I am new to learning the language and I want to prepare myself in advance for its trials and tribulations.

I've heard two very different opinions of how difficult it is to learn Japanese: easy vs near impossible. I haven't seen so much disagreement about the difficulty of a language before.

The US Foreign Service Institute, the US government institute responsible for training government employees in foreign languages, released an estimate regarding how long it takes to learn different foreign languages (here on Wikibooks)

In that estimate they rate Japanese to take longer than all other languages on the list (it's in the 2200+ hours category, with an asterik signifying that it takes longer than the other languages in the 2200+ category).

Is it the Kanji that makes it difficult? I still haven't learned all of the basic grammar yet, but to me the basic grammar seems quite simple and, most importantly for me, quite regular. Counting and some others things are a bit strange, but nothing too bad so far. Are there any parts of the grammar that are very difficult?

Have you learned any other foreign languages and how does Japanese compare in difficulty?

There are a lot of tricky parts of the grammar; the simplicity is a bit deceptive. But the hardest parts of Japanese by far are the writing system, and the politeness. Both of those are lifetime issues that you will never completely master as long as you study.

It's not easy, nor is it nearly-impossible. Somewhere in between.

Well I think the writing systems are really easy once you get used to the kanji. For example, knowing how to break the kanji into parts, usually they even help you with the meaning of the overall kanji (Hesig helps with this). It took me awhile to figure out how on and kun yomi worked (about 3 months). After that, learning vocabulary became easy.

Grammar? Hard? No not really, it's different though.
Japanese is certainly is unique. Once you go through the basic grammar, I thought it got easy. When reading native material you will know when it's a grammar point you don't understand so you can just look it up online, or ask the people on forums.

Vocabulary? Easy, no cognates though. Kanji can be your best friend or enemy.
Katakana words are usually easier to learn because we can figure out what it sounds like in English most of the time.

Speaking
Never got to it yet, but my speaking is pretty bad. Reading scripts flow pretty well though. If I were to walk up to a Japanese person and talk, I probably can't get out of the basic conversation. If they start writing stuff down, I'll understand them to a certain extent. If subtitles pop out of nowhere, I'll understand them to a certain extent. Too bad there's no subtitles in real life.

Listening
Hard...for me. I studied Italian(in school), and my listening is outrageous. I just can't keep up. Heck, even in English I will have some trouble if some kid speaking super fast came up to me. Maybe I have to stop blasting Jpop in my ears. I suppose my listening is getting better. Well, it certainly is better than it was awhile back.

Overall
It's definitely time consuming. If you're having fun learning the language you won't even realize how fast time is going. I would get into listening right away when you start, well maybe after the kana. I started listening maybe a month after some regular study of grammar and words. When I got to listening...I almost raged quit the language. If you have passion towards the language, I'm sure you will do great! My studies of the Japanese language in 2 weeks or so beat my 6 years of Italian study in school.

Maybe read about people bitch about korean will give you perspective lol. here's some interesting read... just check out the psots that mention japanese.
I collected it from another language forum.
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2012/08/13
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2012/11/02

yudantaiteki Wrote:There are a lot of tricky parts of the grammar; the simplicity is a bit deceptive. But the hardest parts of Japanese by far are the writing system, and the politeness. Both of those are lifetime issues that you will never completely master as long as you study.

I'm not sure I agree... to me the difficulty ranking (easiest first) goes writing < reading < listening = speaking, whereas I'd just consider keigo something that quickly becomes second nature if you have to use it daily.

I ranked writing being the easiest, since excluding the prettiness of one's handwriting, it's not too hard to fool someone that what you wrote was written by a native after a few years of study/practice. I put reading second because getting up to native speed is kind of a pain. Convincing someone you're a native in live conversation on the other hand is a whole different level of difficulty.

@dixmox To me the difficulty ranking goes the other way around. I started believing so after meeting so many illiterate people that were just better than me at speaking when I started frequenting volunteer Japanese classrooms, but didn't stand on a par with me when it came to reading or writing. Most of us started learning Japanese with grammar books, textbooks, iKnow, breaking subs, Anki, etc., whereas people that usually have better conversational skills than reading/writing skills (in my experience) like Vietnamese, Indonesian, Brazilian, Filipino, etc., usually come to Japan in different terms than most native English speakers and start learning from day one speaking to their supervisors/co-workers, going to volunteer classrooms, speaking to other language learners, etc.

