Is Japanese Hard To Learn?

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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Intro
0:18 - A Little Story...
0:49 - The Easier Parts
0:54 - ① Japanese Kana
3:01 - ② Japanese Pronunciation
4:48 - ③ Basic Grammar
5:15 - The Slightly Harder Bits
5:17 - ① Japanese Verb Endings
6:11 - ② Japanese Word Order
6:57 - ③ Grammatical Particles
8:42 - ④ Japanese Honorifics (Keigo)
9:44 - Okay, THIS Part is Hard...
10:43 - So... What's the Verdict?

📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:

Wikipedia contributors. "Japanese language." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, 28 Sep. 2022. Web.

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[fiercedeity]

I feel like the tricky part isn’t remembering to put the verb at the end of the sentence. That’s a consistent rule, which makes it easy to remember. The real tricky part is knowing what to do with everything in the middle of the sentence.

[metalsabatico]

I was learning German for a couple of months and I remember thinking at times that it was going to take me longer than I thought in order to get a good grasp of it. I decided to jump into Japanese for a couple of months too but when I went back to reading German it felt like a breeze after going through Japanese. The progress that I had made in German was so much more compared to what had achieved in Japanese in the same amount of time. It’s not so much that it’s hard, but that it is so extremely different from western languages. With Germanic and Latin languages there’s a huge overlap of vocabulary and concepts that help a ton when learning a new language. With Japanese, Arabic, or Korean you have to reprogram the way you think in order to learn them properly.

[gamedev]

im a native english speaker and i decided to learn Japanese because I have a huge passion for Japanese culture. Learning hiragana + katana, no problem. But when it came to the grammar, I almost gave up 3 times it was so confusing and frustrating. What helped me finally understand it was by looking at sentence after sentence using that grammar structure and I finally saw a pattern and understood. About a year or so later, now I can understand a quite a bit when listening to Japanese. and its SO MUCH FUN. I'm not here to brag or anything, I'm just trying to give someone some hope. Just get over the grammar obstacle, learn about 1000 or so words, immerse immerse immerse and you will enjoy it so much. God bless

[gekiatsufantasticeveryday]

I am Japanese and I have one thing to say to the people watching this video.
That is that most grammar is ignored in everyday Japanese conversation.
When talking with friends, etc., Japanese people omit the subject (this is true even if it is not in everyday conversation) or put verbs in places other than at the end. (Various other grammatical rules are also ignored.)
Therefore, Japanese language learners should not be overawed and should study hard with an easy mind. We are rooting for you!

[yoshibeckham]

As a Japanese, i feel honored you explained my language perfectly. ありがとうございました！

[memr]

As someone who has studied 450+ hours of Japanese, although grammar is different, you get used to it.
Some funny literal examples of Japanese language.
私は魚と肉が大好きです。
Watashi wa sakana to niku ga dai suki desu.
me fish and meat big like is.
I really like fish and meat.
Youll notice the particles 'wa, to, and ga' used in this sentence. Also, when translated without changing word order, it really does look strange!

Some more funny things
一月, 二月, 三月, 四月, 五月 ect
1 moon, 2 moon, 3 moon, 5 moon...
Can you guess the meaning?
January, Febuary, March, April, May! So straightforward and easy to remember... though I do prefer the deeper mythos behind the month names in European languages.

And finally some fun words;
積ん読 Tsundoku - buying books, and not reading them
The famous 口寂しい Kuchisabishii - Eating out of boredom instead of hunger
And the chillingly deep 物の哀れ Mono no Aware - "appreciating the bittersweet impermanence of something’s fleeting beauty since nothing lasts forever" (not my words.)

[lumi_]

I’ve been learning Japanese for 8 years and I still learn something new about the language everyday, be it a new slang word or a fixed phrase or a new kanji. I feel like I’ll never really be done learning Japanese, but that’s also kind of the beauty of it.

[Maymaysmaymays]

As someone who has studied this language off and on since high school, I finally feel like I’ve reached a point where I can finally partake in it and understand it in games and YouTube videos. It really is an insane experience after all this time!
The hardest part for me has always been the grammar. There are a ton of ambiguous grammar words in Japanese which can have different meanings depending on where it is in a sentence, I recommend watching YouTube videos of people playing games in Japanese and translating them as they go. Fantastic content for learning!

[foogod]

Props for including a link to Japanese Calligrapher Takumi! I think even if people aren't learning Japanese, a lot of his videos are just really neat (and relaxing) to watch, and for those who are learning, they're a great way to inspire you to practice your kanji more!

I also appreciate that you mentioned that English actually has two different alphabets too (uppercase and lowercase). Lots of people seem to get intimidated by "Japanese has two different phonetic alphabets!" without even realizing that English actually has two different alphabets that everyone has to learn too, we just sorta sweep that all under the rug because we don't usually think about it that way.

