Now that I’m about a year into studying Japanese more seriously, I want to talk about an aspect of the language that is really challenging me.
Japanese Is Tough to Learn
There’s no doubt in my mind that you’ve heard Japanese is a hard language to learn. I suppose this is all relative to your native language, but Japanese is not exactly close to English. In contrast, one language I tried to learn in the past, Spanish, is really not too bad. I can read a lot of it, even now, though I haven’t studied it in several years.
With that said, I don’t really know how to assess the difficulty of a language, but it looks like the US military puts languages in three categories: those that can be learned in 36 weeks, those that can be learned in 48 weeks, and those that can be learned in 64 weeks. Here’s the rough breakdown:
- 36 weeks: French, Spanish, Indonesian
- 48 weeks: Persian Farsi, Russian
- 64 weeks: Modern Standard Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean
In other words, Japanese is one of the languages that the military spends the most time teaching. According to one site, even over 64 weeks, the “classes are intense,” where students are learning 6 to 7 hours a day in mostly the target language.
What People Say Is Difficult About Japanese
Of course, if you try to search up what makes Japanese a hard language to learn, you’re going to find some silly examples.
For example, most sources (such as here and here) will talk about kanji, one of the writing systems in Japanese. Generally, the arguments is that there are roughly 2,000 of them that you need to know to be considered fluent, and each character has multiple readings.
However, I find these to be less challenging when you consider them in context. Likewise, you can easily chip away at a few a day, especially with a spaced repetition tool like WaniKani. I’ve been casually learning some each day alongside my coursework, and I’ve already “learned” close to 200 of them in 200 days—along with another 350+ vocabulary. Obviously, I’m taking it very slowly, so it may be harder if you’re trying to go fast.
Likewise, a lot of sources will talk about the broad grammar differences, like how word order differs from English (e.g., Subject-Object-Verb). These big picture differences are pretty easy to overcome. The idea that sentences end with verbs will feel natural almost instantly. Particles, on the other hand, are definitely challenging.
Other sources will talk about Keigo, the way folks may speak to each other in a business setting. Broadly, I don’t find the concept so challenging, but I will admit that remembering all the appropriate verbs is tough. That said, beyond vocab, I don’t find it too difficult to be polite. The idea of being intentionally indirect or vague as a means of being polite feels pretty natural to me since we do this in English as well.
While I didn’t see it mentioned in these articles, I feel like a common meme in short-form content is poking fun at how many classifiers there are in Japanese. I don’t find the concept very challenging, but it is kind of funny how there are so many. There’s a counter for small objects, one for thin objects, one for flat objects, one for glasses of liquid, etc.
Perhaps other sources even mention how important context is, which I also find challenging. However, I find that paying attention alleviates a lot of the difficulty with context. In fact, if you just pay attention to what’s happening, you can often get by without understanding everything that someone said. I find that kind of cool.
Of course, perhaps this is the Dunning-Krueger portion of my studies and many of these “not so hard” things will turn out to be difficult. I suppose only time will tell. One thing is for certain: posting this publicly is putting me in a vulnerable position.
What Is Actually Difficult About Japanese
With that said, I can say with confidence that there is one aspect of Japanese that is comically difficult for me: morphology. I think I mentioned this previously in the series, but the way that Japanese lets you smash words together to create new meanings (or maybe combined meanings is a better way of putting it) truly baffles me.
The first time I was bothered by this was when I found out you could combine adjectives with verb stems to say things like 読みやすい, which means “easy to read.” From there, I believe you can treat the adjective portion like normal for conjugations and whatnot, but if this is possible with any verb stem, you basically unlock an unlimited number of new words. Sure, I could handle that on paper, but there’s no way I catch what sounds like unfamiliar words when listening.
Well recently, I was graced by a wonderful new form called んです. Now, I’ve learned you can take any adjective and slap on んです to give it a more “explanatory feel” (thanks Tofugu). This basically melted my brain because, once again, it felt like it multiplied the complexity of the language with one small addition.
Around the same time, I was exposed to the たい form, which converts a verb into an adjective with a meaning like “want to X.” If you want to eat, you say “食べたい”, except I’m under the impression that you typically don’t explicitly state your desires. Like, my textbook (NihonGo NOW!) says: “it is very often backgrounded by embedding it into an んです sentence.”
Combine the two (i.e., the たい form and んです) and you get the torturous activity I just experienced in class. I was presented with some challenging dialogue, where I played the role of a subordinate. My boss would ask me to do something, and I would say I wanted to do it but couldn’t (e.g.,したいんですけど) . Then, I would politely ask my boss if they could do it (e.g., していただけませんか？). My brain got so caught up in listening for the verb and trying to change its form that I actually froze a couple of times.
Let me put my frustrations this way: if I were building a programming language and someone suggested adding a feature that exploded its complexity like the few new forms I’ve recently learned, I would launch them into the sun.
All jokes aside, for me this is what makes Japanese so challenging. It seems there’s a nearly endless amount of ways to mix and match words, particles, phrases, and more to create new meanings. From a writing standpoint, it makes total sense. From a listening standpoint, I feel like I constantly have to retrain my ears or perform rapid deconstructions of new words on the fly. Even the way words sometimes are truncated leaves me confused (e.g., 木曜 as opposed to 木曜日).
On the other hand, I do admire the modular nature of Japanese, just mostly when I’m reading it. Listening to a language that has this much freedom or complexity feels challenging right now, so I rely a lot on “reading the air,” which I think fits comfortably in the culture of “場の空気を読み.”
Anyway, let me get back to my studies! For my own personal reference, I’ll mark this article down as happening just after Act 6 Scene 5 in the book, and I just completed session 57 in class. Pretty soon I will have completed the first volume of the series, so I’ll keep y’all updated with my progress. In the meantime, here are some other articles covering my experience with the language:
- Practicing My Toddler-like Japanese in Japan
- What It Feels Like to Be a Toddler Again: Learning a Language
- I’m Learning a Language, and I’m Tired
As always, if you’re enjoying this journey, keep the motivation alive by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, take care.
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