Looking on maps it’s in a rural area but not that rural. The house is situated on the outskirts of a town, basically
Local middle schools website says they had 185 students in 2020, that’s pretty good for rural Japan
About a 30m walk from the town/school. Train station there, bunch of cafes, konbini.
It’s not going to be living in Tokyo obviously but there are rural areas in Japan that are far worse, where the school is 7 kids that all share a classroom even though they’re mixed grade 2-9 because the district has 1 teacher
Bigger reason for me: that house is decrepit and Japan experiences more natural disasters than pretty much any other country. Like I’m not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
The language isn’t that hard though. プラス、それからもっと漫画を読めるよ。
Gonna go ahead and press X to doubt on that. Japanese is consistently ranked among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, alongside Mandarin and Arabic.
If I can learn it anyone can. I am straight up stupid. Full disclosure though: while I can write it pretty well (with a phone or pc, no fucking way I can do it by hand) my speech is mixed. When I talk to Japanese people they say “wow! Your Japanese is so good!” Which means it’s not very good hahah
Mandarin is way harder because it’s alllll kanji and the speaking in tones stuff is so much more nuanced
I’m pretty sure it’s ranked hard because you have to learn an alternative alphabet. But this is not really that tough. You can learn hiragana fairly quickly. Katakana is not nearly as necessary as you might think. Then learning kanji does admittedly take forever but often you’ll see things are either written in hiragana, only use the most basic of kanji, or if they use fancy kanji they have the hiragana next to it anyway (like a phonetic spelling)
The grammar is a little challenging:
Subject verb object - I sushi eat instead of I eat sushi
The subject gets dropped and implied; the language is heavily contextual. I eat it - 食べます (tabemasu) - i (implied) eat it (implied). This is why llm and machine language translation stinks at Japanese, because it can’t really know context from a single line (though it’s improving, chatgpt got that right though deepl said “I’ll eat”, which isn’t wrong, strictly and did give both I’ll eat it and I’ll have some as alternatives)
Then there’s particles like は wa and が ga which mark the subject and topic, respectively. English doesn’t really have an equivalent.
But this isn’t harder as much as it’s nuance imo. The writing system and alphabet is harder, objectively. There’s 46 hiragana and over 100 if you include the additional forms (which is misleading a bit) then basically the same number of katakana, then about 2,000 kanji in use. That’s a lot to learn but it’s basically an extension of learning vocab
Now should you learn Japanese? That’s a tough one. Stagnant economy, falling birth rate year after year, etc. but your goals are your own and don’t have to be practical
Kanji have extremely inconsistent pronunciation. It is one of the worst things about learning the language. It’s not just 2000, it’s 2000, most with multiple readings, many with exceptional readings.
Yeah, even some simple ones you learn early on like 日 will have 5+ readings. Daily Kanji practice is what really made it hard for me to keep learning and why i gave up after only a few months.
It’s embarrassing to say how many years relative to how poor my skills are haha. Like if I had genuinely kept my practice up this whole time I would be a near native speaker
Started in high school, like 2001. Lived in a small town so was self teaching via instruction online and help from the somethingawful adtrw dc++ hub and what eventually became 4chan
Took a some classes in college but didn’t minor or anything. Did get a chance to go to Japan at the end of college (around 2007ish) though. My Japanese was pathetically bad, despite having spent 6 years at this point. I had a somewhat decent vocabulary but I had a mix of: didn’t practice grammar enough so I couldn’t speak with any kind of confidence, didn’t practice speaking enough so when I did actually speak I was often unintelligible, and I was a huge weeb so I kept saying cringe shit
That was a pretty disheartening experience (still loved Japan though) so then I basically didn’t practice for a few years. At this point I was starting my career and then went to grad school so it fell by the wayside
Then I started to pick it back up in like 2016 but mainly to read manga. I was done grad school by then so I finally had some time again and started to brush up again, but passively
Then covid happened and I reconnected with some people from Japan I knew. They wanted to work on English, I wanted to work on Japanese, so we’ve been doing that. Now I’m realizing that was 5 years ago and my speech still sucks
It’s persistence too. The language exchange is great to hear, that’s huge.
