Articles like this push me closer and closer to buying a book to learn Japanese and signing up for classes. My niece speaks Japanese and she suggested if I help her learn Spanish she can help with Japanese. I may take her up on that
I tried in the past. Its harder than you'd expect. Katakana and hiragana are easy. Single words are easy.
The grammar is incredibly difficult to wrap your Western brain around, but if you can get through that you are stuck with fucking Kanji. Which is basically a lifelong commitment to even become kinda okay at.
Then you get the even bigger task of dealing with the Japanese and their love of puns. Fucking every 4th word is somehow a pun or allusion. Often to the point of being complete nonsense until you pick up on it.
What is Kanji? I live in Texas so learning Spanish was easier since it’s very easy to find people to speak with and I’ve had multiple jobs where I had to speak it 70 to 90 percent of the day. Trying to find similar immersion with Japanese short of going to Japan would be tough. Also with Spanish there are a lot of words that are similar to English due to common Latin/Greek root words
I firmly believe that Japanese is very easy to learn to speak and understand compared to many languages, yet it is also likely the most difficult language to learn to read and write well.
The grammar is easy for any brain, western or otherwise, to wrap their head around so long as they are good at pattern recognition; compared to something like English, Japanese is incredibly consistent. Anyone who did well at math in school should be able to easily comprehend Japanese grammar. Yeah, they have a couple more conjugations for verbs based on respect/politeness, but the rules have few exceptions, so it isn't too difficult.
Vocabulary, while lacking Greek and Latin roots that simplify transferring word knowledge from one western language to another, is also very limited for non-academic Japanese. There simply aren't many synonyms in conversational (and anime) Japanese, context is typically in how the limited set of vocabulary is spoken. For instance, there really is only one word used for "big," "ooki." How many synonyms for big are there in common, everyday English? Likely over a dozen.
The written side is a bear, and I just have come to accept that, unless I move to Japan, I will never be motivated to learn to read and write Kanji past a basic level. Even in very common usage there just are too many characters, and it is often a 50/50 guess at pronunciation of Kanji.
Summary: learning any language is difficult, but for speaking and understanding Japanese, I believe it is one of the easier ones. Isolation has kept their grammar and vocabulary more fundamentally sound and simple compared to most other languages. Unfortunately, the reading and writing is incredibly difficult.
I agree with the grammar part. I still am not perfect but getting there. I just love how some stuff is easily understood that way but kanji is just a monster. I wish there was some trick to it. I know maybe 50 kanji and that is barely scratching the surface, I would probably never be able to write those by hand mind you, probably only by computer.
Articles like this push me closer and closer to buying a book to learn Japanese and signing up for classes. My niece speaks Japanese and she suggested if I help her learn Spanish she can help with Japanese. I may take her up on that
I tried in the past. Its harder than you'd expect. Katakana and hiragana are easy. Single words are easy.
The grammar is incredibly difficult to wrap your Western brain around, but if you can get through that you are stuck with fucking Kanji. Which is basically a lifelong commitment to even become kinda okay at.
Then you get the even bigger task of dealing with the Japanese and their love of puns. Fucking every 4th word is somehow a pun or allusion. Often to the point of being complete nonsense until you pick up on it.
What is Kanji? I live in Texas so learning Spanish was easier since it’s very easy to find people to speak with and I’ve had multiple jobs where I had to speak it 70 to 90 percent of the day. Trying to find similar immersion with Japanese short of going to Japan would be tough. Also with Spanish there are a lot of words that are similar to English due to common Latin/Greek root words
I firmly believe that Japanese is very easy to learn to speak and understand compared to many languages, yet it is also likely the most difficult language to learn to read and write well.
The grammar is easy for any brain, western or otherwise, to wrap their head around so long as they are good at pattern recognition; compared to something like English, Japanese is incredibly consistent. Anyone who did well at math in school should be able to easily comprehend Japanese grammar. Yeah, they have a couple more conjugations for verbs based on respect/politeness, but the rules have few exceptions, so it isn't too difficult.
Vocabulary, while lacking Greek and Latin roots that simplify transferring word knowledge from one western language to another, is also very limited for non-academic Japanese. There simply aren't many synonyms in conversational (and anime) Japanese, context is typically in how the limited set of vocabulary is spoken. For instance, there really is only one word used for "big," "ooki." How many synonyms for big are there in common, everyday English? Likely over a dozen.
The written side is a bear, and I just have come to accept that, unless I move to Japan, I will never be motivated to learn to read and write Kanji past a basic level. Even in very common usage there just are too many characters, and it is often a 50/50 guess at pronunciation of Kanji.
Summary: learning any language is difficult, but for speaking and understanding Japanese, I believe it is one of the easier ones. Isolation has kept their grammar and vocabulary more fundamentally sound and simple compared to most other languages. Unfortunately, the reading and writing is incredibly difficult.
I agree with the grammar part. I still am not perfect but getting there. I just love how some stuff is easily understood that way but kanji is just a monster. I wish there was some trick to it. I know maybe 50 kanji and that is barely scratching the surface, I would probably never be able to write those by hand mind you, probably only by computer.
Thanks. I’ll definitely keep all this in mind