Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Printable Version

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Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - qwertyytrewq - 2014-01-25

Languages like Japanese and Chinese have a reputation for being the hardest to learn languages (see that study). But right now, a Japanese person just gave up learning the language because it's too hard.

People in general tend to have a very personal-centric view of the world. For example,

Americans have an American-centric view of the world (liberal means x in America, therefore liberal also means x in the UK).

Rich people who inherited most or all of their money have a rich people-centric view of the world (if you are born into poverty, just work hard and you won't be poor anymore).

Democracy supporters have a democracy-centric view of the world (democracy works in Canada, therefore democracy works in China).

Religious people have a religion-centric view of the world (I am Christian which allows me to be moral, you're atheist so you can't be moral)

Finally, people on the internet whose native (and sole) language is English have an English language-centric view of the world (I am fluent in English, therefore learning English is easy. I find Japanese hard, therefore Japanese is hard). Given the number of them doing JLPT1, Chinese people learning Japanese would most likely have a completely opposite view (English hard, Japanese easy).

Basically, this thread is your golden opportunity to complain about the English language, whether you're learning it or not. People complain all the time about Japanese's thousands of Kanji, or the indecipherable katakana, or the polite/honorific language, or the long strings of hiragana, or the multitude of Kanji readings, or the impossible chain conjugations, or the homonyms etc...

Now you can do the same, except this time, our punching bag is the proud and arrogant English language.

Get it off your chest.

Give your best shot.

What grinds your gears?

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Bokusenou - 2014-01-25

Oh, this sounds like fun. Hmm, lack of a standard pronunciation system bothers me. (or maybe lack of full adherence to it?) Like sometimes I'll say a word I've read a million times in print, but never heard spoken, and a lot of times I'll pronounce it wrong. The word isn't pronounced the way it looks like it might be from the spelling. And I'm a native speaker. I can just imagine what ESL learners have to go through...

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - comeauch - 2014-01-25

English can be difficult sometimes, but really, I don't agree with you. I think in most cases, English is easier to learn than Japanese, possible exception being if you're Chinese.

It's not about being English-centric, of course it's easier to learn a language that is close to your own, but Japanese has that special feature of being fairly unrelated to almost everything else (except for their use of Chinese characters), so everyone starts up at near-zero knowledge (hence the universal idea that it's more difficult). English is related to a lot of languages through latin, germanic and greek roots.

Chinese characters alone are objectively more difficult to handle than a fixed set of around 26 letters. You can't be 100% sure of the pronunciation, searching in the dictionary is slower as pointed out by the infamous article "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard", you can't really guess like you can in English. If you don't remember how "pronunciation" is spelled and write "pronounciation" (which happens to me all the time, as a non-native English speaker lol), people will understand. Even if you're an absolute beginner, you could try "prononsiasion". Depending on the context, maybe Japanese people would understand despite spelling mistakes, but idk, probably not as easily. In Chinese, if you don't remember the character you're pretty much screwed. In Japanese, hiragana provides a way around it, but it's still not ideal. Simply put, there's a greater difference between the spoken and the written Japanese language than for English. And written language is important for most types of learning (at least, I for one wouldn't want to learn starting from speech only).

Sure, Chinese characters give us some semantic meaning, but this ranges from useful to counterproductive (i.e. ateji words). Plus, it's not much "better" than English and it's latin or greek roots (aqua-, tri-, inter-, etc.).

Finally, you have to consider that English is learned by a lot of people, which means there are considerable resources available...
I mean, in the end "difficult" is a subjective word and so it's no wonder that most European-language speakers would find Japanese more difficult than English. IMO, even for an alien, Japanese would be more difficult to learn than English, but if you think I'm wrong, I'm listening to your counter-arguments!

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Betelgeuzah - 2014-01-25

English is just annoying. There's so many irregularities everywhere that it truly deserves it's place as a hodgepodge-language.

It's so bothersome to try to learn the pronunciation "properly" when the "rules" are more like lists of irregularities that you have to force down your throat. I've just given up on losing my accent because it'd take forever.

At least I'm closer to mastering the spelling, which in itself is a pain in the ass too.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Ephel - 2014-01-25

Fun... let me try:

Maybe with kanji I cannot be sure of how to pronounce things, but at least I have an idea of the meaning.