I’m much better now from daily chats with my Japanese friends. That’s really what was missing from the many, many, many years I spent before imo. I would study flash cards and eventually Anki decks once that was a thing, I would have practice conversations here and there with other weebs or in class during the brief period I had that. But for the most part I just read manga, which isn’t really all that challenging (usually), and I would listen to anime while reading subtitles. It was so passive
But now it’s the study daily instead of when I feel like it. It’s chatting every night with my friends and having them be like oh no, it’s actually もう一つの, not もう一つ. Or it’s “so-reh” or whatever I’m saying wrong. The constant feedback is essential
Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2. It’s the written form (3 separate forms) that’s difficult, bringing it to a level 4. Speaking is quite easy compared to other languages.
Thanks for the reply. I’m unsure why the honorifics get brought up in discussion of difficulty. Many non English languages have at minimum 2 of forms as well as 2 genders (some have more). I understand japanese has a lot of honorific titles and a few forms, but it’s not that difficult, for 90-95% of your interactions you can just use two really (and some of the titles exist in english as well, Mr, Mrs., Ms., Miss, Master, Dr., Lord, add an Esq. at the end for some, etc.). For me personally, I would put this in the same category as not understanding how to properly use romance language diminutives (and in many language courses these aren’t really taught until later, as far as I’m aware).
The numbers are fine? I’ve never heard this critique. I might be misunderstanding the point on this one. Other languages have some form of number conjugation as well so my apologies for not getting this
Grammar as compared to what language? Are we comparing Japanese to English only? I said it’s a level 2 not a level 1, but romance language grammar can be somewhat confusing for English speakers as well.
I was young when I learned conversational Japanese and found it surprisingly straightforward as an English native speaker. Additionally, there are no tones (unlike for example Chinese), and all the spoken sounds exist in English, so it’s not too hard for an English speaker to correctly pronounce words with practice (so I completely agree with you here).
Now I’m studying German, which is supposed to be much easier by comparison, and there are 3 word genders and literally dozens of direct and indirect pronouns. It’s extremely difficult to comprehend and recall mid conversation (or even at all). Then, depending on a lot of factors, the grammar also changes. That, plus numbers are reversed (9 and 20 as opposed to 29, and don’t get me started on French numbers). Also, there are multiple sounds that don’t even exist in english.
Still, I will reiterate, I’m suggesting Japanese is more of a level 2 language, but I assure you the majority of difficulty comes from the written form.
Yes, that’s where I’m coming from. But I imagine it’s similar for other Germanic and romance languages, since they’re similarly divorced from E. Asian languages.
If you’re coming from Korean, it’ll be a level 1 since the grammar structure is nearly identical. But if you’re coming from English, I’d wager 3-4 is fair if you don’t need to learn to read, mostly due to lack of new sounds to master, putting it just lower than Korean, which is generally understood to be a 4, and it has an easy to learn writing system (2 weeks and anyone could get it).
German… 3 word genders
I took German as a kid and this really wasn’t an issue IMO, the harder part was mastering tenses and getting the umlauts right (I still struggle with both).
And the numbers are odd, I agree, but at least it’s not insanity like in French.
’m suggesting Japanese is more of a level 2 language, but I assure you the majority of difficulty comes from the written form.
And I’m saying it’s a 3-4, assuming you don’t need to learn more than hiragana and katakana. Korean is 5, despite having an easier writing system, mostly due to new sounds. If you need to read/write, it’s harder than Korean.
I’ve learned a fair amount of Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Spanish, and German, and I’d put spoken Japanese around Tagalog levels (most put this at 4), but I think Tagalog may be easier: similar grammar (both mark the subject and direct object), no weird counting word conjugations or honorifics, one new sound (ng), and difficulty is in remembering which conjugations apply to which verbs (mag- vs -um, etc). On a scale for native English speakers (e.g. the US Dept. of State scale):
Spanish
German
maybe Malay? (considered learning since its the same family as Tagalog and my company does business there)
Tagalog, spoken Japanese
Korean, written Japanese
I could maybe drop spoken Japanese to a 3 if you watch a lot of subbed anime, which helps things feel more familiar. I was never really into anime, watching maybe 4-5 series over 10-ish years, so I didn’t develop an ear for it.
