What is your biggest roadblock in learning Japanese (or any language)?

Not enough time? Hard to get motivated? Unsupportive family members? Haven't found a learning system that suits you?

I'm curious to know what everyone finds to be their hardest obstacle to overcome. 

Memorizing huge amounts of vocabulary just takes so much time. The only real difficulty is doing it day after day without quitting. There's no question anybody can do it if they're only willing to put in the time.

For me personally is perseverance. I tend to lose motivation over time and stop learning completely for awhile. I'm in this phase right now with Japanese.

[Zgarbas]

The sense of expectation you get before you open your mouth and let the sounds come out. That's where i usually get stuck.

If i manage to surpass that, the confused face that people make when they can't make out what you said.

The hardest thing about language is probably vocabulary, like yogert, said but its not really the memorizing part.

The really hard part about language is basically knowing when to use words and how to phrase things. You can know all the words and know how to build grammatically correct sentences which people will understand. But if you only ever learned from a book, you'll probably discover that, if people are being frank with you, how you said something "sounded strange" or "wasn't quite how I would say it." Every language has this and its only something that's gained through years of experience.

One example for Japanese is knowing the right "tone" of words to use in a conversation. Kind of like the difference between saying something is cool or nice vs splendid. This word usage changes how stiff something sounds. There's also sentence layout which you have to think about with Japanese since you can technically move most parts of a sentence around so long as you keep the verb at the end [most of the time]. If you do that though, don't be surprised if some Japanese don't just go "WTF?" Pragmatics (in the linguistic sense) play a huge part in Japanese, which means you can only really learn many of these things through experience/exposure.

The DBJG has a good section about general word order rules though and has a nice chart.


The lower the number, the more toward the beginning of the sentence that noun phrase(NP) should go.

(2015-12-17, 4:13 am)MindTrick Wrote: For me personally is perseverance. I tend to lose motivation over time and stop learning completely for awhile. I'm in this phase right now with Japanese.

I share the same difficulties. Especially when trying to juggle with other aspects of daily life. I'm trying to get Japanese more part of my routine though.

Oh wow, everyone has an interesting angle on the topic. 

For me, there are two major roadblocks. First, like others, perseverance is a big one. I get bored of routines fast so the daily grind can wear me out pretty easily. (Oddly enough, I can still utilize habits. I'm not entirely sure what the difference between a routine and habit is, but hey, habits seem to work for me.)

The other major roadblock is understanding native material at 1x speed. I easily pick out a handful of words and short phrases, but probably 60-70% of things I actually know will go by too quickly for me to pick up. I guess I'll get better at this with more exposure to the language, but it does feel like I've plateaued on this level for a while.

@vix86 That is a really useful chart. Now if only I could find one for Mandarin... 

Motivation has been fine; I've had a hankering to learn Japanese since the 7th grade. Time can be a struggle, but I've compensated for that somewhat by having Japanese in easy reach (liking sites in my Facebook feed, subscribing to Japanese newsletters, reading news every day as a habit, etc.).

I do sometimes find myself overwhelmed by the sheer IMMENSITY of the undertaking. I remember diving into anime and dramas earlier this year, and realizing quickly how much vocabulary I was missing. Flash forward to the end of the year, and my Anki deck of missing vocab continues to grow every week; by the time I get through this week's 140 new words, I have 140 more queued up in Midori, ready to import. I know there are whole realms - particularly in regards to Japanese history and religion - that I have yet to encounter. And don't even get me started on Japanese personal and place names, oy.

@sunlightunderwater

(when) - who - where - how - what - duration

(time) - subject - place - verb - object - time duration

you're welcome

(2015-12-17, 4:01 pm)dtcamero Wrote: @sunlightunderwater

(when)   -   who    -    where   -   how   -    what    -    duration

(time)   -  subject   -   place   -    verb   -   object   -   time duration

you're welcome

High Five! Thanks! 

(2015-12-16, 8:46 pm)yogert909 Wrote: Memorizing huge amounts of vocabulary just takes so much time.  The only real difficulty is doing it day after day without quitting.  There's no question anybody can do it if they're only willing to put in the time.