Written English doesn't convey meaning nor pronunciation.
No, really... there isn't any pronounciation rule that doesn't require common exceptions.
You also have at least two different writing standards (British and American) which are both correct and to which you are exposed, but that you should try not to mix up (a thing that is more difficult because in my country we learn British English, while US English is spoken, and so written, by more people).

In English you always have to state the subject of each sentence (I mean... why? Most of times context makes it clear!), and small particles completely change the meaning of verbs ("phrasal verbs"... actually I like them, but I'm told they're a major pain in the ass for any other learner).

Past form of most verbs has to be learned by heart because there is no simple rule to use for anything that doesn't just take an -ed. Same for a good number of plurals nouns (neither of these two things happens in Japanese, btw).

Edit: I almost forgot... I hate the fact you have to change sentence order to make questions! In most languages intonation alone is enough. I remember asking three times to a 10 years old kid "You painted it yourself?" without him understanding I was making a question, before I noticed I wasn't moving words aroung the way I was supposed to (I just noticed this happened 10 years ago and now I'm feeling old -.-).

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - riogray - 2014-01-25

What grinds my gears about English is the massive amount of vocabulary. It seems you keep on learning and learning and still find about a word a page that you don't know. Pronunciation can be bothersome as well. Just yesterday I heard the correct word of pronouncing "gauge".

Comparing English to another language is quite difficult for me. I know some Spanish and I am able to read most of it, but it's not nearly as good as my English, so it's a bad comparison. I don't remember learning English; I have English family and had lessons throughout my school career. So I can't say anything about it being harder or easier to learn than another language. I do remember learning Spanish and that went much faster than my Japanese.

Quote:[...] I hate the fact you have to change sentence order to make questions! In most languages intonation alone is enough. I remember asking three times to a 10 years old kid "You painted it yourself?" without him understanding I was making a question[...]

I don't get that. Can't "You painted it yourself?" be both a question and a statement? So you can just change the intonation to make into a question? Also, changing the sentence order to make it a question feels natural to me as you have to do so in most cases in German too. What's your mother tongue (just curious Big Grin

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Aspiring - 2014-01-25

Just thought this was interesting.
(Social media's influence on language)

The Shallows, Nicholas Carr Wrote:Changes in reading style will also bring changes in writing style. A striking example of this process is already on display in Japan. In 2001, young Japanese women began composing stories on their mobile phones, as strings of text messages, and uploading them to a Web site, Maho no i-rando, where other people read and commented on them. The stories expanded into serialized "cell phone novels," and their popularity grew. Some of the novels found millions of readers online. Publishers took notice, and began to bring out the novels as printed books. By the end of the decade, cell phone novels had come to dominate the country's best-seller lists. The three top-selling Japanese novels in 2007 were all originally written on mobile phones. (104)"

/totally irrelevant

Reference to o.p.

I'd argue that Japanese words are conceptually easier to learn.
Japanese words have an added visual aspect to them that makes them easier to remember. Logographs are quickly read and deciphered. English words rely on sound, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and context (I imagine these features being more difficult for native Chinese or Japanese speakers, who are accustomed to a logographic writing system).

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - hyvel - 2014-01-25

If I understood it correctly, this thread is meant to serve as a place to vent one's anger about English. So let me give you one thing that has fooled me for many years before I finally figured it out:

"The game is all but decided".

According to ~~common~~ my sense, I always figured that it should mean about the following:

Say whatever you want about the game, but the one thing that holds true is that it is definitely not decided yet.

For some messed up reason, what it apparently actually means though is that the game is indeed already completely decided. Where's the logic in that?! Sheer madness!

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - ファブリス - 2014-01-25

British english can be quite fun.

@hyvel That's a good one! It feels kinda like what it means to me but I have no idea why, especially that I don't see this expression often nor ever use it myself. Something about the various meanings of "but" in english, probably from other expressions I learned.

edit: Oh right, in expression "I am but a simple man", the word but sounds like "just". Hence "The game is all just decided". Native english speakers should correct me here Smile

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Tzadeck - 2014-01-25

hyvel Wrote:"The game is all but decided".

According to ~~common~~ my sense, I always figured that it should mean about the following:

Say whatever you want about the game, but the one thing that holds true is that it is definitely not decided yet.

For some messed up reason, what it apparently actually means though is that the game is indeed already completely decided. Where's the logic in that?! Sheer madness!

