A MySpace friend who's studying English in Tokyo, made a comment that if she were born in an English speaking country she wouldn't bother learning Japanese because it's too difficult.

I agree that Kanji is very difficult, especially when I read about the Kanji kentei. But I think that the supposed functional number of 1945 kanji isn't that great a number. And I've been encouraged by what I've read about how regular Japanese is, with something like only two irregular verbs. So, to me it sounds like the kanji is the biggest hurdle and then things become pretty logical.

On the other hand English doesn't have the kanji problem, but having an alphabet doesn't exactly make it a phonetic system. I think you can imagine a way of doubling or tripling the number of vowels in English (or at least the sounds that they make). English is also full of irregular verbs which sounds like a real headache to learn as a second language.

But what she made me think about was how on the Internet I encounter tons of people from countries where English isn't the official language. A lot of the sites I'm a member of have forums, and on the forums up to 50% of the members are in such countries, yet we all communicate in English.

I would say I haven't really learned either language. I'm in the camp that thinks our brains are hardwired for language, so for me learning English wasn't an active pursuit, it just happened.

Just throwing some thoughts out there, would love to hear your opinions.

The three areas in which Japanese is said to be very difficult are 1) kanji; 2) the greater than usual number of homonyms in the language; and 3) the several different levels of politeness that a fluent speaker must master.

Of these three, I think the first is not especially difficult: it is simply tedious and time consuming to master. Tedious, that is, if you don't happen to love kanji.

I can't say the second problem is very daunting, either. We understand a lot about a word from the context in which it appears. I recognize "stalk" as a noun rather than a verb because it is used as a noun. "Time" and "thyme," which are both nouns, are not difficult to tell apart in speech, again because of context. I don't sweat homonyms.

The only difficulty I concede to Japanese is with levels of politeness. This problem is more cultural than linguistic: when to use which level, and what terms are appropriate to which level, are the real questions. I think the only way to learn this aspect of the language is by living in Japan and interacting with many levels of society in as many different situations as possible. For my part, I have never learned (or felt the need for) any level not taught in beginner and low-intermediate text books. I just have never found myself in situations that call for them. If I were to go into diplomacy or meet the Emperor, I'd be in a mess.

On the other hand, English is an overwhelming mass of exceptions--spelling exceptions, grammar exceptions, idioms, etc.--that arise from the mashing together of every western language that has existed for the past 2000 years, particularly French, Latin, and English (Old and Middle). Examples: i before e EXCEPT after c; English is uninflected EXCEPT for the personal pronouns he, his, him, she, hers, her etc.; the perfect passive participle is formed in different ways depending on language of origin and sometimes even on which dialect of English won out. The confluence of tongues also accounts for the huge number of synonyms in English, and its much larger vocabulary overall. Then there are those accursed articles.

I could go on. Japanese, on the other hand, lacks these challenges. Achieving a reasonable level of fluency in Japanese is the work of a year, two or three if one is not in-country. This estimate is doubly true if one has gone to the trouble of learning the kanji first.

My impression of the Japanese people is that they don't know what is difficult about their language. When I taught English I frequently heard the "Japanese is very hard" idea but, when I probed, couldn't get anyone to tell me why they thought so. Many of them were unable to distinguish between the language, which is simple and highly regular, and the writing system, which is a great, big, beautiful catastrophe.

It all depends on who's learning and what their L1 is.

English has tons of exceptions but they are not so big barriers, and to someone who speaks another European language they have lots of advantages learning English, like not completely different word order, similar words, same alphabet, little inflection. Then one can focus on starting to communicate and learn the myriad idioms, spellings, etc.

For example I learned English while living in England and didn't think it was hard, whereas with Japanese I frequenly run into new grammatical structures that I find very difficult to get my head around quickly, and being in Japan didn't help all that much.

Very different word ordering, hard writing system, mostly alien sounding words, verb & adjective conjugations, politeness and vagueness, these make Japanese hard I think.

Ofcourse, its possible to learn a lot within a few years.

I guess every language has its pitfalls, and I'm just ever so slowly trying to feel my ground into Japanese.

