Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English?

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Printable Version

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Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - johnzep - 2007-12-07

I have a friend who is a native English speaker...he learned French in college, wolof in the the peace corp in Senegal (in addition to using a lot of french), and he has lived in Japan for 2 years.

He thinks Japanese is the hardest of the 3 languages he has learned by far. Mainly because of Kanji (he hasn't done RTK) And I think even if you do RTK, there are still lots of other tricky things...like learning readings of the kanji, dealing with politeness levels, among other things.

If I had to guess the amount of time I spent completing RTK...I would guess that it was somewhere around 150 hours (I wish I had kept track better...does that sound like a reasonable estimate?) I'm willing to wager that 150 hours would get a native English speaker pretty far in learning French or another language closely related to English. However, in Japanese it is the minimum investment to have a fighting chance at the language.

Also, not being able to read phonetically is a big problem. For example I routinely saw a bus that said　　回送　when I would leave work. I could understand the meaning, but barring a non-trivial amount of kanji study, I couldn't read it. Whereas someone that has studied English only basic phonics could read "out of service" and learn a new phrase.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Biene - 2007-12-07

(off topic)

@billyclyde

Here are some links that I found for French frequency wordlists:

http://www.lexique.org/listes/liste_mots.txt
(Words listed alphabetically with the frequency in brackets)

http://eduscol.education.fr/D0102/liste-frequence.htm
(the most frequent 1500 Words, listed by frequency and with nature of the word (e.g. Adjective))

Non of these list have the translations of the listed words.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - leosmith - 2007-12-07

PParisi Wrote:Of these three, I think the first is not especially difficult: it is simply tedious and time consuming to master.

I consider difficulty to be a measure of the time it takes. What do you consider difficulty to be?

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - billyclyde - 2007-12-07

(off topic)

Thanks, Biene! I haven't found anything that's not super-simple yet, but I'll let you know if I do.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Codexus - 2007-12-07

leosmith Wrote:I consider difficulty to be a measure of the time it takes. What do you consider difficulty to be?

Difficulty = Effort invested / Return On Investment ?

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - billyclyde - 2007-12-07

Luis, maybe the thing we're all really talking about is whether Japanese is -perceived- as difficult, which for Westerers it certainly is. Whether it really is doesn't matter compared to the points we can score with people for speaking it! Wink

Also, I guess almost everyone here is a native English-speaker or a European? I would like to hear anyone whose native language is not Indo-European speak to the difficulty. I think Koreans probably learn it the most easily of all. Both are similar phoneticallly and not tonal; also, Korean has a more complex politeness register than Japanese, with (I think) seven levels!

I also think, compared to most other languages, because Japanese is almost totally isolated to one location with a long xenophobic history, its speakers have a hard time simplifying their speech for non-natives. Many just throw up their hands, or do what my grandfather did when talking to non-native English speakers, which is talk louder. This makes it harder to get by in all but the most basic interactions (and perhaps deafening).

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - PParisi - 2007-12-07

leosmith Wrote:
PParisi Wrote:Of these three, I think the first is not especially difficult: it is simply tedious and time consuming to master.
I consider difficulty to be a measure of the time it takes. What do you consider difficulty to be?

Okay: I grant that time is part of what makes something difficult. But it is the least important aspect of what makes something difficult. It would take much longer to move 20 desks which collectively weigh 800 pounds than to lift them all at the same time. Nevertheless, moving the twenty desks is much easier for most people because all that is required are things nearly everyone has: modest strength and endurance and a bit of time. Lifting the 800 lbs all at once requires something fewer have: the engineering know-how to build a pulley-and-crane rig to move all of the chairs at once.

I am not saying learning kanji is as easy as reading a cheap novel or watching tv. It is, however, much easier than other aspects of learning a language: eg. usage, levels of politeness, written composition, idioms, and actual reading. Learning to attach one english word each to 2000 characters is a parlor trick compared to learning to read in a language.

