I'm sure we all get the "Oh, aren't Asian languages hard?" from many people but how has Japanese really compared to the other languages you may have been studying? (I know many of you are studying English and Chinese.) I understand that difficulty is relative to both one's original culture but this thread is just how languages are difficult to you.

Japanese was my first love. Learning the 仮名/かな was actually a breeze for me but it took me a while to get into the "flow" of the grammar. Pronunciation for me was simple and conjugation really isn't all that bad -- there are only 3 oddball verbs. (する／くる／いく) Of course the many kanji readings really ticked me off and Japanese names still are impossible to be able to write. Something which I find only in Japanese is extreme ambiguity. There are so many homophones in Japanese it makes it difficult to make out a sentence. When I first started I couldn't tell where one sentence started and one ended. (This was before the sentences were written in 漢字.) But spoken Japanese can be a bit hard to catch for me even now. Was that syllable part of that word or the next? I still have yet to get the flow of spoken Japanese. ;{

Chinese (Mandarin...Traditional)
I have a speech impediment with tempo. In Chinese every syllable get's one count so it rid me of my hard time speaking. (yay!) Also, Chinese hanzi usually have one reading and are much easeir than Japanese 漢字. (For me) Grammar is pretty laid back in Chinese and that is a plus and a minus. My only real difficulty with Chinese is that sometimes I read a sentence without a word I don't know and I don't get it. It's pretty deep in cultural expressions. Overall it's my favorite and easiest language.

Korean's writing system, 한굴, is amazing. It's easy and I got it in one hour when my Korean friends showed me in Japanese class. Yes I have made mistakes like writing s**t instead of dog but hey that's how we learn. Now Korean grammar is SO much like Japanese grammar that it's not even an issue generally. Vocabulary sounds similar to Chinese/Japanese but is hard to say for me. Numbers are meh and the politeness levels are harder than Japanese. Actually to be honest, I'm not comfortable with conjugating verbs yet. There are a lot of irregularities. If it were not for the lack of good dictionaries and study material Korean would be easier than Japanese. (Because of the writing system and because the langauge is just a bit overal more foreign language friendly.)

I plan on starting ASL next Semptember... I wonder how difficult that will be?

Discuss your difficulties.

Well I've only had the chance to learn three languages. I know native level English.

Turkish is my second language. My mom is a native. I'm pretty fluent and everything I know is pretty intermediate. The reason it's difficult is I'm American, the only way I learned is from speaking and listening from my parents and watching really old movies. Never studied it at all. When I went to Turkey for the first time in 2008, I picked up a couple books and I never noticed how many suffixes the language has(it's crazy, I think I saw like 40+). I plan on learning this to advanced someday. I believe if I learn enough vocab I could be native level.

Japanese of course is my third language, I'm still working on it. Kana was really easy to do and it was really fun when I was really getting into the Japanese language 5 years ago. So far I've noticed the only problems I'm having are all the kanji readings, production, and a few of the things you've mentioned above. Another difficulty is that the classes for Japanese are crap, I've yet to attend a class where the teacher actually teaches us anything(I've been to 4 classes). But the more time I spend with it the easier it is to understand.

And Russian finally. I love the way this language looks and how beautiful it looks. I can write it really well(you read it in print and write it in cursive), but the vocab and pronunciation can be really hard to grasp. I took a Russian 1 class and it was a very good class(I noticed my handwriting in English really benefited from this class strangely). Wish some of the Japanese classes I took were that good.

I can tell you from experience that japanese isn't all that bad. Expect the reading portion. For japanese names there's stlll a lot of names I can't read in japanese(expect for the common ones). There are a lot of rare name/readings out there, pretty impossible to learn them all, but the way to go is to learn them from context.

There are a lot of readings, but outside the common one they provide the readings for it.
The speaking part of japanese isn't as hard as the written portion of the language. But it becomes easier as you learn the written portion well. The spoken portion becomes easier to understand and follow. I can tell you from experience that the more I gained better reading/understanding japanese in it's writing system. Listening to japanese in it's spoken form become easy after a while. The grammar portion isn't hard, but just takes time to get used too.
I don't have any experience with mandarin or Korean.(Probably learn mandarin next).

As some wise guy said the only difficult language is the one you don't want to learn.

The only problem for me is gathering appropriate materials - I mean audiobooks (novels) with matching e-texts and a good translation. Sometimes a real curse!
Would you guess that it is much easier to find them for Estonian, Lithuanian or Belorussian (no problem, in fact), and practically impossible for Korean and Japanese - a little bit easier for Mandarin.
The Wild East, damn it!
If it wasn't for Jehovah's Witnesses stuff I wouldn't be able to learn anything.

I HATE handbooks, SRS etc.
All I need is a good reference grammar, a pronunciation course and a mouse-over pop-up dictionary.

Edit:
It took me only one day to find everything I need for Lithuanian!!!! Good (recorded by professional readers) audiobooks! Camus, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Saint-Exupery!

And would you believe it - HARUKI MURAKAMI! Really depressing! The end of the world is at hand - repent, Japanese publishers!

"I've yet to attend a class where the teacher actually teaches us anything"
Me neither. That's one of the reasons I aspire to become a teacher.

"As some wise guy said the only difficult language is the one you don't want to learn."

Yep, it's true. As long as it's fun you don't care if it takes a long time to learn.

..."practically impossible for Korean"

So true, there is almost nothing compared to Japanese and that even pales to Western languages.

I'm thinking of getting the Lord of the Rings in each of the languages I am studying. I'm such a geek. XD

buonaparte Wrote:And would you believe it - HARUKI MURAKAMI! Really depressing! The end of the world is at hand - repent, Japanese publishers!