English only seems to be easy when one looks at polite forms. Since I started to learn English years and years ago, I've come to belive that there are a damn many ways of polite forms in English. It's just not done with grammatical forms but rather the words that are choosen. But that's again something you have to learn from context.
I haven't formed a full conclusion about the Japanese grammar yet, only that it's very different to what I'm used to, and thus the concept is difficult for me. All those partikles are irritating, I'd rather stick with simple and honest declination and conjugation and tempus and such...

Something I've heard about (but forgot where) is this : In most european languages you are quite fluent when you have your first 3000 vocabulary down. In Japanese you need much much more, about 10000. I'm not talking about asking for the direction to some place or ordering a coffee, but normal everyday conversations. Is this true?

If this is true, then I'd vote for Japanese as more difficult than English, at least on the basis of the amount of time that needs to be invested.

Biene, here is an interesting article about word frequency and language acquisition. It claims 2000 words for 80% comprehension in English, and talks about the difficulty in learning more after that.

http://www.wordhacker.com/en/article/use...nwords.htm

I think studying kanji in frequency order is unhelpful, but words frequency lists certainly are. My dictionary trips have drastically decreased since hitting the 2Kyuu vocab lists hard.

Also, English is easier. Just kidding, I don't know-- but I do think English is more flexible, not in terms of utility or diffusion, but in terms of being a language that holds up to more damage and variation while maintaining communicative sense. Its varied versions, in other words. I'm thinking of Manglish (Malaysia), Singlish (Singapore), African english, the delightful pidgin versions you'll find here & there-- the language seems to endure lost grammar, simplified vocabulary, and varied intonations quite well, perhaps because it's a mutt language itself. So I think you can get by with less of the language in English, meaning it's easier than Japanese, which needs more work to achieve basic functionality.

Shooting from the hip here, but I don't think Japanese would endure a similar mutation. Too many of its rules are not grammatical, but culture-specific, like politeness registers, and they would be the first to go had Japan ever succeeded in becoming a colonial (political or economic) superpower. (I suppose we Americans can be blamed for stripping English of its politeness.) Even kanji I think rely on a certain kind of education system to survive. Kanji and politeness are necessary parts of the language, but perhaps not integral-- certainly, there have been frequent calls from within Japan to get rid of kanji. You can get by without them, you'll just be an illiterate jerk.

A study of the Thai or Balinese tourist industries would shed light on this-- everyone speaks a little English, but a lot of them speak a little Japanese, too. There's economic incentive for both, but which was harder to learn enough of that you could make money with the language? Which can you get by with less of?

***
(off-topic)
Anyone know where I can find lists for the most common French & Spanish words?

Japanese is much harder than English.

Here's a little comparison:

-English has a pretty easy grammar for an Indo-European language.
-The latin alphabet has only 26 letters.
-Modern functional English uses a restricted vocabulary. Sure, if you start delving into literature, you'll find that the English lexicon is fairly rich but a lot of uneducated native speakers would not even understand many of these words. Especially if we're talking about James Joyce or Shakespeare.
-The hardest thing in English is the irregular spelling. How do you pronounce Portsmouth or Worcestershire?

by comparison in Japanese:
- The grammar is simple, but its proper use can be tricky. I never understood how ために could me "for the sake of" and "because of". There's also an abundance of specific grammar structures.
- Kanjis and Kanas are obviously a bit more plentiful than the letters of our own alphabet. Heisig makes it easier, but that doesn't mean that kanjis aren't fiendish.
- Japanese has a big vocabulary.
- Spelling in kana is easy. Spelling in kanji is not so easy. Reading a name is hard and writing it is impossible as many kanjis can be used.

So overall, Japanese is harder in pretty much every category.

Here's a Japan Times article as a bonus: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/member/me...0403x2.htm

billyclyde Wrote:(I suppose we Americans can be blamed for stripping English of its politeness.)

Bollocks. If England is a nation full of polite, classy people, then Japan is a nation full of people wearing kimono.


The main difficulty in learning Japanese must be the way they use kanji. With so many characters having multiple readings, learning to read Japanese is a never-ending task. Even for Chinese, with three times as many characters in common use, the general concensus is that it's easier to learn to read than Japanese.

One other things that makes English easier is the versatility of certain words. Words like get, have, see, go, make, be etc... can get you a long way. It seems that Japanese has a lot more verbs in everyday use.

