How Difficult is it to learn the language?

[sardO]

Hey, I'm considering taking Japanese as a course in university next year, but I just want to know what I'd be getting myself into. I'm interested in learning Japanese because I am considering studying abroad for a year during university, so knowing the language would not be a bad idea. My question is this: how hard is Japanese to learn? Mainly, how hard is it to learn to speak and read Japanese, not so much writing it. The course description is this: "An introduction to spoken and written Japanese focusing on developing proficiency in the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Acquisition of basic grammar, hiragana and katakana scripts, and oral communication skills will be emphasized. Basic kanji (Chinese characters) will also be introduced. Open to students with no prior background in Japanese." I know pretty much nothing about the Japanese language, am I setting myself up for failure or do you think it won't be too bad? Is it just a matter of putting a lot of effort into it?

[MMM]

Without knowing you it is impossible to know whether or not you will succeed in Japanese. In my experience the majority give up, but those that persevere learn not only Japanese, but learn about themselves and learn about how different language can be.

[sardO]

My main motivation to learn Japanese is my desire to to study in Japan for one year of my university and my love for Japan and Japanese culture. I can normally always accomplish things I set my mind to as long as I have the right motivation. Just how daunting can the Japanese language be to the average person (and with no prior knowledge)?

[Hatredcopter]

How difficult? Well, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn, only surpassed by Chinese. On the other hand, it's not as impossible as people make it out to be.

If you're taking decent university-level courses, you can learn enough Japanese in two years to be able to at least survive a study abroad year in Japan without much trouble. I know this because it's exactly what I did - two years of Japanese at my home uni, then I studied in Nagoya for a year. If you're aiming for fluency, this would be closer to four, maybe five years of study depending on the intensity of your courses.

[Barone1551]

Well the experience for everyone is different. At my school the first year (101) seems to be the same. There is a large number of students who apply for the course because like your description, it states that "no previous Japanese knowledge required". When people see this they jump right in. But quickly people drop out. Every year the number drops by at least half after the first semester of Japanese. And then another half by the next year. People look at no previous knowledge as a free pass. It is a difficult language but so are most other languages. And usually it is a harder language for people who speak English becuase it is very different from a western language. Which is why many people stick with Spanish, it has more in common with English.

With that being said I think you have to be going into it with the right mind set. From my personal experience, I didn't find Japanese extremely hard. I took Spanish first and didn't care for it to much and ended up not getting a good grade. But I attribute this mostly to the fact that I wasn't very interested in Spanish culture. I was very interested in Japanese culture. This made it very easy for me to study Japanese. I enjoyed studying Japanese, it wasn't a chore, I did it on my free time.

So I guess what I am trying to say is it has to be a personal experiment. I think like anything you learn you are going to have to enjoy it in order to make it easy. If you don't have much of an interest for Japan that learning Japanese can become a chore and therefore hard (which happens to most of the people I know who take it). If you are enjoying yourself taking it, you will do fine.

[jesselt]

Originally Posted by Hatredcopter

How difficult? Well, Japanese is one of the hardest languages to learn, only surpassed by Chinese. On the other hand, it's not as impossible as people make it out to be.

I wouldn't necessarily say that this is a true statement. Both languages are difficult in their own way =/

I have a friend taking Chinese because Japanese was too hard, so I guess it depends on the person.

Anyways, the statement that the number of Japanese students drops 50% each semester is correct from my experience =)

[Hatredcopter]

Chinese grammar is significantly easier than Japanese grammar. But the number of characters you need to learn is a couple times more than you do for Japanese, and Japanese pronunciation is way way easier than Chinese (not a tonal language like Chinese is). Plus you have to deal with Simplified vs. Traditional Chinese... I can't imagine Japanese being more difficult than Chinese... at least on the whole

But now we're getting off topic I think...

I do agree about the 50% drop out number, it was about the same at my university.

[Khengi]

I think I can give you a more in depth answer to what you're looking for.

My father's side of the family is full Greek, and they learn dozens of languages within their lifespan, so I guess a remnant of that passed down to me. I'm a natural linguistics, having placed in the nation with language arts, and I grasp the concept of linguistics very quickly.

The faster you can learn these things, the faster you can learn Japanese: it isn't English. It isn't similar to English. What you think in English cannot translate exactly to Japanese. Japanese is not just another language, it's another way of thinking.

One mistake students learn in universities is the schools desire to teach the students 丁寧語, which is foolish (the proper form like 'desu' and '-masu'.) The student is supposed to learn the dictionary form of verbs and then learn to conjugate them from there. It is because of this that people who have 4 years of college Japanese under their belt can only understand 7% of an anime episode, can only conjugate normal-intermediate sentences when speaking with a native, and overall never truly feel like they know Japanese, still sounding like a Gaijin when they speak.

