Why is Japanese so hard to learn?

Question

Japanese nouns have no genders, plural forms, or accompanying articles to learn. The language also has only two verb tenses, present and past, and includes very few irregular verbs. Spoken Japanese has only 5 vowel sounds and spelling is phonetically consistent, making the language relatively easy to pronounce. Why is this lanaguage so hard to learn then?

Answer 1

For all the reasons you've listed, it's quite easy to learn. Don't brainwash yourself into thinking it's hard. It'll come. Be patient.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

I think I can understand how challenging it is for you to learn Japanese. The agglutinative nature of Japanese gives it a lot of room for contextual variations.
In my opinion the hardest parts are:
1) learning to read kanji;
2) particles and suffixes.
As for the usage of particles, it seems almost impossible for ordinary Japanese people to logically answer every question that would arise. Only experienced Japanese teachers would be able to do that. Ordinary Japanese might be able to tell which of the sentences given sounds right if asked, but would not be able to give you logical explanations most of the time. But anyway thinking of it as being more challenging than it might really be is surely not the way to go. Just like you are struggling with Japanese, I'm having a hard time learning English. Personally I would recommend blogging in Japanese. Daunting as it may seem, blogging in a foreign language would be a lot of fun. I know it from experience. If you enjoy studying it, then blogging in Japanese would be your best bet. You don't have to write Japanese from scratch. You can rely on Google. I know not a few blogs written in Japanese by English-speaking people. Good luck with your studies.

Google Japan Advanced search:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=ja

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=&hl=ja&num=10&btnG=Google+%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2&as_epq=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E5%8B%89%E5%BC%B7%E3%81%8C%E3%82%93%E3%81%B0%E3%81%A3%E3%81%A6&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&as_rights=

Answer 4

Because its structure is totally different.

Imagine a completely mastered language as a six-story building. If that language is English for you, when you learn, say, French or Spanish, you can start from the fifth floor, becuase the first four floors are the same. You only need to build the upper two floors.

With Japanese, you need to go down to the second floow and start from there. Naturally it takes longer because you need to build five new floors instead of two, and may even run out of building materials.

Answer 5

well yeah in some ways it's easier but in some ways it's harder and like way different.

Unlike English, Japanese sentences have a different word order. Instead of having it be like Subject Verb Object, it's Subject Object Verb.

Japanese of course has 4 ways of writing and then even after that, kanji characters can have different readings.

Japanese grammar has different parts that account for social status/politeness and stuff. So yeah.

Also, Japanese is a whole different language! Every language has it's hard rules.

Answer 6

Japanese is extremely different from English. For example, Japanese has an extremely large number of nouns, and almost no nouns have exact English correlates. For example, ask people what the Japanese word for animal is. Most likely, everyone, without exception, will say doubutsu. Then, ask what the noun doubutsu includes, and most likely it will differ extremely greatly from what your English meaning is.

Answer 7

there are couple of reasons for this, first of all, you know japanese, you have to know 4 elements, consisting of kanji, hiragana, and katakana and latin alphabet. Those 4 elements differ from each other as Kanji, is basicaly chinese, symbol representing ideas not sounds, and the other 3 is based off of sounds.

example (me : in kanji 私 in katakana ワタシ in hiragana わたし and is pronounced Watashi)

japanses also has many different words for the same thing (ex Me or I can be Watashi, Ore, Boku....) there are also polite ways of saying things and normal way of saying things.

Answer 8

Japanese is actually easy to learn. I've become fluent through self teaching. Once you have a basic concept on the vocabulary, verb structure, and sentence structure it's quite easy. A lot of people try teaching themselves through the Japanese characters (Hirigana, Katakana, Kanji) first, which usually throws them off. I found it much easier teaching myself through Romanji(Roman characters, as in our alphabet) before learning the Japanese characters.

You really have to have an interest in Japan as a culture to learn the language. Listen to the music, watch the movies,make Japanese friends; they help A LOT.

Answer 9

Because the letter are so different and it doesnt derrive from a language like latin which most languages derrive from like english, spanish, italian, french, portuguesse etc.....

Answer 10

I guess they could say the same about english, as it is considered to be one of the hardest language to learn-yet they still manage to do it.