Sorry, what i meant was comparing english to japanese directly. It was poor wording on my part. What i meant to say was for a non language learner to just start learning Japanese will seem very difficult, but if you compare learning japanese with learning, say, french, it may not seem as bad if you remove the writing systems and use only romanji.
I am an english native speaker from a Hispanic family, and i find Spanish to be quite difficult. I learned conversational japanese (and hiragana and katakana) while i was young. Not particularly advanced, mind you, but conversational and low level. I found, personally, japanese to be much easier to pick up than Spanish. I wasn’t particularly into watching anime, either. I understand this portion is anecdotal, but that was my experience.
Eventually, i learned italian (to approximately b-1) level, and both Spanish and German to a-2 so far (i may be over estimating my Spanish, to be honest). Japanese is nowhere near as difficult as learning German. German grammar is extremely tricky, and I’ve found that many Germans don’t really enjoy speaking it because of the difficulty (at least this is what they tell me). This is also my personal experience, which impacts how i feel about the languages but doesn’t outright define their difficulty.
My point with the three genders was in memorizing all the articles that don’t exist in English or Japanese. There’s no grammatical gender. I’m glad it was easy for you to pick up, but that is more difficult for English speakers than people want to admit, especially when there is no rule for how the genders are assigned. In italian and Spanish there are some rules, but in German, I need to literally memorize every German word, with article, and then memorize how to conjugate nominative, accusative, dative … This simply doesn’t exist in Japanese.
Japanese is level 4 but only with the written form included, and it’s a very simple explanation: it’s considered a level 4 when the new 3 written forms are included. If you remove those written forms, it’s only a level 2 language, which is still considerably difficult to be fair.
To address a few of your points, there are no new sounds to master in Japanese that don’t already exist in English, so I’m not sure what you mean there and i would love for you to explain it to me.
Also, for the written forms, hiragana and katakana are actually somewhat easy to learn, so I’m not sure why you bring those up and not kanji. You need to know more than 2,000 kanji to be considered literate. This is why Japanese is considered difficult, and not anything else. You can’t even get n5 certified without knowing some kanji.
Suggesting one needs to have already absorbed japanese culture to consider it a level 3 is… an inaccurate statement. I think that’s missing the mark on what the difficulty rankings are trying to assess. Any language will be easier if you absorb its content, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the difficulty of it.
it may not seem as bad if you remove the writing systems and use only romanji
Sure. And I still think it’s a 3 if not 4 out of 5 on the difficulty scale for your typical westerner who speaks a germanic or romance language natively. Pronunciation is easy, so you could memorize sentences and whatnot and fumble through a vacation somewhat well, but actually being conversational and sounding more-or-less like a native (grammatically speaking) is an entirely different beast.
Grammar is simple on the surface: subject + “wa” + direct object + “oh” + verb conjugation. However, the subject and direct object can be dropped, prepositions go after the noun, and there are a lot of subtle differences in how ideas are communicated (I’m not strong in Japanese, but in Korean, your farewell greeting depends on who is leaving). So not only is everything flipped around from how a westerner expects things, but there are also a ton of small differences in how ideas are conveyed that make it a lot harder to become fluent vs another western language where structure and ideas tend to be a lot more similar. And that’s not even getting into familiar roots.
i find Spanish to be quite difficult
Really? It’s usually one of the easiest languages for a native English speaker to learn because it doesn’t have any new sounds and there are a ton of shared roots (saying English words in a “spanish” way is surprisingly likely to yield a valid word: e.g. respect -> respeto).
Oddly enough, I have a hispanic coworker who learned Japanese (super into manga and anime) and they claim it was pretty easy, and then complain about stupid English-isms. So yeah, idk, maybe language difficulty is super individual.
especially when there is no rule for how the genders are assigned
Maybe that’s why you struggled w/ spanish?
For me, memorizing nouns isn’t hard, and if I have to learn gender, I just memorize the noun w/ the gender (der tisch, die mauer, das auto). It’s been many years so I’ve forgotten a lot, but I just memorized vocab by saying the gendered article with it, then it kind of became second nature.
I do the same for Spanish (el eroplano, la escuela). Spanish is even easier because the endings usually give it away.