Yeah, there is not a big trade in e-texts in Japan yet, largely due to resistance from major publishers. However, you can get novels and audiobooks from Share. I have a couple of Murakami novels (txt files) if you want them.

Blahah,
of course I want them. I have some, too.
What about audiobooks?

There are plenty of dorama CDs, but they are just damn silly. What I need is Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kanzaburo, Murakami Haruki, or even Yoshimoto Banana.

I only have some older writers: Natsume Soseki, Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, Dazai Osamu, etc.
They are very good, but it is not enough.

I don't count Harry Potter or JWitnesses stuff - but you have make do with what you have.
That's life - I think I am going to cry bitterly....
F U C K them all!

I am finding it hard to decide which of the languages I have studied before Japanese (English, Kazakh and German; Russian is my native) was the most difficult. On the one hand English, despite having a relatively simple grammar, had its share of difficulties, like irregular verbs, phrasal verbs and spelling. On the other hand I had a very good immersion environment - starting from fifth grade I learned English in a group where we were not allowed to speak Russian in class and where everyone except me had lived in the US for a year or two. After that I studied at a summer language school every year, spent the last two years of high school in England and the first year of college in the US. Because of this I cannot even properly recall the days when the aforementioned difficulties were a major headache.

Even though I grew up in Kazakhstan my Kazakh is not that great, due in no small part to the lack of an immersion environment. I lived in Almaty, the country's largest city, where pretty much everyone speaks Russian, and I studied at a school where all the classes were in Russian. There were obligatory Kazakh classes, but the quality was pretty poor - they mostly consisted of rote memorization and translation, and the approach to grammar was rather Russo-centric, which isn't very helpful in learning a language that is not even Indo-European. The main difficulty with the language itself seems to be phonetics - there are nine sounds that do not exist in Russian and the sound harmony rules are a bit more complex than in some of the other Turkic languages. But, since I started studying the language at an early age, I learned to pronounce those sounds pretty quickly, and the sound harmony rules are not really that counter-intuitive once you get a feel for the language.

After having studied Russian and English, German did not seem hard at all at first. The only things I am still struggling with are things to to with gender, especially the gender-dependent adjective endings. The noun genders in German are a lot more counter-intuitive than they are in Russian, where the gender is nearly always reflected in the noun's ending, and Russian also does not have articles. Hence it is very difficult to determine which adjective ending to use with which noun when you have to take into account the noun's gender, number and article (or lack thereof). The really annoying thing about this is that it really doesn't affect your comprehensibility that much - people will understand you perfectly well if you use the wrong adjective ending, but it will still make you sound like a dumb foreigner.

I have only been studying Japanese for a few months so far, so I am probably not yet in a good position to compare its difficulty to other languages, but so far its grammar does not seem to be much more difficult. The lack of noun declensions is a huge relief and the verb conjugations are not that different from Kazakh (although it would be easier if my knowledge of Kazakh conjugations wasn't so incomplete). The thing that I find the hardest to wrap my head around is the syntax. Perhaps it is just my relative lack of exposure, but right now the borders between adjectives, verbs and sometimes even nouns in Japanese seem blurred to me.

buonaparte see the other thread for another Murakami ebook, but apart from that one I only have the two you already posted. Murakami has never been recorded to audiobook in Japanese, as until recently people didn't really pay for audiobooks in Japan. However, iTunes and Febe are bringing audiobooks into the mainstream in Japan so we will soon see the modern authors being made available too.

In general, if you want audiobooks and text, you should start by finding the audiobook you want on iTunes/Febe, then get it for free somewhere else, then see if you can find an ebook to accompany it. Trying to find audio for texts always ends in disappointment.

I've been learning Japanese for a little over 2 years, have reached conversational fluency (not native level), can read novels with a dictionary and generally enjoy 90% comprehension when watching dorama.

I find Japanese quite easy to study but very hard to master. On the one hand we have all these fantastic tools and resources which make it more convenient to learn than almost any other language IMO. On the other hand, it's just 100% different to English and so mastering it is something I've not really seen too many people do.

I've been learning French for about a month! I find French harder to study than Japanese due to lack of native materials (altho they are out there) and I have to say I really hate the verb conjugation system in French. Japanese is much, much simpler. I find it extremely redundant that you have to change your conjugation depending on who the verb applies too!!! The whole gender thing is generally just a pain in the ass though I feel as if I have a decent method of working around that. I'd say, overall for an English speaker, French is probably easier to master. Though, the pronounciation and spelling are fairly awesome, Japanese is leagues easier. I also find that there isn't so many handy tools for French like there are for Japanese! But then again I already know a few thousand French vocab due to it being a part of English!

It's kinda weird for me at the moment because when I listen to/watch something in French I feel like i'll never be able to understand it like I do Japanese. I think that's because I don't really remember the time when I didn't understand Japanese. I guess I'll just have to keep at it until it all becomes clear.

buonaparte Wrote:Blahah,
of course I want them. I have some, too.
What about audiobooks?
l!

Probably you have already seen it, but since I think no one mentioned it yet: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=752
(or http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Audiobooks)

(But let's not derail this thread further, since the original topic is very interesting )

kame3 Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:Blahah,
of course I want them. I have some, too.
What about audiobooks?
l!

Probably you have already seen it, but since I think no one mentioned it yet: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=752
(or http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/Audiobooks)

(But let's not derail this thread further, since the original topic is very interesting )

sheetz Wrote:The creation of this list of free audio downloads was inspired by this discussion http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=6366&PN=2 at the How To Learn Any Language Forum and copied directly from my learning log over there.

Yea, the world is small...