I'm a native speaker, but I always thought of that phrase like this: all the important things in the game have already happened, so the outcome is obvious, it's just that it hasn't technically finished yet. It probably is easier to imagine when written as 'all but over.'

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - dizmox - 2014-01-25

ファブリス Wrote:edit: Oh right, in expression "I am but a simple man", the word but sounds like "just". Hence "The game is all just decided". Native english speakers should correct me here

"All but" as a set phrase either means "everything except for" or "almost". In this case it has the latter meaning.

I agree about alphabet-based languages being potentially hard due to lack of logographs. For every new word you have to learn a whole new spelling, instead of just putting two or three kanji that you already know together.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - vix86 - 2014-01-25

Having watched kids here in Japan try and learn English, there are a few things I've come to realize over time about English that make it quite rough.

Unlike Japanese, English's syntax is fairly rigid and if sentences have their order changed even slightly sometimes, the whole thing becomes wrong. Its still understandable (if you know Japanese and understand the way a Japanese person might make an English sentence that way) but wrong. Japanese on the other hand has a certain preferential sentence order, but syntactically it won't break the 'correctness' of the sentence if stuff is moved around.

The other thing that makes English rough I've noticed is the level of idioms, or maybe just the sheer number of homophones in the language, which make it rather difficult. Lots of people complain about the fact that Japanese has so many words that sound the same but have different meanings, but English has way more, and it makes it difficult for ESL learners quite often.

Finally, I think pronunciation is difficult, but I've heard that you can learn a set of rules/patterns for pronunciation in English and it'll cover about 80% of the cases or something. No, the other difficult thing is what riogray had said: Vocabulary. There are so many words in English, and if you consider every homonym for a word as a separate word, then the amount of vocabulary you need to know skyrockets ('run' for example would count as something like 40-50 separate 'words' -- go look it up in the dictionary). Personally, I think the extensive vocabulary of the language is actually what makes it difficult for English native speakers to get comfortable in Japanese because we are use to having a word for everything (or so it seems) but in Japanese sometimes meanings for stuff are 'condensed' into one word in the vernacular.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - littlecrow - 2014-01-25

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is.

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - ktcgx - 2014-01-26

Ephel Wrote:Edit: I almost forgot... I hate the fact you have to change sentence order to make questions! In most languages intonation alone is enough. I remember asking three times to a 10 years old kid "You painted it yourself?" without him understanding I was making a question, before I noticed I wasn't moving words aroung the way I was supposed to (I just noticed this happened 10 years ago and now I'm feeling old -.-).

Actually, "You painted it yourself?" is a perfectly good question (native speaker myself, well educated, grammar pedant). The kid in question was probably just an idiot. You get them some times Wink

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Isbilenper - 2014-01-26

So just for reference all of this is coming from a native speaker of Danish.

One of the things that has always annoyed me about English is that two obviously related words can have their common part pronounced differently. For instance, the "famous" part of "infamous" is not pronounced as "famous" by itself. Some words also seems to be spelled in a rather counter-intuitive way, even when you know how they should be spelled. For instance I still feel that "circle" should be spelled as "circel" in terms of pronounciation.

This next thing might depend on your native language, but as a Dane one of the most annoying things is probably, that a lot of Danish idioms can be directly translated to English, except you have to replace every word in the idiom with a synonym after you make the direct translation. For instance, a "vicious cycle" would be an "evil ring" if translated directly from Danish, and "running in circles" would be "running in (a) ring" (we actually omit the article in that idiom in Danish). Furthermore a "construction site" would be a "building place" when translated word for word and the list goes on.

Also prepositions in all European languages I have studied are a pain in the ass, English included. When correcting Danish Lang-8 posts, prepositions are one of the things I still correct a lot when correcting the entries of advanced learners. I'd imagine it might be the same for those correcting English entries. Just to give a few examples showing how different it could be, the Danish equivalent of "going to school" would be "taking in school" if translated directly and naïvely, and while you would travel "by bus" in English, we travel "with bus" in Danish if one used a naïve translation.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Ephel - 2014-01-26

ktcgx Wrote:Actually, "You painted it yourself?" is a perfectly good question (native speaker myself, well educated, grammar pedant). The kid in question was probably just an idiot. You get them some times

Quote:I don't get that. Can't "You painted it yourself?" be both a question and a statement? So you can just change the intonation to make into a question? Also, changing the sentence order to make it a question feels natural to me as you have to do so in most cases in German too.

