Why was it so easy for me to learn German and Dutch and so hard for me to learn Japanese?

Answer 1

Because German, English and Dutch are all from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Their syntax is similar. Whereas Japanese is from a different language family.

The difficulty of Japanese does not only lie in the fact that it has a different alphabet. For you it's difficult in the first place because it has no common characteristics with English.

Answer 2

I think this is a very good question. I learned Japanese as a second language as I found myself in Japan. But, it wasn't really until later that I got serious about learning it. I have been reading the answer... I don't know if that is right or not but I usually do. I see about three things: 1. that Japanese is unlike German in that it is unrelated to English. 2. Someone has suggested a different approach. That maybe a good idea. And, lastly, 3. that Japanese is a difficult language with a different system of writing and grammar that is a** backwards from English. All of these seem to come together in a plan to me and that is that granting all three, Japanese is more difficult and unfamiliar and so calls for a different approach.
I was in Japan as I said above when I started and I don't know how far I would have gotten had not the Japanese themselves been charming and encouraging. There is not much in the way of pronouncing Japanese correctly but for their 'r.' I will grant that is hard but not impossible. The rest of the sounds are very easy. There are two syllablaries that you can master with some effort in a short while a month or two. But, they also use ideographic characters and you need to know close to 2,000 of them in Japanese and will take you a while to accomplish.
Finally the grammar which is mixed up with the writing system and also is based in a logic outside the experience of English, I would suggest an overview of it and a good one and then when you see what it involves to learn Japanese grammar and the 2,000 or so kanji that you would need to know to speak passable Japanese and understand what is going on around you... that you can decide if you want to put that effort into it.

Answer 3

German and Dutch are kinda close, so if you speak one or the other, then it wouldn't be way too hard to learn the other one, I guess. Japanese, however, has completely different alphabets from European ones, (50 basic alphabets called hiragana, another 50 basic called katakana, and countless Chinese letters called kanji ) and there is no space placed between words so if may be confusing. Also the grammar is very different from English, for example, 'I eat a banana' in Japanese order is 'I banana eat', ' I went out today because it was sunny' is 'today, sunny it was because, I out went.' And when you count, instead of '1apple, 2 apples,' it's '1 apple, 2 apple, 3 apple.'
But the thing is, disregard of having so many alphabets, there are only around 50 pronunciations, and in English, there are about 240!! So the pronunciation will be a lot easier to learn first as you speak English, so try speaking first. Then all other reading writing kind of things are just a matter of practise, so you will be good at it soon. Try learning hiragana to read and write first, because those are the first one they teach in Japan when you go to school.
Mind you, being Japanese, English was really a hard one for me. It took me years to be able to speak some English, and am still learning.

Answer 4

on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being easy and 10 being hard) German and dutch are 6 and Japanese is 15.

Answer 5

Probably because of the pronunciation and of course the writing. Japanese is so much different than German and Dutch. I know people who have learned French and Spanish pretty easily, but then they try to learn a language like Arabic and it's a whole new ballgame. Good luck though. If you really want to, I'm sure you'll succeed!

Answer 6

If your first language is English, then that's the answer. English German and Dutch belong to the Germanic languages and it's always easier to learn another language from that group (they are like brothers and sisters - they have their differences but are really quite similar) than from another like French or Spanish which are Romance languages. However, Germanic and Romance languages have a common ancestor and are more like cousins - fewer similarities but still quite a few.

Japanese , however, is a very distant relation - cousin five or six times removed - so has more differences than similarities which makes it much harder to learn.

Answer 7

Guten Tag.

Speaking as one who has been in the same boat, I tried to learn Japanese first but never got further than Koni Chiwa yet breezed through Deutsch, I believe it's because there is so much Deutsch integrated into Americanized English.

We never question the origins of such words as Kindergarden, Kinder Spiel or Kaput because we hear them, even use them quite frequently yet we are already familiar with their meaning.

Moreover, many German words translate readily into English and vice-versa so even if we can't understand every word of what a person is saying, we can often comprehend the general idea.

Das ist ein - This is a...
Oder - Or
Nicht - Not
Nein - No

Answer 8

English is a descendant of German and Dutch is a cousin to them both. As the three are related, learning either is easier than Japanese which is very unrelated to any European language.

It's always easier to learn a language related to the one you start with than one that is not. However, relations aside, learning new languages is always fun :-)

Answer 9

Because with German and Dutch the syntax and the vocabulary are so close to English that they are easy to absorb. They are so alike, in fact, that you can take the risk of inventing words and phrases with a reasonable chance of getting them right -- or reasonably right. Japanese is wholly new and wholly strange. There are no easy ways round -- you have to work at it!

Answer 10

keep trying I think you might be a little tired. Japanese is not so much more difficult. I have a problem with speaking/learning German, but found Japanese words easier to speak and read