German is certainly difficult though, but less because of the genders (for me), and more because of the tricky grammar. There are a ton of rules, and while they’re consistent (i.e. no laundry list of exceptions like English), there’s still a ton of them.
If you remove those written forms, it’s only a level 2 language
Do you have a source for this?
Also, it’s almost impossible to ignore written forms. If you’re going to get around in Japan at all, you need to at least learn hiragana and katakana (not hard, maybe a month to learn?), and probably a few hundred kanji. But learning Japanese has been about as difficult as learning Korean for me, and I learned both after learning Tagalog, so I was already prepared for learning languages with very different structure (Tagalog does VSO with funky verb conjugations that change what subject and object mean, but it’s marked like Japanese and Korean are).
And Korean is simpler in many ways:
writing system is very blocky and uses spaces between words, which makes it easy to learn - no asterisk needed when determining the difficulty level
Korean numbers aren’t conjugated w/ the counting word (I can still understand if I’m not familiar with the counting word)
Same in some:
honorifics are similar; Korean technically has 7 levels, but it seems most people just use three (informal, polite, higher status) unless they need to talk to the President or something
two number systems (native and “Chinese”) and counting numbers
And worse in some:
relationship terms - they’re different depending on your gender and which side of the family it’s on (e.g. my MIL has a different term than my SO’s MIL [my mom])
pronunciation - several sounds just don’t exist in English, and that’s really hard to develop
morphology - Korean will combine sounds depending on what comes before (e.g. “un” marks the subject like “wa” does, but if the previous word ends in a vowel, it becomes “nun”; when two consonants are together, one is elided; etc)
I would say Korean is a little harder than Japanese w/o writing, but Japanese becomes harder when you include the writing system. That’s why I say it’s at best a 3 and probably a 4, and Korean is solidly a 4, if we’re doing a 1-4 scale.
hiragana and katakana are actually somewhat easy to learn, so I’m not sure why you bring those up and not kanji
Yeah, they’re not that hard, but I found hiragana pretty difficult because the swoop-y lines kind of blended together and made it hard for me to remember which is which. But once you are confident with both, you can look up pretty much anything you need in a dictionary, since most dictionaries and many things like menus will have hiragana or katakana renditions of any kanji you run across. Romanji pretty much only exists for foreigners until they’re comfortable w/ hiragana and katakana.
Kanji is a whole beast unto itself, hence why I didn’t bring it up. You can try to learn radicals, but that only gets you so far, and my experience is that it’s easier to just memorize the kanji than try to break them down. I hear radicals work a lot better in simplified Chinese, they just fall apart more w/ kanji.
And yeah, you need thousands of kanji to be “literate,” but only a few hundred to get by (i.e. “conversational” written Japanese). You’ll run into a bunch you don’t know, but you can probably figure it out from context.
Any language will be easier if you absorb its content, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the difficulty of it.
My point has nothing to do with culture and more to do with hearing common words frequently in context. If you can immerse yourself in the language, you get a feel for how things fit together, which can turn things like conjugation from rote memorization to being somewhat intuitive, because you’ve subconsciously already figured out some of the patterns.
If you watched a ton of anime in Japanese while reading in your native language, you’re already conditioning yourself to learn Japanese better because you’ve already started understanding patterns subconsciously.
That 30 minute walk is going to suck in Hanamaki’s winters. I assume they get it worse than the more central area that I know which has no shortage of snow.
I remember seeing an article on these houses. The biggest issue is this house was built before the 1980’s, so it was built before modern earthquake (?) proofing standards. This makes the house unlivable and technically condemned, and the Japanese government won’t let anyone (including owner) from being able to live there until it’s been modernized to the standards.
While this sounds easy, you need to get the supplies and crew out there (no easy road access), which is expensive, and possibly not a real option (again, remote area and trucks might not be able to reach it).
So you end up with a house no one can legally live in, in an area that can’t be reached to repair/build anything. It’s just a lose/lose situation and causes the value of the property to be very low.
The last major earthquake revision was in 1981 so anything with planning approval before that is going to cause a ton of headaches. There have been many minor revisions since then, but they usually don’t apply when considering loans, insurance, etc.