I feel that once you get over the initial hump of learning kana, starting to learn the kanji, and basic grammar, Japanese seems easier than many anticipate, but the challenge resurfaces around the intermediate level. At that point, things like developing a really sophisticated vocabulary on a wide range of topics and a refined sense of proper word choice and precise use of grammar, which may not be necessary just to get your point across, but are necessary to sound natural, at least in my experience, came to the forefront as the main challenges. Basically, the devil is in the details, and there does seem to be a large gap between being able to communicate using the language and actually sounding natural in it.

youasuki Wrote:@dixmox To me the difficulty ranking goes the other way around. I started believing so after meeting so many illiterate people that were just better than me at speaking when I started frequenting volunteer Japanese classrooms, but didn't stand on a par with me when it came to reading or writing.

I noticed this kind of divide, too. Some people seem more literate, and then there are others who are more fluent, but people with "the total package", so to speak, of being bother literate and fluent seem more elusive.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The simplicity is a bit deceptive.

This.

[s0apgun]

^ Lol. Truer words have never been spoken until now.

To take a step back and view the bigger picture, I think one big difficulty in Japanese is just that it takes so damn long to really get good at. Of course, that's due to a lot of smaller difficulties that add up. But having enough free time in your life, and having enough motivation to continue on, are both very difficult things to be consistent about. If you live in Japan it's kind of easy since you always have a reason to keep learning, but if you're in another country it really takes a lot of internal motivation.

I've said before that I think it takes most people five years or more to pass JLPT N1, and that's a level that still feels a bit unsatisfying when you finally get there.

Another difficulty is that even if you live in Japan you may not actually get as many chances to use the language as you would like. That's because of social customs in Japan, how Japanese people treat foreigners, and the fact that most Westerners who come to Japan do English teaching jobs. You need to put in an effort to try to speak as much Japanese as possible even if you live in Japan. It does not just happen, and it's actually kind of difficult at first.

My main thought was that if you can express yourself intelligently in live speech then you should be able to do it in text (as long as you have knowledge of kanji) since you have all the time in the world to think about it, in which case there's far less clues to give away that you're not really perfect yet. Donald Keene makes for a good example. But I guess this goes for any language.

I just see the writing system as a matter of memorization, not so much a complex cognitive challenge.

What I'm saying is that factually, speaking vs writing Japanese may be the other way around according to what you said in terms of difficulty even though, like you, I see writing and composing far easier that speaking since that's how I went on learning Japanese myself as well.

.

Japanese is damn hard.
My grandfather once wanted to learn it. He decided he should obviously teach himself the Japanese ABC first. He at once discovered that they have two A’s: あ and ア. That was to be expected, we have two A’s too: A and a. He then looked for B. No B. No b, either. Damn it. What about C? Nothing. What a language! No ABC! He gave up. That was to be expected too.

Arupan Wrote:(off-topic)

dizmox Wrote:I'm not sure I agree... to me the difficulty ranking (easiest first) goes writing < reading < listening = speaking, whereas I'd just consider keigo something that quickly becomes second nature if you have to use it daily.

I ranked writing being the easiest, since excluding the prettiness of one's handwriting, it's not too hard to fool someone that what you wrote was written by a native after a few years of study/practice.

So am I right in thinking you narrow this down to a chat environment only? Cause writing an essay, a paper, or even correcting other people's Japanese, for example, needs some heavy fooling (lol).

================================

(on-topic)
For me the hardest thing in learning Japanese has always been gathering the will to actually study.

I'm talking about stuff like essays as well. Just think how many foreigners can write in perfect English but sound kind of off in real life.

dizmox Wrote:I'm talking about stuff like essays as well. Just think how many foreigners can write in perfect English but sound kind of off in real life.

This is kind of what I was talking about earlier. What you say is true and so is the opposite, that is, to sound native-ish even if you don't speak the language very well. I've met several Chinese people that have passed N1 / JLPT1 and despite having lived in Japan for more than 5 years or so, they sound off in their speaking and their manner is just not even remotely close to Japanese, they also use what I suspect are a mixture of Chinese/Japanese interjections or rather you don't hear them saying えーと、あのー、っけ、なんか、うむ、えええ very often or at all, just to name a few off the top of my head. They have heavy accents as well. On the less critical side, I met a very native sounding guy from India, though he's been living in Japan for more than 20 years and is married to a Japanese (he attends the same 日本語教室 that I go to in my area).

Surely that's just a matter of neglecting that area though? I mean you just learn the kanji, readings and you're done.

What I find most difficult about Japanese is the multiple ways of saying one thing and the subtle differences that mean that if you use one version it is "incorrect" even if it would seem to be correct. Sometimes there is apparently no reason for this and you just have to memorise it.

An example would be conditionals. As a beginner you may just learn that there are multiple ways to say "if". Seems easy enough. But then later on you find out that actually you can't use certain ones for certain types of sentences.

