mean to reach mastery. It means to reach proficient level to do start the career in the FSI. FSI even recommends after finishing those many weeks to travel into the country of the target language and stay for a year.
Yes, 2200 hours is not even close to enough to achieve fluency
Most definitely not for Japanese. Japanese is 2200 class hours. Not including all the practice and study outside of class. Finally a minimum of a year spent in the target language country. It is considered one of the most intense language courses to go through. The livelihood of applicants hinge on it.
@@2oqh
This video sees most of the difficulties in the writing system.
This, however, doesn't really explain it, because Korean also belongs to the hardest set of languages, and the Korean script can be learned in one or two days.
What I find most difficult as a German:
1.) The most important part - the verb - comes last. So you always have hard-to-comprehend sentences with embedded parts.
2.) Nothing is obligatorically marked, everything is optional. There's no grammatical sex, no singular or plural, no person - often not even a subject if the context allows.
Both factors - verb coming last and nothing being specified - makes it hard to follow and easy to lose track.
Oh, yeah, and the writing obviously. 😅
For the word order, there is a common word order. Also, German likes to put verbs at the end, too. Your brain will adjust lol
I think one thing very difficult for me is that they tend to use entire sentences to describe one noun 😭 and then go on to continue the point. It’s so confusing sometimes
@@ariellev9185, in German, verbs go in the end in certain times, side sentences, passive voice etc.
But there are tricks to reduce the damage those things do - there are options. And good writers make use of them.
In Japanese, there is no option. What you need to know most always comes last.
Your mentioned attribute clusters are just another example of that. Ame ga futte iru hi ni au ni dekaketa ore no... Ugh!
I agree that the lack of a clarified subject makes it difficult
@@ariellev9185I agree the entire sentences + noun suck expecially since like... There are sentences where you can't tell if it's one big modifier, or a modifier modifying the modifier, or a copula and then a modified phrase
@@user-nm3ug3zq1ybruh that's not that hard
3月1日は日曜日で祝日、晴れの日でした。
1st of march was sunday, holiday and sunny day.
Sangatsu tsuitachi wa nichiyoubi de hare no hi deshita.
All 日 have different pronunciations.
Love how those are all the languages I want to learn 😂. Currently studying Japanese and Korean for about 6 months.
If you learn Japanese out of context (speedrunning kanji and vocab without going into foundations first) then you're in for a bad time
This is how most Japanese learners I've seen try to learn the language and often they don't last long because they burn themselves out.
Arabian is the most difficult language to me . Honestly, the Japanese grammar, writing systems or are possible to learn depends how much effort we put on ... I feel that Japanese language is a beautiful sound juts like music
Also just felt like adding - Kanji in Japanese or Chinese characters in China are much better (I think) and easier and more intuitive for me from a dyslexic point of view. Dyslexia makes latin alphabet languages harder for me, whereas it seems like my brain is much much more prepared to learn the characters. I can easily learn and remember a character through its shape and meaning/radicals etc, than I can the spelling of english words that have lots of vowels in them, or just bizzare spellings that make no sense to me at all. I don't come across the same frustrating issues with characters that I do when reading latin alphabet. Might be brain overcompensating who knows.
I've often wondered if Finns can learn Japanese easier. I've read than Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and Finnish (?) are Altaic languages with similar structure. Apparently there are genetic similarities too
I’m very thankful to have started learning Japanese when I was an early teenager. I started studying Japanese at around 14 yrs old so wrapping my mind around how Japanese functions fundamentally wasn’t as much of an issue. If I had started at 17 or so I think it would e been a lot harder.
Haha, I started at 58. Wish me luck!
@@flashgordon6510good luck
@@flashgordon6510 You can do it!! 💪 I started when I was 39, studied for a couple years, then stopped. Now I’m starting again, a decade later! 😁 Love it! ❤
I think that the most hard languages are 日本语[different and many pronouncations of kanji] and 韩语[sets of alphabetical letterings which are inconsistent, one stack of these is said as oppyo and another as geuk, the endings is what confuses me]
do you speak Chinese? Since you are using simplified characters
i speak a bit of chinese, albeit not fluently, im selflearning it for now cause in my country there is no chinese to learn in liceum@@oh-noe
I am an Eastern European, and for me japanese language (not writing, but pronunciation) is the easiest among all Asian languages. And most comfortable for my larynx.