It’s not that bad
Looking on maps it’s in a rural area but not that rural. The house is situated on the outskirts of a town, basically
Local middle schools website says they had 185 students in 2020, that’s pretty good for rural Japan
About a 30m walk from the town/school. Train station there, bunch of cafes, konbini.
It’s not going to be living in Tokyo obviously but there are rural areas in Japan that are far worse, where the school is 7 kids that all share a classroom even though they’re mixed grade 2-9 because the district has 1 teacher
Bigger reason for me: that house is decrepit and Japan experiences more natural disasters than pretty much any other country. Like I’m not living in a crap shack when the next earthquake, typhoon, or tsunami inevitably hits
The language isn’t that hard though. プラス、それからもっと漫画を読めるよ。
Gonna go ahead and press X to doubt on that. Japanese is consistently ranked among the hardest languages to learn for English speakers, alongside Mandarin and Arabic.
If I can learn it anyone can. I am straight up stupid. Full disclosure though: while I can write it pretty well (with a phone or pc, no fucking way I can do it by hand) my speech is mixed. When I talk to Japanese people they say “wow! Your Japanese is so good!” Which means it’s not very good hahah
Mandarin is way harder because it’s alllll kanji and the speaking in tones stuff is so much more nuanced
I’m pretty sure it’s ranked hard because you have to learn an alternative alphabet. But this is not really that tough. You can learn hiragana fairly quickly. Katakana is not nearly as necessary as you might think. Then learning kanji does admittedly take forever but often you’ll see things are either written in hiragana, only use the most basic of kanji, or if they use fancy kanji they have the hiragana next to it anyway (like a phonetic spelling)
The grammar is a little challenging:
Subject verb object - I sushi eat instead of I eat sushi
The subject gets dropped and implied; the language is heavily contextual. I eat it - 食べます (tabemasu) - i (implied) eat it (implied). This is why llm and machine language translation stinks at Japanese, because it can’t really know context from a single line (though it’s improving, chatgpt got that right though deepl said “I’ll eat”, which isn’t wrong, strictly and did give both I’ll eat it and I’ll have some as alternatives)
Then there’s particles like は wa and が ga which mark the subject and topic, respectively. English doesn’t really have an equivalent.
But this isn’t harder as much as it’s nuance imo. The writing system and alphabet is harder, objectively. There’s 46 hiragana and over 100 if you include the additional forms (which is misleading a bit) then basically the same number of katakana, then about 2,000 kanji in use. That’s a lot to learn but it’s basically an extension of learning vocab
Now should you learn Japanese? That’s a tough one. Stagnant economy, falling birth rate year after year, etc. but your goals are your own and don’t have to be practical
Kanji have extremely inconsistent pronunciation. It is one of the worst things about learning the language. It’s not just 2000, it’s 2000, most with multiple readings, many with exceptional readings.
Yeah, even some simple ones you learn early on like 日 will have 5+ readings. Daily Kanji practice is what really made it hard for me to keep learning and why i gave up after only a few months.
I feel like I learn a new reading for 生 every couple years
especially the simple ones will have more readings
Fair point
So…how many years deep are you haha
It’s embarrassing to say how many years relative to how poor my skills are haha. Like if I had genuinely kept my practice up this whole time I would be a near native speaker
Started in high school, like 2001. Lived in a small town so was self teaching via instruction online and help from the somethingawful adtrw dc++ hub and what eventually became 4chan
Took a some classes in college but didn’t minor or anything. Did get a chance to go to Japan at the end of college (around 2007ish) though. My Japanese was pathetically bad, despite having spent 6 years at this point. I had a somewhat decent vocabulary but I had a mix of: didn’t practice grammar enough so I couldn’t speak with any kind of confidence, didn’t practice speaking enough so when I did actually speak I was often unintelligible, and I was a huge weeb so I kept saying cringe shit
That was a pretty disheartening experience (still loved Japan though) so then I basically didn’t practice for a few years. At this point I was starting my career and then went to grad school so it fell by the wayside
Then I started to pick it back up in like 2016 but mainly to read manga. I was done grad school by then so I finally had some time again and started to brush up again, but passively
Then covid happened and I reconnected with some people from Japan I knew. They wanted to work on English, I wanted to work on Japanese, so we’ve been doing that. Now I’m realizing that was 5 years ago and my speech still sucks
God I’m so depressed now
LOL, I’m so sorry, didn’t mean to be a debbie downer.