I will be perfectly honest with you, Japanese is extremely hard. I started teaching myself from books when I was 16, graduated High School early so I could attend Purdue Calumet, passed Japanese 101, 102, 201 and 202 by testing out of the first three, took the 4th one in-class and became a student teacher for this fall. I'm going for the JLPT2 in December.

I say that to tell you it may be better to practice yourself if you have a knack for languages. You see, there are a lot of things that make becoming fluent in Japanese for an English-native almost unthinkable.

1. It's a pro drop languages, meaning using 'I', 'you', 'they', etc. too much makes you sound foreign (English uses it constantly)

2. All verbs end in 'u', and you need to learn the conjugation differences between the 五段 verbs and 一段 verbs and how they're conjugated (as well as the exception verbs)

3. It is not a language like Spanish, German or French that is so similar to English that in some sentences you can simply translate your thoughts into Japanese perfectly from English. This almost never happens, Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of what English does in most cases. The sentences 'I'm feeling hungry' does not translate as 俺の気持ちがおなかがすいた　(My feeling is hungry)。 This makes no sense, as even though the words are the same to what you want to say, to a Japanese it would sound like "My mood is the stomach empty became". Instead, you would have to DROP the idea of saying 'I'm feeling hungry' and find out the way Japanese do it.

4. As there are less sounds in Japanese, there are homonyms everywhere. While everyone always says that 'Kanji helps lower the problem of homonyms,' what happens when you're speaking? There are no Kanji coming out of your mouth. 木が好き。= I like trees. Now what happen if that first simply is turned into a simple き？Now it can be dozens of things, and there's no way of knowing unless the original writer tells you. While context usually helps the problem, homonyms are still present all the time. Chinese has tones, preventing this problem more, but Japanese even require on-screen dialogue while a TV show is on, as the viewers may not understand what they're saying (I'm talking about natives watching natives, remember).

5. There are 3 written scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are elementary (I can read and write them as fast as our own Roman alphabet), but Kanji is different. I don't mean because there are so many of them because that is no problem. Japanese is harder than Chinese because in Chinese, each Kanji is usually only read in one or two ways. Many Kanji in Japanese can have up to and over 10 readings. 明 is a doozy, my friend, and the readings all depend on context.

6. Japanese people cannot read other Japanese names at times, requiring furigana (small Hiragana over the Kanji to know how it's pronounced). This is because a Japanese name can be written with any Kanji one likes so as long as the readings match with what you want it to say. This produces the problem of many names having combined Kanji that could have over 50 ways of being pronounced.

There are many, many more, my friend. I don't want to tell you the easy part yet because the easy part comes AFTER you're grasped all of this. When you get to the point of Japanese where you can pronounce a Kanji and continue reading that you've never seen before (just by common sense in Japanese), then you've got it.

[KyleGoetz]

Originally Posted by Khengi

I think I can give you a more in depth answer to what you're looking for.

My father's side of the family is full Greek, and they learn dozens of languages within their lifespan, so I guess a remnant of that passed down to me. I'm a natural linguistics, having placed in the nation with language arts, and I grasp the concept of linguistics very quickly.

The faster you can learn these things, the faster you can learn Japanese: it isn't English. It isn't similar to English. What you think in English cannot translate exactly to Japanese. Japanese is not just another language, it's another way of thinking.

One mistake students learn in universities is the schools desire to teach the students 丁寧語, which is foolish (the proper form like 'desu' and '-masu'.) The student is supposed to learn the dictionary form of verbs and then learn to conjugate them from there. It is because of this that people who have 4 years of college Japanese under their belt can only understand 7% of an anime episode, can only conjugate normal-intermediate sentences when speaking with a native, and overall never truly feel like they know Japanese, still sounding like a Gaijin when they speak.

I will be perfectly honest with you, Japanese is extremely hard. I started teaching myself from books when I was 16, graduated High School early so I could attend Purdue Calumet, passed Japanese 101, 102, 201 and 202 by testing out of the first three, took the 4th one in-class and became a student teacher for this fall. I'm going for the JLPT2 in December.

I say that to tell you it may be better to practice yourself if you have a knack for languages. You see, there are a lot of things that make becoming fluent in Japanese for an English-native almost unthinkable.

1. It's a pro drop languages, meaning using 'I', 'you', 'they', etc. too much makes you sound foreign (English uses it constantly)

2. All verbs end in 'u', and you need to learn the conjugation differences between the 五段 verbs and 一段 verbs and how they're conjugated (as well as the exception verbs)

3. It is not a language like Spanish, German or French that is so similar to English that in some sentences you can simply translate your thoughts into Japanese perfectly from English. This almost never happens, Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of what English does in most cases. The sentences 'I'm feeling hungry' does not translate as 俺の気持ちがおなかがすいた　(My feeling is hungry)。 This makes no sense, as even though the words are the same to what you want to say, to a Japanese it would sound like "My mood is the stomach empty became". Instead, you would have to DROP the idea of saying 'I'm feeling hungry' and find out the way Japanese do it.

