Is It Hard to Learn Japanese?

Japanese can take longer to learn than some European languages, but it isn’t inherently difficult. In fact, I found Japanese to be a forgiving language, one where it’s harder to make mistakes.

How hard it is to learn different languages according to The American Foreign Service Institute:

0:00 - The most important thing to have when learning Japanese.
1:50 - What makes Japanese easier to learn than other languages?
3:38 - Learning the Japanese writing system.
6:15 - What are the difficulties of learning the Japanese language?
7:49 - The formalities of the Japanese language.
10:19 - How I learned Japanese particles.
12:35 - Some books I bought in Japanese.

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#languages #learnjapanese #polyglot

[Thelinguist]

Japanese is best learned by getting used to the language, rather than trying to master grammar. I don’t know any Japanese grammatical rules. I’ve just grown more and more comfortable in the language over time.

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[zibhukc]

As a Japanese, I always get amazed by those who are learning our language despite the fact that it’s not used outside Japan. So, their motivation comes mostly from their pure interest in the language or our culture, which I’m proud of.

Edit: Thank you for your comments! I’ve read all of them.

[freehongkong]

Steve is like a minecraft enchantment table. The more books this man has around him the higher his power levels.

[TheSuperUltraGiraffe]

I’m sorry but are we gonna ignore those glasses? Wow. Incredible.

[csroad]

I’m Japanese and I’m leaning English now
But your English is easy to understand for me so I watched this video hahaha

[StarlitGlitch]

I’m fluent in Japanese and live in Japan now and I definitely agree that it’s not as scary as it seems! Especially grammar-wise there’s plenty of European languages that seem much trickier to me. It takes getting used to at first though

[qjkwzqr]

Thank you all for learning Japanese and the culture. Love from Japan.
I'm learning English now hope I can be fluent as I am in English.

[OngoingDiscovery]

The easiest thing about learning Japanese is that there is so much high quality media to consume and immerse in. Books, manga, films, music etc. Whatever you're into, you can likely spend your whole day in Japanese for years and never run out of interesting content to immerse in. Given how important input is in acquiring language, this is a massive advantage for Japanese learners over learners of languages with less developed entertainment industries surrpunding them.

[orinrin]

"Katakana isn't too common"
Me: *laughs in game menus being 50% Katakana English*

[gretsch_man]

I've been living in Japan for almost 30 years now, so I can handle myself when it comes to Japanese. Your explanations about Japanese are spot on.

I would recommend to anyone who really wants to learn the language to spend at least some time in Japan.

I would also STRONGLY recommend to learn Kanji. Most foreigners I've met haven't really mastered Kanji and it just shows during conversations. Trying to memorize Kanji words (as opposed to Hiragana/Katakana words) is much more difficult if you don't understanding the Kanji. For example, lets take the word 高熱 (Kōnetsu). 高 (Kō) means high, 熱 (netsu) means fever. Combined it becomes "high fever". So if you already know the Kanji 高 (Kō) and 熱(netsu), memorizing 高熱 is simple.

[Elkarus]

Learning Japanese it was shocking how easy and hard is at the same time.

[jezzmaninjapan]

I'm studying Japanese at university right now and in first semester we learn (mainly):
1) Desu/~masu
2) Adjectives & want
3) Iru/aru
4) ~Te-form and variations
5) Non polite and variations

And that's not even counting the small stuff like numbers/counters/telling time + all the exceptions (telling the day of the month sucks) ; using genkoyoushi ; writing e-mails ; learning bodyparts & expressions for feeling sick ; ~Teiru ; ~Tari ~tari ; Verbs of giving/receiving ; nominalization ; etc...

But to get to the point, changing registers (Polite/Non polite) mid-way in conversations is definitely as you say "a clanger" for Japanese people. At least for people you don't know very well. So you might think "fine, I'll just use ~masu all the time". Problem is that in a lot of structures you HAVE to use non polite. From there on out, everything can become a lot more confusing. You'll be saying half you sentence in non-polite and then end with the polite register.

Oh and don't get me started on particles... They can get really confusing later down the line. Maybe it will click faster for some people though.

Anyways, to everyone that read this: have a great day or great sleep!

[fhxgbsc]

I'm a Chinese, and I'm learning Japanese. I think Chinese is more similar with English in structure than Japanese, even though they seem totally different from each other, while Chinese and Japanese kanji look the same. Japanese tend to put the most important part into the end of a sentence, usually predicates, as well as add many structures into a simple sentance which seem kind of meaningless and made the sentences super long compared to their original forms, just to express their emotion, to adjust to a certain environment. Maybe it's more important for a Japanese to read the atmosphere, it's kind of difficult for me but, actually I like it, which allows me to express my emotion in a precise way.
"爱" and ''愛", both "love" in Simplified Chinese and Japanese, the difference is that we don't have "心", "heart", in it. Simplified Chinese is more efficient, not just in kanji. We have simplified kanji and shorter verbs, but we speak even longer sentences with overwhelming amount of information than Japanese and Traditional Chinese, which is used in taiwan. In fact, people in taiwan often have trouble understanding mainland movies without subtitles just because we speak too fast and too complex. It does efficient, but we just only stand on our OWN position, no attention to OTHERS side, which made simplified Chinese relatively harder to understand and less emotion, heartless, in other word. Of course, I didn't realize it before knowing Japanese, I think it's the charm of linguistics.

[ryancadima]

I got to get some of those Steve Kaufmann magnetic reading glasses to raise my language learning skills

[maplelatte]

I’m Japanese but if I was not born as Japanese, I would never feel like learning Japanese cause damn it’s even hard for native Japanese speakers lmao

[amadeusferro]

I'm brazilian 16 years old boy. I became semi-fluent in japanese, studying 6 hours all day in 1 year. Now I can understand 80% a hard anime, and I tricked a japanese native girl, speeking for 1 hour, she thought who I'm a japanese.

Edit. Using anki, and starting with brazilians youtube chanels, after english blogs, and now I learn japanese in japanese.

[LymonAdd]

I agree that Japanese is very flexible and forgiving: after year and a half of Japanese classes I can say much more complicated sentences than after a year of German classes, but German vocabulary of course is much easier to acquire and memorize (I’m Ukrainian)

[mrtsiqsin]

2:18 Wow ... your glasses are like an invention of the next century!!!

[Eric-leuu]

Using LingQ for 2 years. Reading news, blogs, novels, all in Japanese. Also, watching a lot of YouTube channels and listening to podcasts. Up to 12K words now.

[TheAlanFFM]

I use to think it was so silly that I had to learn hiragana and katakana until someone pointed out that we also use two writing systems in English. We don't think about capital letters as a seperate script, but to a foreign speaker, learning the capital Latin script is akin to learning a completely new set of letters.