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Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: Is Japanese hard to learn?
« on: May 15, 2022, 03:28:50 pm »
Re: "Is Japanese hard to learn?"
...it depends on your definitions of "Japanese", "hard", and "learn"...
If by "Japanese", you mean:
- If you want to be able to have light conversation, answer waiters at restaurants, and find bathrooms... it won't take years of a huge amount of effort.
- Reading and writing, with a full set of jouyou kanji, and a N1 vocabulary, this will probably take years.
- However, if you are also talking about the historical pre-genbun-icchi texts which are handwritten and represent the kanbun style of writing... good luck. That's hard for Japanese people.
If by "hard" you mean:
a) More than a one-year entry-level course is needed to speak with your doctor or read legal texts, then it is hard
b) learning just from a textbook can't get you to communicate, then it still probably is
c) having casual conversations with friends can't be learned even while living in Japan... well then it isn't that hard
If by "learn" you mean:
a) being able to break down a sentence into its constituent parts, then it's not so hard
b) being able to construct complex sentences without a thought after a one-year course, then it is fairly hard
c) understanding the historical and geographic influences which brought modern Japanese to its current point, including regional accents and slang terms across generations, then it's pretty hard, because that's a big subject.
Learning any language goes through various stages where fluency and depth of knowledge are separate goals, each of which is difficult to achieve, but achieving both together is very hard.
Japanese makes it more difficult (for an English speaker) because there is less vocabulary overlap (must be re-learned), a reverse-sequence grammar, and cultural references which must be learned from basically nil. Starting from Chinese, there is a.. say.. 30-50% head start though, because of shared kanji/vocabulary, and some shared literary/historical references.
But basically, if you plan to learn a language from zero, it all depends on how far you plan to go, but plan on counting in years before you aren't consciously thinking about how to construct your sentence. (I know a few native English speakers who aren't as good at English as they would like to be in Japanese...)
Of course, motivation/desire, and time/effort applied to the task will help reduce this, but actual interactive contact with speakers of the language will be necessary.
...it depends on your definitions of "Japanese", "hard", and "learn"...
If by "Japanese", you mean:
- If you want to be able to have light conversation, answer waiters at restaurants, and find bathrooms... it won't take years of a huge amount of effort.
- Reading and writing, with a full set of jouyou kanji, and a N1 vocabulary, this will probably take years.
- However, if you are also talking about the historical pre-genbun-icchi texts which are handwritten and represent the kanbun style of writing... good luck. That's hard for Japanese people.
If by "hard" you mean:
a) More than a one-year entry-level course is needed to speak with your doctor or read legal texts, then it is hard
b) learning just from a textbook can't get you to communicate, then it still probably is
c) having casual conversations with friends can't be learned even while living in Japan... well then it isn't that hard
If by "learn" you mean:
a) being able to break down a sentence into its constituent parts, then it's not so hard
b) being able to construct complex sentences without a thought after a one-year course, then it is fairly hard
c) understanding the historical and geographic influences which brought modern Japanese to its current point, including regional accents and slang terms across generations, then it's pretty hard, because that's a big subject.
Learning any language goes through various stages where fluency and depth of knowledge are separate goals, each of which is difficult to achieve, but achieving both together is very hard.
Japanese makes it more difficult (for an English speaker) because there is less vocabulary overlap (must be re-learned), a reverse-sequence grammar, and cultural references which must be learned from basically nil. Starting from Chinese, there is a.. say.. 30-50% head start though, because of shared kanji/vocabulary, and some shared literary/historical references.
But basically, if you plan to learn a language from zero, it all depends on how far you plan to go, but plan on counting in years before you aren't consciously thinking about how to construct your sentence. (I know a few native English speakers who aren't as good at English as they would like to be in Japanese...)
Of course, motivation/desire, and time/effort applied to the task will help reduce this, but actual interactive contact with speakers of the language will be necessary.