One of our Japanese friends worked in France for a few years and now in US. She speaks pretty good English. When I asked if she learned French in her stay in France she said yes, a little, but French is 10 times harder than English.

All a middle-aged Japanese woman needs to keep up her end of a conversation with a Japanese friend is nanka, maa, soo, ne, na and uuuuu(a nasal sound between un and um formed in with the back of the tongue and the palate ) and the soft sound made by drawing air in slightly through the teeth.

A little joke, JimmySeal. Of course, English doesn't have a grammatical register for politeness other than "low" speech, which is actually dialect. And I have found the English to have more awareness of how to be impolite in their language than Americans, thanks to a greater sense of irony, and perhaps too because of a more deeply ingrained sense of socioeconomic class. Broad generalizations, though.

To bolster the "english is harder" argument, as a mutt language, it has exceptions to virtually every rule of grammar and spelling. Mouse, mice; house, hice. Totally confounding for classroom learners as they get to higher levels.

How many other languages have spelling bees?

billyclyde Wrote:How many other languages have spelling bees?

I wonder this too. I think Irish (Gaeilge) would be a good candidate.

One thing that makes English easier is that most English speakers are non-natives. It's only natural for non-natives to be tolerant of mistakes made by other non-natives, and most native speakers have a lot of experience speaking with non-natives. Spelling is a nightmare, but you can usually figure out what a misspelled word is supposed to be, and spell checkers help too.

Thanks for the replies, very interesting and funny! The first two sentences in that Japan Times article hits right at a home with what PParsi said.

In the end, it doesn't really matter which is harder to learn. But if Japanese were actually the hardest language to learn, I'd get a kick out of being able to master it on any level. I kind of had it in my head that English was the more difficult of the two, and so, if all these hundreds of millions can pick it up then surely that's a great motivator as to why I should be able to pick up the easier Japanese. But oh well, either way it seems like they're both...accessible with difficulties along the way. Maybe to the point of not even needing to be compared. I guess I just like comparing languages.

Going off topic, but I think it comes from a show I saw a long time ago. Where the host was proposing the argument: if a language is unable to express a certain concept, can the speakers of that language ever even have the thought of the concept? He traveled the world meeting visiting various cultures and I think he more or less proved that they couldn't, that your language did have direct impact on the thoughts you were capable of having. I might be wrong there, it was a long time ago and I don't really agree, I've had some thoughts that I think aren't possible to put in words. But anyway, the way he went about comparing languages of the world and how they shaped people's thinking was really interesting to me.

in japanese there is a higher bar for learning in context, so the self-reinforcing part is much lower then for english.

i mostly learned english from watching movies and browsing the web after i learned a basic foundation at school.
i would say that in about 4 years without putting in an effort i could understand english prety wel.
part of this is becouse i am dutch so much words are simular and immersion is easier sinc ei see much english words in every day life.

japanese on the other hand does not have this natural immersion, only what i force myself to have in mine own house.

i would say this is the biggest difference, im sure that if i lived in japan, i would pick up japanese as easy as i did with english.

Lots of valid points were made here, but nothing can compare with this one: English is much easier due to exposure. Almost everyone living in any city is bombarded with english every day. The previous poster implied this, and I agree.

ivoSF Wrote:i would say this is the biggest difference, im sure that if i lived in japan, i would pick up japanese as easy as i did with english.

Don't mean to offend but I disagree. I'm always astounded by how almost all Dutch people master English but I know some Dutch people in Japan and they found Japanese just as difficult as I did.

As someone mentioned, it's all about what your first language is I think. English and Dutch are very similar and in some ways I believe that Dutch is a "superset" of English since it contains all of the sounds that English does and more. (Apart from the "th" sound perhaps)

Pronunciation has got to be one of the main factors that makes English much more difficult for Japanese learners. I can't believe no one's mentioned this yet. Japanese has a pathetic amount of sounds - no more than 60?, only 5 vowel sounds. It's no wonder that Japanese people can't hear let alone pronounce many of the differences. Picking up a language must be a lot easier if you're already familiar with all of the sounds.

The other two things that I find very difficult about Japanese are particles and the grammar. I think the grammar can get very involved and with subjects often being totally emitted, it's pretty hard.