A bit of a clarification (so people don't get unnecessarily intimidated): The reason that Japanese has 188 particles is actually because the vast majority of those particles actually serve the same functions that we use prepositions for in English (and English has somewhere around 150 prepositions, depending on how you count, plus a number of multi-word phrases that people often use that have similar functions, so when you tally it all up there's really not that much of a difference between English and Japanese in this respect).

My personal opinion: Some aspects of Japanese are harder than many other languages to learn, but a lot of aspects of Japanese are actually much easier in many ways, and I really think these often don't get enough credit. If you're a fairly logical person, Japanese grammar is very regular and predictable (once you learn the rules, they _always_ apply. "special cases" and "exceptions" are very rare). If you see a word spelled out (in hiragana or katakana) you know exactly how to pronounce it (none of that "which of the 5 possible ways is "ough" being pronounced in _this_ word?" stuff). There are basically 2.5 irregular verbs in the entire language, and the rest all fall into really just two straightforward categories for conjugation rules. You don't have to worry about tedious things like matching gender, plurality, case, or often even verb tense between different parts of the sentence (it's just not an issue), and so on...

Yes, there are some parts that are obviously harder than most other languages. Keigo (polite/honorific speech, etc) does make some things more complicated, but to be honest a lot of it actually becomes kinda automatic (in my experience) remarkably quickly once you start using it. Kanji is obviously more complicated than most other writing systems, but if you start really learning and practicing them, you start to pick up a lot of common elements and details to them which end up making them not nearly as complicated or hard to remember as they look on the surface. Many of these aspects really look worse than they are too. I still wouldn't call it an "easy language" by any stretch, and it is going to be harder for English speakers to learn than something much more similar like a romance or germanic language, but it's still nowhere near as bad as most people seem to think, in my opinion, and a lot of it can actually be pretty fun in some ways too.

[costamcostam]

Japanese is so hard it made me return to learning German

[luke]

Japanese was the first language I acquired as a child who grew up in Japan with a Japanese mother. It however never became my primary language as our family moved to the Philippines when I was still around 5. Thankfully, my parents still continues to speak to me in Japanese up to the moment, so it never left my life. However, without any formal education, I still talk like a child. I struggle with kanji as well.

Working for a Japanese company has helped develop my skills (I still have tons of vocabulary to learn though) and I can carry a Japanese conversation without trouble. However, my pitch is certainly off which screams "I am a gaijin" whenever I talk to native Japanese speakers

[okstcowboy]

Japanese is so hard it makes Spanish feel like a dialect of English.

[coolbrotherf]

The hard part about Japanese for me as an English speaker is learning the vocabulary and Kanji. The grammar in general is actually pretty forgiving and doesn't have a ton of stuff to remember like irregular forms, declensions, conjugations, etc. Once people pick up on the vocabulary, it's not hard to learn to speak the language from there.

[chesterfarrington]

Just started learning Japanese today. I started out by just writing the entire hiragana script in a table. I find the physical writing something deepens your memory of it. Then I spent hours just studying them and what they sound like. I think a good place to start is just to feel comfortable with a script, and to separate あ from what I would equate it to, "a" and to start to see the character for what it is. I also learned a small amount of vocabulary, chief among them being able to write and say "ton kotsu" correctly because ton kotsu ramen is objectively the best food.

I know I have a ridiculously long path ahead of me, but I'm super motivated to learning this language right now, and I look forward to struggling with Kanji, tones, and honorific. Another puzzle to be solved along the way to my goal: to be the first American to learn Japanese without being an anime fan in over 40 years

[jordibernal]

The R in Japanese and Spanish are extremely similar to each other. I’m a native speaker of Spanish so I don’t have trouble pronouncing らりるれろ

[DreamyAbaddon]

I love how you used 平仮名 and 片仮名 in their Kanji form lol.

[승냥이유튜브-hp]

As a Korean, Japanese is very easy. It is one-third of my English study

[CalvinLimuel]

What really stumps me with Japanese Kanji is that each has multiple possible pronunciation. Yes that happens too in Mandarin, yes I get the vocalization rule, but when do we use Chinese pronunciation (on'yomi) and when do we use the native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi), and sometimes some syllables are dropped when combined with other words, and from which sound do we start writing the trailing hiragana (okurigana)?

[sithisrants]

I've studied Japanese for four years. The more I learn, the less I know. It is absolutely impossible. 😢

[zqdhfkh]

It's so easy for turkish people when it comes to sentence order and logics like it has so many similarities i don't feel very complicated things as a person that is learing this language currently