Yes
The State Department doesn't classify any language as "the hardest to learn." They instead group languages into different categories based on their difficulty for native speakers of English. Japanese is within the most difficult language category, but there's no "most" difficult language according to the State Department.
To say whether Japanese hard or not, I would prefer to use JLPT as the standard example of Japanese proficiency test. It has 5 level from N1-N5, including minimal hour and exact number of requirement to pass each level like vocabulary, grammar and listening (文字、語彙、文法、読解、聴解) in general. You are free to choose the level, but the learning speed and the pass rate depends on your native language and motivation to learn I think. For example, if you already a native level at chinese, you will have advantage with kanji. Kanji is basically selected chinese character (about 2000+ to be considered good enough for N1) some being simplified mixed with a little bit of Japan own national character system. If you are korean, the grammar is a little bit similar, since japanese language root from Ural Altaic family, like turkish and korean. But, to be even considered master or fluent in Japanese using JLPT standard, it depend on the usage of the language itself. Most company in Japan prefer N2 if you are looking for a standard job, and maybe even N1 for a specialized job, or at least be able to use language at business level. If you can passed N2, you are considered to be able to live and communicate with little to no problem in japan, with N1 to be considered as native speaker level.
Japanese N1 is not even close to being a native speaker, don't forget these tests do not even include speaking or writing aspects, there are many people who pass but still struggle to communicate. JLPT N1 is just enough to be functional in daily life and to consume some (not too difficult) native materials. Also JLPT pass score is quite low, so you can get N1 with a lot of room for error. But N1 is still as good starting point so I do still recommend learners to try and aim for N2/N1. There's also the Business Japanese Proficiency Test (BJT) , it seems a bit more accurate in testing your ability to communicate in a working environment, but it is lesser known.
@@ami4511 True, that's why I said N1 to be "considered" as native speaker level, but the irony is, I bet maybe not even all japanese people will be able to pass N1, on academic level. Language knowledge needed between test and daily life can be so different based on its practicality. To be able to comprehend a language on native level is indeed very challenging and the proficiency level will be vary between speakers. Also not every company prefer JLPT, but majority does.
I am an English speaker learning Korean - their alphabet is really easy, but watch out for the grammar.
As if 2000 Kanji weren’t difficult enough, each kanji has multiple readings (pronunciation) depending on context.
I learnt Japanese together with people from China and even they had difficulty with this aspect.
It’s way more than 2200, that’s just the federally recognized as common, there are tens of thousands. Natives know significantly more than 2220.
@@2oqh True. About 3000 is considered to be necessary for media fluency.
If you learn katakana and you lift up the hood of your Japanese car most of the parts are labeled in Katakana but the words are the English words: Kaaburetoru for Carburetor.
Katakana is exclusively foreign words.
Weird, I kinda picked it up without ever learning it, I dont need subtitles and can understand 90%+, if the conversations dont delve into some niche topic.
That being said I cant read Kanji and I bet if I spoke it my grammar would suck if I were to try to create more complex ideas with compound sentences.
What makes Japanese even harder is that people in the Kansai region in western Japan speak with the Kansai dialect, which is totally different from the standard textbook Japanese that non-native Japanese people learn.
Learning Kanji is actually really fun if you turn it into a game, don't worry about pitch accsidents, just worry about understanding the language
It took me about two weeks to learn hiragana and katakana and I think that's how you should start. The grammar is pretty simple with only a few irregularities so that shouldn't take too long either. The vocabulary will grow if you just get yourself going. Kanji isn't an impassable obstacle as you can go around it to some extent by using hiragana instead.
I agree, having to use 3 sets of characters and write using all three of them at the same time is very difficult