Japanese is Easy Actually...

Everyone is always saying how hard the Japanese language is, but I'm here to show you that it's not all that bad. In this video, I'll be explaining why Japanese is actualy not as hard as you might initially think.

Written, Produced, and Edited by @TheLingOtter
Background Video by @yanghaiyingOtter
Drawings by Lola illustrations
Thumbnail by @art_imperio

0:00 Intro
0:55 Vowels
1:38 English Vowels
3:06 Consonants
4:02 Extra-Consonants
5:44 Phonotactics
6:33 Phonology Overview
7:05 Morphology
9:23 Morphology Overview
9:50 Syntax (Grammar)
11:57 Syntax Overview
12:39 Semantics/Pragmatics
14:12 Honorifics
15:12 Semantics/Pragmatics Overview
15:39 "Why is Japanese Hard?"
16:57 Conclusion
17:41 Outro

[nappeywappey]

Spoken japanese: 😊✅❤️
Written japanese: 😢🔥🆘

[ulughann]

Japanese would have been a very simple language if they didn't write it whatsoever.

[shade]

I've been learning Japanese for a few months now. I definitely agree that it's more time consuming than "difficult."

[knethen]

Hearing the vowels in the order あえいおう (a e i o u) sounds surprisingly jarring and weird after getting used to the usual japanese order あいうえお (a i u e o). Even though I would also order the vowels (barring äöü) of my native language, german (which are at least kind of close to japanese) a e i o u.

[kumoric]

I've been learning for about 2 years now. The language itself is easy, the hardest part is consistently studying for long enough since it's so time consuming 😅

[TeddyJayO]

You're one of my favourite channels but I'm not gonna just SIT here and have you invalidate my struggles in Japanese Kanji class😭

[carliu]

As a japanese learner, I think the trickiest part (specially when reading) are the constant pronunciation changes that kanji have, they have no phonetic cues and even if you know all the listed readings, you are not guaranteed to be able to read a word at all (一本 ippon　心強い kokorozuyoi　七夕 tanabata　発展 hatten 今朝 kesa, etc). Even IF you are able to memorize the most common exceptions, a vast majority of kanji gain two or more unique readings if they are used in names, so yeah, learn how to speak and how to read japanese are basically two completely unrelated things (Btw I love the new renders he's so fcking cute :3)

[fouad]

85% of views are the otter the other 15% are here for the knowledge and I'm here for otter

[okiyomi]

This perfectly describes what it was like learning japanese for me, the beginner parts are just so comfortable because of the relative simplicity of the phonetic and consistency of grammar rules, but the deeper I got though the more I realised just how much time it would take to actually become proficient in the language. The hardest part of the language is the fact that it is so different from english that you basically have to learn an entirely new culture, but that is also its biggest strength in my opinion. I had so much more success learning a language far away from english because everything felt new and fresh, and I was forced to change the way I think giving me a whole new perspective.
Amazing video, x2 points for otter which totally didn't distract me the whole time by being too cute...

[animefreak]

As a person that studies Japanese on and off for the last ten years or so, here's a few comments.

Regarding phonology: Standard Japanese, as well as most dialects have merged /z/ and /dz/, as well as /ʑ/ and /dʑ/ and the orthography doesn't distinguish them either. So, it's fine if you can't distinguish those, only few dialects in southern Kyuushuu still do. A weird thing not reflected in orthography is "bidakuon", the nasalization of /g/ to /ŋ/ in some contexts.
I think Japanese phonotacts are also easier to get accustomed to than Polynesian ones. For one, Japanese doesn't have phonemic glottal stops. And also, it might just be me, but with Polynesian phonologies being so small, some legitimate words end up sounding like tongue twisters. This occasionally happens in Japanese, too, such as with あたたかくなかった.

Regarding morphology: -tachi isn't really a plural marker. The best translation that I can think of for it is "and the rest". It doesn't imply that the additional objects/people are of the same kind as the explicitly named one. For example, just saying 猫たち, doesn't imply that that the rest are cats, too. Of course, in the absence of context it's most reasonable assumption, but if you have a pet cat and a pet dog, you could use 猫たち to talk about them collectively just fine.

Regarding syntax/semantics, while Japanese does have a pretty free word order, because the particles scope over entire phrases, you have to be careful not to create what my friends called "parsing errors". This is whenever the sentence you've created can have two different grammatically valid interpretations and the one that the person you're talking to interprets isn't the one you meant. For a funny example, Google the phrase 頭が赤い魚を食べる猫. The biggest challenge with syntax is to learn how Japanese people interpret syntax by default, so that you can create sentences that will be interpreted the same way you intend them to be interpreted.

[rextanglr]

As a Chinese person, I find it easier to read Japanese with kanji than without it.

[kumoric]

The Japanese R sound can also be heard in some accents of Scotland I believe

[rndmfactory]

I am currently learnig japanese, mostly using anki and reading books. I found that after getting a certain amount of words in, kanji actually helps me remember the meaning of words better. Even if you have never seen a word, if you know the kanji, chances are that you can 1. guess the approximate meaning of a word and 2. guess the reading, which (i think) makes it possible to learn more words faster.

At least that's what it feels like to me :)

[BariumLabs]

I love your content. Made me very interested in linguistics and languages as a whole. Keep up the amazing work!