Well, I don't know about the IQ of the kid... maybe he just thought I was dumb for asking that, or I did some pronunciation mistake I wasn't able to notice at the time.

Quote:What's your mother tongue (just curious )?

I'm Italian :-)

We nearly never change word order for yes/no question and we have an incredibly simple rule for "who/why/where/when/..." questions (we put the "w"-word at the beginning of the sentence and the rest of the sentence remain exactly the same (except for the fact that the "missing information" isn't where you could have put it).

Hai mangiato. ((you) have eaten)
Hai mangiato? (have (you) eaten?)
[Not that verbs change depending on subject so we don't need to put a word for "you", even if it wouldn't be a grammatical mistake to put it:

Tu hai mangiato. (you have eaten)
Tu hai mangiato? (have you eaten?)
]

Ha mangiato la pizza. ((he/she/it) has eaten pizza)
Ha mangiato la pizza? (has (he/she/it) eaten pizza?)
Chi ha mangiato la pizza? (who has eaten pizza?)
Cosa ha mangiato? (what has (he/she/it) eaten?)

If two informations are missing, the "w"-word replaces them in the same order in which they would have appeared in the sentence (in a similar manner as in Japanese, except word order in Italian is more important):

Chi ha mangiato cosa? (Who has eaten what?)
Cosa ha mangiato chi? (What has eaten who(person)?)

Only exception I can think of is changing the sentence order (or adding subjects) to give more importance to the information you're asking:

Hai preso la penna? (Did (you) take the pen?)
Hai preso tu la penna? (Did you take the pen?) like in "I noticed the pen is missing, is you the one who took it?"

Same sentence could work well as an adfirmative sentence "Hai preso tu la penna!", but the most common way to explicit the subject in the adfirmative version of the sentence would be "Tu hai preso la penna". So word order in question sentences is nearly all about nuance.

dizmox Wrote:I agree about alphabet-based languages being potentially hard due to lack of logographs. For every new word you have to learn a whole new spelling, instead of just putting two or three kanji that you already know together.

Well... no.
There are lots of alphabet-based languages with a consistent phonetic writing for which you don't need to learn any spelling. You hear the word and you can write it, you read it and you can say it.
That should be the advantage of using an alphabet.
That's also why in English-speaking countries there are spelling competition for children while most other countries with an alphabet don't.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - anotherjohn - 2014-01-26

Isbilenper Wrote:For instance I still feel that "circle" should be spelled as "circel" in terms of pronounciation.

I would pronounce 'circel' as 'SIRsell', c.f. parcel, cancel, Marcel (PARsell CANsell marSELL).

'...cle' of 'circle' is consistent with icicle, cycle, bicycle, tricycle, etc. HTH.

I have yet to understand why it is said that there are more words in English than in e.g. Japanese. I recently did an English vocab test & scored 36.2k (as an educated native).

My Japanese is now at ~10k, but there is still a long, long way to go. It certainly seems plausible that 36k would be required for an equivalent reading level.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Stansfield123 - 2014-01-26

If you want English to make sense, learn French. Smile

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Isbilenper - 2014-01-26

anotherjohn Wrote:
Isbilenper Wrote:For instance I still feel that "circle" should be spelled as "circel" in terms of pronounciation.
I would pronounce 'circel' as 'SIRsell', c.f. parcel, cancel, Marcel (PARsell CANsell marSELL).

'...cle' of 'circle' is consistent with icicle, cycle, bicycle, tricycle, etc. HTH.

Yea, it is consistent, I do nonetheless feel like they are all counter-intuitive. It is probably because I am biased since we have a sound fairly similar to "..cle" in Danish that is spelled as "..kel", and invoking the good old "c can be pronounced as either s or k" I learned as a child, I feel like "..cel" = "..kel" (the accuracy of the "c = s or k" rule is besides the point). "Circle" is spelled as "cirkel" in Danish and "bicycle" is "cykel", both being pronounced somewhat close to their English counterparts. You make a good point that the "c" in "..cel" will probably be pronounced as an "s" though, so it is necessary to spell it as "..cle" to make a distinction.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - qwertyytrewq - 2014-01-26

Ephel Wrote:That's also why in English-speaking countries there are spelling competition for children while most other countries with an alphabet don't.