4. As there are less sounds in Japanese, there are homonyms everywhere. While everyone always says that 'Kanji helps lower the problem of homonyms,' what happens when you're speaking? There are no Kanji coming out of your mouth. 木が好き。= I like trees. Now what happen if that first simply is turned into a simple き？Now it can be dozens of things, and there's no way of knowing unless the original writer tells you. While context usually helps the problem, homonyms are still present all the time. Chinese has tones, preventing this problem more, but Japanese even require on-screen dialogue while a TV show is on, as the viewers may not understand what they're saying (I'm talking about natives watching natives, remember).

5. There are 3 written scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are elementary (I can read and write them as fast as our own Roman alphabet), but Kanji is different. I don't mean because there are so many of them because that is no problem. Japanese is harder than Chinese because in Chinese, each Kanji is usually only read in one or two ways. Many Kanji in Japanese can have up to and over 10 readings. 明 is a doozy, my friend, and the readings all depend on context.

6. Japanese people cannot read other Japanese names at times, requiring furigana (small Hiragana over the Kanji to know how it's pronounced). This is because a Japanese name can be written with any Kanji one likes so as long as the readings match with what you want it to say. This produces the problem of many names having combined Kanji that could have over 50 ways of being pronounced.

There are many, many more, my friend. I don't want to tell you the easy part yet because the easy part comes AFTER you're grasped all of this. When you get to the point of Japanese where you can pronounce a Kanji and continue reading that you've never seen before (just by common sense in Japanese), then you've got it.

Much of what is said here is true, but the assertion that the Japanese "subtitles" are added to shows because natives cannot understand what is said is ridiculously misleading.

I also am not aware of any kanji with >10 readings, let alone "many."

Having studied other languages in the past (Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, German, French), I'd say that Japanese is pretty hard. Probably the hardest of the languages I've studied. Definitely the hardest to speak (I find Chinese pronunciation trivial with just two days with a teacher who knows what she's doing in teaching phonetics—accent is very pattern-based, while with Japanese there are a lot of weird intonation/pitch changes that don't follow distinct patterns and you just have to memorize them (think アメ/雨, 橋/箸, クモ/雲)). I think Chinese is harder to read, but Japanese is easier to write (because you can always fall back on kana if you need to). Chinese grammar is a lot closer to English than Japanese is, IMHO.

That being said, I spent two years in undergrad studying (and attending a conversation club) Japanese, and then I attended university in Japan. I did fine. On the other hand, my undergrad has one of the best Japanese programs in the nation, so there's something to be said for that as well.

I think a person who has never studied Japanese before, but shows a strong interest in succeeding—coupled with the required work ethic—will have little to no problems picking up enough in two years in order to have a successful study abroad experience.

Go for it. Worst case scenario? You speak Japanese decently after two years. Best case scenario? You speak it well enough to go abroad for a year, and you will return with a good grasp of the language (but still not enough to call yourself "fluent" in my opinion—that'd take another year or so of intense work in Japan).

You'll also likely survive your ordeal liking anime a lot less than before you spoke Japanese. Once I could watch anime without subtitles, I started realizing how vapid and terrible most of it was, just like American TV shows are mostly terrible.

[Khengi]

Much of what is said here is true, but the assertion that the Japanese "subtitles" are added to shows because natives cannot understand what is said is ridiculously misleading.

The Japanese woman who I teach students alongside with (native from Kansai, frequently talks to be in 関西弁), brought in various recorded tapes of Japanese game shows for practice. Upon asking why there were Japanese subs used on a Japanese show, she responded, "Sometimes the people are misunderstood when speaking, and Kanji is added on screen to show the differentiation between words and phrases", and I'm not paraphrasing.

I also am not aware of any kanji with >10 readings, let alone "many."

These are all the readings of the single Kanji 明.

あ.かり あか.るい あか.るむ あか.らむ あき.らか あ.ける -あ.け あ.く あ.くる あ.かす
あきら あけ あす きら け さや さやか とし はる み め

You'll also likely survive your ordeal liking anime a lot less than before you spoke Japanese. Once I could watch anime without subtitles, I started realizing how vapid and terrible most of it was, just like American TV shows are mostly terrible.

I totally freaking agree, I'll be perfectly honest. It's just so... ugh, cliche at times when you finally understand it. Those subtitles make it more epic than it really is.