[bestbeekeeper]

i dunno that i agree that there are no consonant clusters in japanese beyond きゃ or にゃ, because in words like 失礼します or 疲れ, they are effectively pronounced as clusters, and even the "u" sound is left off at the end of ます. native japanese speakers tend to reduce these sounds, if not delete them entirely. part of this comes down to the japanese timing system, but i think for an english speaker it's easier just to call it a cluster

[bahaman]

sorry for the wall of text, but have some disagreements with the video

the phonology section does happen to ignore pitch accent, which is a relatively complicated system, and quite important to one's accent (if you're going to emphasise the different realisations of /n/, pitch accent is more important to japanese people since it's contrastive and not allophonic, unlike /n/ realisations.

it also doesn't mention vowel devoicing, something which many people learning japanese get wrong (they delete vowels instead of devoicing, which is only done in certain situations in natural japanese, and they devoice at times when conditions are not natural) and which is necessary for sounding like a speaker of tokyo japanese.

also when talking about morphology you didn't mention verbs, which is strange, nor did you mention adjective inflection. both of these involve memorising tables of conjugation and bases, some of which change depending on the style of speaking or whether or not you are writing, and irregular forms.

and well you can't talk about japanese grammar being difficult until you actually get into the details, like when are you supposed to use は or が, when can you use the て form to connect things and in which cases must you use the "conjunctive form", what are the differences in use case between へ and に and へに and にも &c., even basic sentences like "X は Y じゃないです。" are based on underlying grammar which is actually relatively complex for an english speaker, ex. the decision to use じゃない instead of でない is a complicated choice which one doesn't even begin to unpack until much later in their japanese journey. So much of japanese grammar is secretly complicated that it doesn't even get discussed until much later in so many japanese resources (and there's a whole industry which revolves around deciding how much of the complication a japanese instructor should teach)
if you compare this to french, "X n'est pas Y" is an incredibly simple construction, requiring only the principles of syntax (SVO) and negation. it's even simpler than "X is not Y"

and then we get to the biggest thing that you didn't mention, which seem really important to how difficult japanese is (at least in this one's experience):

**Listening**
listening to japanese is really hard in comparison to french, spanish, or any other language similar to english.

this has a lot to do with grammar of course, while romance/germanic conjugations and constructions line up almost perfectly with english, and therefore require little mental effort to understand at speed for english speakers, japanese expresses certain concepts completely differently, (to be able to do something is represented either by using dekiru (relatively intuitive and easy to pick up for english speakers), or by using a conjugation to do the same (which can be much more hard to immediately pick up on, since it requires that you catch that the vowel "u" changes to "e", a very small change for so much semantic information, which is never conjugated for in languages similar to english).
syntax is another big contributor, for the very same reasons.

but it also has to do with japanese phonology itself: japanese is spoken at an incredibly fast rate, vowels can be devoiced unexpectedly, consonants can be expressed in forms which are not clear, the intonation/accenting of japan is so so much different than any lagnuage similar to english which means one will have to learn new ways to separate words based on stress. and
**most crucially**, japanese words just sound really similar *all the time*. japanese has about 100 possible syllables, which they use to generate tens of thousands of words, so it is very easy to become confused which word is being used, which meaning of a word (which is considered the same despite being very different in implication) is being used.

all of these things make listening to japanese really really difficult (and it's a very similar problem in chinese and other "simple but hard" langauges)

and well, you can add production and comprehension onto the list of things not talked about
while basic japanese grammar is simple, even very normal sentences (for a native japanese speaker) can be impenetrable without a lot of thought
recently, hearing "変な名前。でもぴったりよねあなたに” really stumped this one, and caused it to be forced to pause and go back and read over the line with subtitles.
now, this sentence is really simple, ぴったり means "precisely", よね are used to emphasise something, and あなたに means, basically, "to you"
the sentence comes together to say "strange name, but it fits you perfectly"
but despite this sentence not involving any complicated grammar at all, it still required a lot of thinking because of the way such a sentence was put together.
and then that goes into overdrive for sentences like
"ほら あなたの居場所なんて、この世のどこにも無いじゃない ”
without breaking it down in the same way, this is a simple sentence which doesn't use complex grammar and means
"see, you have no place in this world", basically
but it's expressed in a way super unfamiliar to english speakers, something like: "well, something like a place for you, this world has nothing like that" (this is an intuitive translation which stilll makes the sentence easier to understand, unsure how to translate this in a way that doesn't simplify its difficulty significantly because it's just nothing like english)

that is all to say, even very simple sentences which don't use complicated grammar points or unexpected syntax, are difficult to parse without a lot of thought. if you go to "r/learnjapanese" you'll see people struggle with this: even though they know all the words and the basic grammar, the meaning doesn't come to them instantly.

in this commenter's opinion, this is why japanese is "hard" while spanish and french are "easy"
they all have sentences/paragraphs/phrases which are difficult to understand on first glance ("le temps qu'il te reste" was difficult to understand when first reading it) but of these, only japanese has this problem for like 90% of sentences all the time, ,
once you immerse in japanese beyond grammar and such you realise that it's a lot less simple than the "rules" would suggest

sorry for the wall of text, again, just thought that it would be interesting to talk about this and really do appreciate this video and find it cool, but want to suggest disagreements! would love to hear thoughts from anyone who read this far...

[Nishalaby]

I teach japanese to spanish speakers and i love telling them that we have the upper hand when it comes to pronunciation given how similar our vowels are. I especially like comparing it to english vowels since most people here in Argentina have a general grasp of how they work, but alas, they call me a nerd and don't pay it much mind... Some day they'll understand just how interesting this can be!!😈
Super interesting video! you've got my sub big guy!

[ObbyTheBird]

I love the new Otter art! on the thumbnail and in the video.

Great video!

[Sonilink]

Funny, because Japanese speakers itself say that Japanese is the hardest language in the world, like me as a Pole hear a lot from polish people, like for eg. my mom that Polish is the hardest language in the world/second hardest language in the world after Chinese/one of the most difficult language in the world.

[RichardHumphreys-looq]

BRO, new otter look is incredibly hype!