I’m much earlier on, maybe around a year and a half so far, just via self-study and language exchanges, so I feel your pain somewhat.
Like you said, it isn’t exactly…“hard”, per se, it just takes a lot of time and dedication.
It’s persistence too. The language exchange is great to hear, that’s huge.
I’m much better now from daily chats with my Japanese friends. That’s really what was missing from the many, many, many years I spent before imo. I would study flash cards and eventually Anki decks once that was a thing, I would have practice conversations here and there with other weebs or in class during the brief period I had that. But for the most part I just read manga, which isn’t really all that challenging (usually), and I would listen to anime while reading subtitles. It was so passive
But now it’s the study daily instead of when I feel like it. It’s chatting every night with my friends and having them be like oh no, it’s actually もう一つの, not もう一つ. Or it’s “so-reh” or whatever I’m saying wrong. The constant feedback is essential
Me? Yes, probably. I’ve been promising my wife I’d do it for like… almost 3 years? 🤦
Today is the day, here is your sign
Anki and tae Kim
Don’t fuck with Duolingo, waste of money
Personally I like doulingo for hiragana/katakana.
But after that, anki is my god, my king, my one and only. (Few thousand words in.)
Oh interesting that’s one of my least favorite parts of duolingo
There’s a free app called scripts I’ve been using to learn stroke order. It’s just okay but they smash them at you with much more repetition
Hmm. I’m aiming to learn around 4000 words before I start working on writing kanji. Another
Spoken japanese is realistically like a 2. It’s the written form (3 separate forms) that’s difficult, bringing it to a level 4. Speaking is quite easy compared to other languages.
Doubt. Here are some reasons:
Pronunciation is dead simple though.
Thanks for the reply. I’m unsure why the honorifics get brought up in discussion of difficulty. Many non English languages have at minimum 2 of forms as well as 2 genders (some have more). I understand japanese has a lot of honorific titles and a few forms, but it’s not that difficult, for 90-95% of your interactions you can just use two really (and some of the titles exist in english as well, Mr, Mrs., Ms., Miss, Master, Dr., Lord, add an Esq. at the end for some, etc.). For me personally, I would put this in the same category as not understanding how to properly use romance language diminutives (and in many language courses these aren’t really taught until later, as far as I’m aware).
The numbers are fine? I’ve never heard this critique. I might be misunderstanding the point on this one. Other languages have some form of number conjugation as well so my apologies for not getting this
Grammar as compared to what language? Are we comparing Japanese to English only? I said it’s a level 2 not a level 1, but romance language grammar can be somewhat confusing for English speakers as well.
I was young when I learned conversational Japanese and found it surprisingly straightforward as an English native speaker. Additionally, there are no tones (unlike for example Chinese), and all the spoken sounds exist in English, so it’s not too hard for an English speaker to correctly pronounce words with practice (so I completely agree with you here).
Now I’m studying German, which is supposed to be much easier by comparison, and there are 3 word genders and literally dozens of direct and indirect pronouns. It’s extremely difficult to comprehend and recall mid conversation (or even at all). Then, depending on a lot of factors, the grammar also changes. That, plus numbers are reversed (9 and 20 as opposed to 29, and don’t get me started on French numbers). Also, there are multiple sounds that don’t even exist in english.
Still, I will reiterate, I’m suggesting Japanese is more of a level 2 language, but I assure you the majority of difficulty comes from the written form.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declension
Yes, that’s where I’m coming from. But I imagine it’s similar for other Germanic and romance languages, since they’re similarly divorced from E. Asian languages.
If you’re coming from Korean, it’ll be a level 1 since the grammar structure is nearly identical. But if you’re coming from English, I’d wager 3-4 is fair if you don’t need to learn to read, mostly due to lack of new sounds to master, putting it just lower than Korean, which is generally understood to be a 4, and it has an easy to learn writing system (2 weeks and anyone could get it).
I took German as a kid and this really wasn’t an issue IMO, the harder part was mastering tenses and getting the umlauts right (I still struggle with both).