I wonder what the Japanese equivalent of a Spelling Bee would be? Long strings of Kanji that have non-standard/rare readings?

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Stansfield123 - 2014-01-26

anotherjohn Wrote:I have yet to understand why it is said that there are more words in English than in e.g. Japanese. I recently did an English vocab test & scored 36.2k (as an educated native).

My Japanese is now at ~10k, but there is still a long, long way to go. It certainly seems plausible that 36k would be required for an equivalent reading level.

A "word" means something else in an agglutinative language than it does in other kinds of languages. So a comparison would first have to define some kind of a fair standard for what a word is in an agglutinative language (at what point should you stop counting compounds), and what it is in English (at what point do you count two words as different, i.e. is "look" and "looking" two words or one? - it's obviously one).

But the fact is, English is a massive language, for a couple of reasons:
1. it was originally composed of most of the words of several languages (Germanic, French and Latin).
2. on top of that, it is used by billions, in very different cultures, by people who adopt new words from many other languages.

That's why it has over a million words.

Meanwhile, Japanese has been developed and is only used on a fairly homogeneous cluster of islands. I'm confident that if you pick a reasonable definition of what a word is in Japanese, you'll find that there's not gonna be a million of them.

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - dizmox - 2014-01-26

Ephel Wrote:
dizmox Wrote:I agree about alphabet-based languages being potentially hard due to lack of logographs. For every new word you have to learn a whole new spelling, instead of just putting two or three kanji that you already know together.
Well... no.
There are lots of alphabet-based languages with a consistent phonetic writing for which you don't need to learn any spelling. You hear the word and you can write it, you read it and you can say it.
That should be the advantage of using an alphabet.
That's also why in English-speaking countries there are spelling competition for children while most other countries with an alphabet don't.

Ok, but you still have to remember the pretty arbitrary string of sounds that go together to make the word.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:I wonder what the Japanese equivalent of a Spelling Bee would be? Long strings of Kanji that have non-standard/rare readings?

Kanken

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - Stansfield123 - 2014-01-26

Isbilenper Wrote:Yea, it is consistent, I do nonetheless feel like they are all counter-intuitive. It is probably because I am biased since we have a sound fairly similar to "..cle" in Danish that is spelled as "..kel", and invoking the good old "c can be pronounced as either s or k" I learned as a child, I feel like "..cel" = "..kel" (the accuracy of the "c = s or k" rule is besides the point). "Circle" is spelled as "cirkel" in Danish and "bicycle" is "cykel", both being pronounced somewhat close to their English counterparts. You make a good point that the "c" in "..cel" will probably be pronounced as an "s" though, so it is necessary to spell it as "..cle" to make a distinction.

The reason for the "cle" is the French "cercle". The English adopted the word (well they didn't have much choice in the matter), but the pronunciation was difficult (it's basically read "serkl", with nothing between or after the three consonants), so they just read it as "sirkel".

Normally, languages also change the spelling, to follow native spelling rules. English didn't, I could only speculate as to why (maybe it has to do with a huge number of French words getting adopted at the same time, or maybe the Norman aristocracy just felt like imposing French spelling - I don't know).

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - anotherjohn - 2014-01-26

Stansfield123 Wrote:That's why it has over a million words.

But afaik chemical names account for a significant chunk of that million, and the rest are names of plants/animals/food/clothes/etc collected from around the world throughout history.

So in a sense the bulk of those 'English' words are common to all languages in which those topics are discussed, it's just that no-one has so far seen fit to brag about it in the popsci literature Smile

Reasons why English is just as hard to learn as Japanese - tokyostyle - 2014-01-26

anotherjohn Wrote:I have yet to understand why it is said that there are more words in English than in e.g. Japanese.

Medium sized dictionaries in both languages tend to hover around 250,000 entries each. The largest for each language is closer to 450,000 to 500,000 for both. If English does actually have a million words then I would guess a lot of them are from scientific latin terms and all of those words are just as much a part of Japanese as they are English.

anotherjohn Wrote:My Japanese is now at ~10k, but there is still a long, long way to go. It certainly seems plausible that 36k would be required for an equivalent reading level.

This article suggests the following average ranges for students:

Code:

小学生:  5,000 - 20,000

中学生: 20,000 - 40,000

高校生: 40,000 - 45,000

大学生: 45,000 - 50,000

(It gives a full reference for where the data comes from, but that's recognition only.)