Really? I'll take that any day over the 'conjugation based on gender of the object' found in languages like German.
I think once you break down the first barriers of Japanese grammar, it gets a lot easier.
Tae Kim's site was good for making me realize a few things about the grammar that while I knew, I didn't fully grasp until it was put like it was there.

german, dutch and english are related, or celtish languages, i believe they originate from somewhere in germany.

i would find japanese easier then french even i that is an europian language

ruisu Wrote:if a language is unable to express a certain concept, can the speakers of that language ever even have the thought of the concept?

You may be talking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Personally, I don't think it holds much weight, but I'm an armchair linguist.

I'm a native French speaker. Teaching myself English required no particular efforts. I just looked up lots of words in the dictionary. I own only one book on English grammar, it's more of a collection of a few tricky points that could be confusing and I probably used it only a few times. The rest came naturally.

Japanese is much harder. Even putting aside the problem of the kanji, it's hard to make sense of a text. Looking up all the words in a dictionary is not enough. First, there can be a lot of hiragana between words that are hard to make sense of, especially with all the possible colloquial contractions and alterations. I call that the "hiragana soup". So you have to know the grammar well before you can hope to understand it. I have many books on the subject and I study a lot. But still, the sentences will often be too alien to make any sense. In English and French, we may use different words but we still say most things in roughly the same way. In Japanese, it's a different way to think.

Now when you leave the comfort of written communication, things become more balanced. English pronunciation is hard. When I first started watching TV series in English, I could already read any novel in English and in fact I was addicted to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. And yet I had trouble understanding the simplest sentence. I could have understood perfectly if I had been able to hear what they were saying though. Even now after 10 years of watching TV series almost every day there is still the occasional "what did he say?" moment.

Japanese is easy in that area, I can watch a dorama or anime and easily pick up unknown words and expressions to look up in the dictionary. It would have been impossible for me to do that with an equivalent level of English.

speaking of al those contractions, is there a book that show al the verb endings?)i call it that but im not sure if that is accurate) for example im reading a child book now in pure hiragana, but i cant find almost every word i lookup in the dictionary, this is very odd if you talk about words a 5-8 year should know.

for example "shibakari" , i got the feeling bakari is a verb ending and shi is the word talked about?

im not so much for the official grammer books

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar
A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar

Go buy them right now, I'll wait.

ivoSF: I think pure hiragana texts are a lot more difficult to understand than the kanji+furigana combination.

Quote:revenantkioku wrote:
Really? I'll take that any day over the 'conjugation based on gender of the object' found in languages like German.

Thats actually one thing that still puzzles me in English and even more in Japanese. The reduction of information that could be put into a sentence.
I'm more or less able voice an idea in English, but I think it could be more specifically expressed in German. Not just because German is my first language, but because of the conjugations and declinations that can help to specify things.
French for example is more difficult than English for me, since they have more Tempi than German and often differ in the genders for the nouns (e.g. moon has in French the female gender and in German the male gender). So I have to understand the mental-concept behind the new Tempi and have to stop thinking in German-genders when learning French vocabulary.
With the Japanese culture being so fixed on Genders (men do this and women do that) I'm quite surprised that they never invented genders for the objects. I might be wrong here, but as I understand they have no equivalent to "der, die, das".

It would be interesting to know what a person from e.g. China would think of English vs. Japanese.

*****
Off topic

I'd be interested in frequency lists for French words, too.

jarvik i downloaded that book to see if it was something, but realy its overly complicated, what i hate about grammar books is that i`m spending more times on figuring out what adj verb, con and such english grammar terms mean then on simply finding the answer i want!

i want a way to find out the root word not al the contractions.
a sort of rule of thumb.


for example:

if i read a word i do not know "eating" i simply want to know how to look up " eat" in the dictionary, i do not need a long story how it is converted into al the variants such as, we were eating, i ate, you are eating and they are eating and we are going to eat tomorrow.

sorry if i am nagging....

and codexus, i have a lot of manga with kanji(and furigana) but i start using that as soon as i get mine Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

ps i found a book that seems rather easy in its explanations, barrons japanese grammar, in a few days i should know if its as good as it seems