And the numbers are odd, I agree, but at least it’s not insanity like in French.
And I’m saying it’s a 3-4, assuming you don’t need to learn more than hiragana and katakana. Korean is 5, despite having an easier writing system, mostly due to new sounds. If you need to read/write, it’s harder than Korean.
I’ve learned a fair amount of Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Spanish, and German, and I’d put spoken Japanese around Tagalog levels (most put this at 4), but I think Tagalog may be easier: similar grammar (both mark the subject and direct object), no weird counting word conjugations or honorifics, one new sound (ng), and difficulty is in remembering which conjugations apply to which verbs (mag- vs -um, etc). On a scale for native English speakers (e.g. the US Dept. of State scale):
I could maybe drop spoken Japanese to a 3 if you watch a lot of subbed anime, which helps things feel more familiar. I was never really into anime, watching maybe 4-5 series over 10-ish years, so I didn’t develop an ear for it.
Sorry, what i meant was comparing english to japanese directly. It was poor wording on my part. What i meant to say was for a non language learner to just start learning Japanese will seem very difficult, but if you compare learning japanese with learning, say, french, it may not seem as bad if you remove the writing systems and use only romanji.
I am an english native speaker from a Hispanic family, and i find Spanish to be quite difficult. I learned conversational japanese (and hiragana and katakana) while i was young. Not particularly advanced, mind you, but conversational and low level. I found, personally, japanese to be much easier to pick up than Spanish. I wasn’t particularly into watching anime, either. I understand this portion is anecdotal, but that was my experience.
Eventually, i learned italian (to approximately b-1) level, and both Spanish and German to a-2 so far (i may be over estimating my Spanish, to be honest). Japanese is nowhere near as difficult as learning German. German grammar is extremely tricky, and I’ve found that many Germans don’t really enjoy speaking it because of the difficulty (at least this is what they tell me). This is also my personal experience, which impacts how i feel about the languages but doesn’t outright define their difficulty.
My point with the three genders was in memorizing all the articles that don’t exist in English or Japanese. There’s no grammatical gender. I’m glad it was easy for you to pick up, but that is more difficult for English speakers than people want to admit, especially when there is no rule for how the genders are assigned. In italian and Spanish there are some rules, but in German, I need to literally memorize every German word, with article, and then memorize how to conjugate nominative, accusative, dative … This simply doesn’t exist in Japanese.
Japanese is level 4 but only with the written form included, and it’s a very simple explanation: it’s considered a level 4 when the new 3 written forms are included. If you remove those written forms, it’s only a level 2 language, which is still considerably difficult to be fair.
To address a few of your points, there are no new sounds to master in Japanese that don’t already exist in English, so I’m not sure what you mean there and i would love for you to explain it to me.
Also, for the written forms, hiragana and katakana are actually somewhat easy to learn, so I’m not sure why you bring those up and not kanji. You need to know more than 2,000 kanji to be considered literate. This is why Japanese is considered difficult, and not anything else. You can’t even get n5 certified without knowing some kanji.
Suggesting one needs to have already absorbed japanese culture to consider it a level 3 is… an inaccurate statement. I think that’s missing the mark on what the difficulty rankings are trying to assess. Any language will be easier if you absorb its content, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the difficulty of it.
Sure. And I still think it’s a 3 if not 4 out of 5 on the difficulty scale for your typical westerner who speaks a germanic or romance language natively. Pronunciation is easy, so you could memorize sentences and whatnot and fumble through a vacation somewhat well, but actually being conversational and sounding more-or-less like a native (grammatically speaking) is an entirely different beast.
Grammar is simple on the surface: subject + “wa” + direct object + “oh” + verb conjugation. However, the subject and direct object can be dropped, prepositions go after the noun, and there are a lot of subtle differences in how ideas are communicated (I’m not strong in Japanese, but in Korean, your farewell greeting depends on who is leaving). So not only is everything flipped around from how a westerner expects things, but there are also a ton of small differences in how ideas are conveyed that make it a lot harder to become fluent vs another western language where structure and ideas tend to be a lot more similar. And that’s not even getting into familiar roots.
