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
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
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
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