Remembering these subtle rules is bad enough when writing, but to apply them while speaking seems almost impossible.

Disclaimer: Japanese is the first foreign language I have (seriously) attempted to learn. I expect that this sort of thing exists for other languages too.

A really funky part of living in Japan is using the Katakana borrowed words. On the surface, these items are great because they are really just cognates borrowed, they are easily learned, and easily remembered. However, I can't help but feel strange when I use these items in daily speech here. I've chatted with a few coworkers here about this (language teachers) and there seems to be agreement with the awkward nature of using these items. It is likely a socio-cultural affective element of language use. I imagine I would feel just as awkward if I returned to North American and walked around referring to kareoke with a correct Japanese pronunciation.

On a possibly related tangent, I notice that some of my students who can pronounce English quite well will often revert to the Katakana style epenthesis (adding vowels to break up consonant clusters, for example textbook becomes tekusutobuku) when speaking in English with an audience of Japanese peers. I wonder if a similar process is taking place for them; the awkwardness of using a cognate to an item that already exists in the L1 and is produced quite differently.

Brains.

dabrowskiowski Wrote:I wonder if a similar process is taking place for them; the awkwardness of using a cognate to an item that already exists in the L1 and is produced quite differently..

Maybe. When I use picture flashcards to introduce new words to kids, I give them a few seconds first to see if they can guess/figure out the word. The other day there was this picture of a piece of string/yard and they went and said いと with an pseudo-English pronunciation. This could demonstrate that most Japanese speakers (at least while young for example) don't think of words such as テキストブック or 糸 in separate terms, both are Japanese words, they own these words.

buonaparte Wrote:Japanese is damn hard.
My grandfather once wanted to learn it. He decided he should obviously teach himself the Japanese ABC first. He at once discovered that they have two A’s: あ and ア. That was to be expected, we have two A’s too: A and a. He then looked for B. No B. No b, either. Damn it. What about C? Nothing. What a language! No ABC! He gave up. That was to be expected too.

Made me laugh. =)

It's difficult due to all the kanji you have to learn.
It's also easy thanks to the kanji helping with the meaning of the words.

It's both a blessing and a curse

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:Maybe read about people bitch about korean will give you perspective lol. here's some interesting read... just check out the psots that mention japanese.
I collected it from another language forum.
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2012/08/13
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2012/11/02

that was an interesting read, following onto the learnanylanguage forum. without distracting this thread too much: what did you think of the sweepdecking methodogy? reading up on what that forum member describe, it seems more or less similar too say cramming a large amont of words in something like anki, and having the system make corrections based on your (substituting for the person testing the flash cards on you) input. but maybe i'm off the mark.

korean is a language i want to as well as japanese. content with english, japanese and korean. that thread only made it even more damn interesting, (笑)

youasuki Wrote:

dabrowskiowski Wrote:I wonder if a similar process is taking place for them; the awkwardness of using a cognate to an item that already exists in the L1 and is produced quite differently..

Maybe. When I use picture flashcards to introduce new words to kids, I give them a few seconds first to see if they can guess/figure out the word. The other day there was this picture of a piece of string/yard and they went and said いと with an pseudo-English pronunciation. This could demonstrate that most Japanese speakers (at least while young for example) don't think of words such as テキストブック or 糸 in separate terms, both are Japanese words, they own these words.

Off topic, but here is something I started doing in my classes last year, and it works wonders! Instead of just holding up the flashcards, pull them slowly out of an envelope (or fast, up to you), and get the kids to start yelling out guesses as to what it is. You'll find even the ones who always do the bored thing watch you like a hawk, and the whole class is much more interested. The best thing about doing it like this is that the kids are actively engaged in thinking about what they're being shown and what it is, and they'll remember the vocab much better because of it. Another thing you can also do is, if you have a confident kid who's not shy of speaking English in front of the class, get them to come up to the front, show them the vocab, and the have to describe it to the rest of the class using English.

dabrowskiowski Wrote:A really funky part of living in Japan is using the Katakana borrowed words.

Ya I used to have huge issues with loan words. as a native English speaking westerner whenever I used these words with a japanese person I felt like I was putting on a bad Japanese accent speaking English. It felt incredibly rude to be honest... Like making fun of these people for speaking engrish... Something which I am obviously loathe to do as a person speaking their language with frequent mistakes.

But after a short while in Japan it dawned on me that if you try using a proper English pronounciation of an English word Japanese people usually have no idea what you're taking about. Not a clue. That is how they understand these words.

Hence their huge problems trying to speak English... They keep trying to speak in katakana.

Anyway after enough experiences like that I just said screw it and treat them like japanese words written in hiragana... because its not anything to do with English any longer really.