Really? It’s usually one of the easiest languages for a native English speaker to learn because it doesn’t have any new sounds and there are a ton of shared roots (saying English words in a “spanish” way is surprisingly likely to yield a valid word: e.g. respect -> respeto).
Oddly enough, I have a hispanic coworker who learned Japanese (super into manga and anime) and they claim it was pretty easy, and then complain about stupid English-isms. So yeah, idk, maybe language difficulty is super individual.
Maybe that’s why you struggled w/ spanish?
For me, memorizing nouns isn’t hard, and if I have to learn gender, I just memorize the noun w/ the gender (der tisch, die mauer, das auto). It’s been many years so I’ve forgotten a lot, but I just memorized vocab by saying the gendered article with it, then it kind of became second nature.
I do the same for Spanish (el eroplano, la escuela). Spanish is even easier because the endings usually give it away.
German is certainly difficult though, but less because of the genders (for me), and more because of the tricky grammar. There are a ton of rules, and while they’re consistent (i.e. no laundry list of exceptions like English), there’s still a ton of them.
Do you have a source for this?
Also, it’s almost impossible to ignore written forms. If you’re going to get around in Japan at all, you need to at least learn hiragana and katakana (not hard, maybe a month to learn?), and probably a few hundred kanji. But learning Japanese has been about as difficult as learning Korean for me, and I learned both after learning Tagalog, so I was already prepared for learning languages with very different structure (Tagalog does VSO with funky verb conjugations that change what subject and object mean, but it’s marked like Japanese and Korean are).
And Korean is simpler in many ways:
Same in some:
And worse in some:
I would say Korean is a little harder than Japanese w/o writing, but Japanese becomes harder when you include the writing system. That’s why I say it’s at best a 3 and probably a 4, and Korean is solidly a 4, if we’re doing a 1-4 scale.
Yeah, they’re not that hard, but I found hiragana pretty difficult because the swoop-y lines kind of blended together and made it hard for me to remember which is which. But once you are confident with both, you can look up pretty much anything you need in a dictionary, since most dictionaries and many things like menus will have hiragana or katakana renditions of any kanji you run across. Romanji pretty much only exists for foreigners until they’re comfortable w/ hiragana and katakana.
Kanji is a whole beast unto itself, hence why I didn’t bring it up. You can try to learn radicals, but that only gets you so far, and my experience is that it’s easier to just memorize the kanji than try to break them down. I hear radicals work a lot better in simplified Chinese, they just fall apart more w/ kanji.
And yeah, you need thousands of kanji to be “literate,” but only a few hundred to get by (i.e. “conversational” written Japanese). You’ll run into a bunch you don’t know, but you can probably figure it out from context.
My point has nothing to do with culture and more to do with hearing common words frequently in context. If you can immerse yourself in the language, you get a feel for how things fit together, which can turn things like conjugation from rote memorization to being somewhat intuitive, because you’ve subconsciously already figured out some of the patterns.
If you watched a ton of anime in Japanese while reading in your native language, you’re already conditioning yourself to learn Japanese better because you’ve already started understanding patterns subconsciously.
That 30 minute walk is going to suck in Hanamaki’s winters. I assume they get it worse than the more central area that I know which has no shortage of snow.
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I interpreted this as 30 meters and wondered why anyone would care about a walk that reasonable.
I imagine this would work out pretty great if you can just lift off the roof if it collapses on you in an earthquake. The other two, not so much.
I remember seeing an article on these houses. The biggest issue is this house was built before the 1980’s, so it was built before modern earthquake (?) proofing standards. This makes the house unlivable and technically condemned, and the Japanese government won’t let anyone (including owner) from being able to live there until it’s been modernized to the standards.
While this sounds easy, you need to get the supplies and crew out there (no easy road access), which is expensive, and possibly not a real option (again, remote area and trucks might not be able to reach it).
So you end up with a house no one can legally live in, in an area that can’t be reached to repair/build anything. It’s just a lose/lose situation and causes the value of the property to be very low.
The last major earthquake revision was in 1981 so anything with planning approval before that is going to cause a ton of headaches. There have been many minor revisions since then, but they usually don’t apply when considering loans, insurance, etc.
I mean, this crap shack has been standing for more than a hundred years now
With active maintenance