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In a nutshell…. Yes. Any language is going to take time and effort to learn, and Japanese in particular presents more challenges to a native English speaker than many other languages. However, as you’ve seen in this article, even the “hardest” aspects of Japanese are much simpler than they might initially seem.
- Japanese Sentence Structure Explained
In Japanese, toshokan means “library,” and ikimashita is the...
- Japanese Writing System
(Source: Wikipedia Commons) Hiragana (the blue characters in...
- Kanji
By the way, if you want to learn Japanese kanji fast and...
- Japanese Pronunciation
#1 Tsu. You’re likely familiar with the word tsunami (the...
- Japanese Sentence Structure Explained
- The Sound. First cab off the rank, the lack of phonemes. Japanese only has 46 distinct sounds for you to master. On top of this, Japanese is not a tonal language like Mandarin, Thai or Vietnamese.
- Japanglish. Japanese has always had a unique way of dealing with loan words from other cultures. They even went so far as to create an entirely new writing system to deal with them called katakana.
- No gender difference and no plural ‘s’ Learners of Romance or Germanic languages may rejoice to hear that upon starting their Japanese language journey, they will never again have to remember if a chair is feminine, masculine, or neutral.
- Kanji. With 2041 kanji considered “Jyoyou” or what a student completing Year 12 is expected to learn, it may sound counterintuitive to say that kanji is one of the factors making Japanese easier to learn.
And yet for some reason, it’s soooo common for foreigners learning Japanese to do this exact thing. It’s almost like there’s a pre-existing assumption that “Japanese is so hard”, which, like a self-perpetuating bias, makes people go looking for difficult stuff to mull over and complain about to “prove it”.
Oct 9, 2024 · But how hard is it to learn Japanese? Keep reading to find out what makes the Japanese language so difficult. We also have many articles covering Japanese language including 7 savvy strategies for learning Japanese, counting in Japanese, JLPT, as well as how to find online tutors, language exchange partners, and more. Japanese Writing System
- Sounds
- Grammar
- K-K-K-Kanji!
For one, Japanese phonology (the sounds that make up the language) is really simple. There are only five basic vowel sounds (most of which are common in other languages), and the consonants are pretty basic as well. Compare that to English phonology. English phonology, especially the vowels, and much more complex than Japanese. Another nice thing a...
Anybody who has tried to learn a Romance language knows that subjunctive tense will make you want to rip your hair out. What issubjunctive tense? Basically, it's expressing a future desire. In Japanese, it's really, really easy to do. But in other languages, well…let's just say that I'm a native English speaker and, to be honest, I don't have a clu...
Even kanji, the boogeyman of the Japanese language, is actually pretty easy. Technology has not only made it a lot easier to learn kanji (through spaced repetition systems), but a lot easier to read and write kanji too. You no longer have to memorize the stroke order of each kanji; now, you can just type it in! And if you don't know a kanji, it's i...
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aagoti. •. Japanese (and learning languages in general) is more complex than it is hard or difficult, like math beyond high school level is. A complex task is one that is made up of multiple parts, while a difficult one is, well, difficult, not easy, hard to grasp, takes a lot of effort.
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Feb 16, 2022 · Despite highly organized grammar, easy-to-learn vocabulary, and the lack of impossible sounds or tones, Japanese can be a challenge to learn, especially coming from English. Here’s why. 1.