Look at my chairs analogy in another way: before James Heisig came along, the only way to learn kanji was through the time-consuming but mindless task of writing the characters over and over again. Not complicated but time-consuming and frustrating. James Heisig has engineered a 'machine' to streamline and shorten the process, making it not only uncomplicated but relatively quick. He exerted some serious mental effort to develop and refine his 'machine', the book "Remembering the Kanji." All I'm doing is operating the machine for an hour a day.

Another thought: According to one estimate I've read, the average American in a lifetime learns the operation of 1000's of different appliances, electronic and mechanical. This learning occurs gradually and without the expenditure of much effort. Learning the kanji is no different.

As far as kanji are concerned, it is a low-level intellectual task to learn 2000 kanji. Time, self discipline and patience are all that is required. The reason people fail is not because they can't do it but because they lack time, patience or self-discipline. On the other hand, as the physicist Rutherford once pointed out, few people in the world really understand the theory of Relativity, and not because only few have tried.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Biene - 2007-12-07

Kanji are a major hurdle when learning Japanese, I guess we'd all agree to that. Wink

So, when we would ignore the writing systems, and would just focus on the spoken languages, is Japanese then really much more difficult than English? For Indo-European learner it might be the case, since we can find similarities in our native languages when compared with English. But what would a learner say who comes from a total alien language-type?
I'd be interested what a learner with Finnish-background (or another agglutinative language) thinks about the difficulties of spoken Japanese and it's grammar.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - leosmith - 2007-12-07

Codexus Wrote:
leosmith Wrote:I consider difficulty to be a measure of the time it takes. What do you consider difficulty to be?
Difficulty = Effort invested / Return On Investment ?

PParisi Wrote:As far as kanji are concerned, it is a low-level intellectual task to learn 2000 kanji. Time, self discipline and patience are all that is required. The reason people fail is not because they can't do it but because they lack time, patience or self-discipline. On the other hand, as the physicist Rutherford once pointed out, few people in the world really understand the theory of Relativity, and not because only few have tried.

Y'all are saying difficulty is something like intensity of effort, while I'm saying it's something like the total amount of effort. Since you understand physics, its sort of like the difference between work and power (power = work/time). I know we were talking about kanji specifically, but when people talk about overall difficulty of learning a language, they usually talk about the total amount of time to become proficient in reading, writing, speaking and listening. I think this is because it's harder to quantify intensity of effort.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Codexus - 2007-12-08

leosmith Wrote:Y'all are saying difficulty is something like intensity of effort, while I'm saying it's something like the total amount of effort. Since you understand physics, its sort of like the difference between work and power (power = work/time).

Your way is more objective. I may be reading too much into this, but I think it reflects the way you see things in life: "Off course, I can do it, if it's hard it's just going to take me more time".

Now when people ask you "Is Japanese difficult to learn?", what do you think they are really asking? (assuming they are interested in the answer and not just making conversation)

"How long is it going to take me to be fluent?", so that they can schedule their vacation in Japan knowing that they'll be able to converse with the natives by that time.

or...

"Should I really start learning Japanese? because you know... if it's too difficult for me I'm probably going to fail anyway so rather than waste my time maybe I should pick something easier... Isn't Esperanto easy to learn?"

Unfortunately, the second attitude is quite common.

Maybe it would be best to consider just the overall time it takes to reach proficiency in a dispassionate manner. But mostly what people will consider is the amount of effort they made so far and what they can show for it.

Let's invent the imaginary language L and assume that after 2 years of regular study you get the exact same level of overall proficiency that if you were learning Japanese. But L uses the roman alphabet so you can start reading right away. People would still say that Japanese is a lot more difficult. There is just a lot more of effort to do before you're rewarded with the ability to read. People who don't have enough self-confidence are likely to quit before they reach that point. And you'll have a perfectly good objective justification that Japanese is harder to learn than our imaginary language L: more people give up.