I agree completely.  Learning how to use verbs also can be painful, but vocabulary is a lot of work.

低いモチベーションになります。ヤリ気がありません。
これは一番難しいところです。

It takes up a lot of my free time, but that's not really the hard part. I enjoy it, so it's easy to immerse myself in Japanese culture...which, at this point, is all I need to do to become native level fluent, which is my goal.

The hard part is not being in Japan, because it makes it hard to relate with other people about it. There's a large chunk of my free time that I spend on a unique interest, that I can't really use to socialize with friends and co-workers about, the way we usually use our common interests (sports, movies, music, etc.).

It makes it a little harder to keep the conversation going, when the only things I've done all week are work and Japanese stuff...neither of which interests the people around me.

(2015-12-18, 6:59 am)Stansfield123 Wrote: It takes up a lot of my free time, but that's not really the hard part. I enjoy it, so it's easy to immerse myself in Japanese culture...which, at this point, is all I need to do to become native level fluent, which is my goal.

The hard part is not being in Japan, because it makes it hard to relate with other people about it. There's a large chunk of my free time that I spend on a unique interest, that I can't really use to socialize with friends and co-workers about, the way we usually use our common interests (sports, movies, music, etc.).

It makes it a little harder to keep the conversation going, when the only things I've done all week are work and Japanese stuff...neither of which interests the people around me.

This.  So much.

If there's one downside to being a language nerd, it's the fact that there usually aren't that many like-minded people around.

(2015-12-18, 6:59 am)Stansfield123 Wrote: It makes it a little harder to keep the conversation going, when the only things I've done all week are work and Japanese stuff...neither of which interests the people around me.

I also relate to this. People are always talking about Game of Thrones or some other pop culture hit. Meanwhile all I have to talk about are things related to my own personal language studies.

It's hard for me to not try to learn every single new word I encounter. My feeling is that if a Japanese person reading it is expected to know it then I ought to know it as well. Even with a vocabulary of easily over 30k words I still come across new words ALL the time, and yeah they aren't critical to me understanding what I'm reading or anything but I still can't bring myself to just ignore it. It's going to be learned, dammit!

This takes huge amounts of time, as I'm sure many of you know. Luckily I've never suffered a lack of motivation, in fact I often skip new movies, games and TV shows because I'd rather be studying Japanese! This leads to what those above have said, where you have little to talk about with others because the things we spend our time on don't overlap in any way.

For me the hardest thing has been coming to terms with the fact that my Japanese will never be as good as my English. I no longer feel pressure to reach that goal, which is actually pretty freeing. It's allowed me to realize that my goals with learning Japanese have simply changed, and that changing my study habits and focus is fine and even a good thing.

For example, when I moved to Japan on JET I knew no Japanese. My goal then was mostly to be able to speak with the people around me. At that time it was a lot of fun to speak with Japanese people in Japanese and cross the cultural barrier. Whenever my conversations became longer, or moved into a new topic that used new vocabulary, I really got a kick out of it. I have a lot of nice memories from that period.

Now that I live in the US I just don't have those same speaking opportunities. For a long time that really bothered me. But now I've found that focusing on reading comprehension is just as fun as focusing on speaking was then. It also lends itself very well to things like anki and self studying.

I suppose that if I ever go back to Japan I'll try to change my focus to working on speaking again.

Also, one area that I have only scratched the surface of is writing. Perhaps one day if my reading gets to a level I'm happy with I'll work with someone on that.

"What is the hardest part about learning language?" --> Definitely the part, when you actually have to sit down and bust your a** with studying...

The hardest part about learning a language? Using it. I am not a shy person at all but when put on the spot, I freeze! Input is fine though sometimes a struggle but output is the most difficult for me. I can't even read out loud in Japanese without looking like a stumbling fool :/ but my mental reading pace is much faster.

Funny, speaking was always the easiest for me, in any foreign language I've learned. Writing is a hassle, but speaking is easy. I just put the words in the right order in my head and say it. It's funny, because I'm not a talker at all, nor do I talk much during my job, ect.