So I guess my point is that both perspectives are equally valid and that there is no simple answer to the question of whether a language is difficult or not.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - taijuando - 2007-12-08

if you look at the foreign service language estimates...japanese and chinese take something like 2500 hours to master while Spanish is on the easier scale

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - ivoSF - 2007-12-08

that seems a bit hight, that would mean 3 years effort without sleeping or if you only work on it for 6 hours a day almost 10 years.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Codexus - 2007-12-08

2500 not 25000 Wink

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Django - 2007-12-08

To carry on where Codexus left off, let us suppose the existence of a language, K, that employs not just an almost identical set of Chinese characters as Japanese, but also both syllabaries of kana. Let's also assume that as a native speaker of K, you were had also been familiarised from a young age with the Roman alphabet. If you were a native speaker of K, would you, without the system of writing to cloud the issue, find Japanese more difficult or English on a purely grammatical basis?

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - PParisi - 2007-12-08

leosmith Wrote:
Codexus Wrote:
leosmith Wrote:I consider difficulty to be a measure of the time it takes. What do you consider difficulty to be?
Difficulty = Effort invested / Return On Investment ?

PParisi Wrote:As far as kanji are concerned, it is a low-level intellectual task to learn 2000 kanji. Time, self discipline and patience are all that is required. The reason people fail is not because they can't do it but because they lack time, patience or self-discipline. On the other hand, as the physicist Rutherford once pointed out, few people in the world really understand the theory of Relativity, and not because only few have tried.
Y'all are saying difficulty is something like intensity of effort, while I'm saying it's something like the total amount of effort.

Point taken! Smile

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - phauna - 2008-02-06

Perhaps you'd all like to look at this comparative list of language difficulty:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/easiest-languages.html

English, Spanish, Italian get two cactuses, easy.

Arabic, Chinese ones, Japanese, Korean get five cactuses, difficult.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - uberstuber - 2008-02-06

English gets two cacti assuming English is your native language though...

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - Jarvik7 - 2008-02-06

The rankings are also only (somewhat) valid from the perspective of an English speaker. A native speaker of Chinese or Korean would rank the languages totally differently. It really has nothing to do with the difficulty of the language, just the similarity to your existing language & culture giving you a head-start.

-edit-
Just read some of the text on the page linked above. The English is quite poorly written with very frequent spelling errors of basic words. The author doesn't seem to be an authority on languages Tongue

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - JimmySeal - 2008-02-06

I think even objectively Japanese and Chinese are two of the hardest languages going, because their writing systems are so complicated, and because their writing systems allow them to have huge, bloated vocabularies with lots of homophones, specialized words, and near synonyms.

Meanwhile, I've come to believe that English is one of the simplest major world languages. Its verbs conjugate into only 5 forms, and a few simple verbs and nouns can be stretched a long way. Compare that to Italian or Spanish, with verbs that conjugate into about 40-50 forms, nearly half of them irregular.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - DrJones - 2008-02-14

Written English, maybe. Spoken English, on the other hand...

English has no strong rules related to pronounciation, and any rule is full of exceptions; it has 11 vowels, but uses only 5 letters to represent them; it even has silent letters that aren't meant to be pronounced, but that were added to write the word closer to a latin root. This results in english children having to spend as many years as japanese children to being able to read a text properly (about ten years), while an italian child can read correctly in just 1.8 years. Moreover, several studies point that about 50% of english-speaking adults still have problems with the pronounciation.

This explains phenomenoms like Spelling Bees, that I've yet to see in any other language.

You can read more about suggested english reforms in this wikipedia article.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - rich_f - 2008-02-15

DrJones Wrote:This explains phenomenoms like Spelling Bees, that I've yet to see in any other language.

Don't forget about the KanKen exams in Japan. Big Grin

Not the exact same thing, but a similar concept.

I still remember losing the final round of my school's spelling bee by forgetting the second L in allergy. >_< Dammit, that still makes me mad.

Is Japanese More Difficult to Learn Than English? - nac_est - 2008-02-15

I agree with DrJones, the only hard part of the English language is pronounciation. Compared to that, for example, Italian is so much easier. It's like the Japanese pronunciation, where (almost) everything is pronounced unequivocally as it is written, but without the added difficulty of kanji.
Grammar, on the other hand, is much different...