is learning Japanese really that hard?

25 comments

1. Yes it’s hard, but you should still do it, because it’s fun.

2. It takes a serious amount of time. How hard is it to learn that ohayou gozaimasu, konnichiwa, and konbanwa are greetings for morning, noon, and night?

   Well, after basically accumulating bite sized blocks of learning over years, a monolith of japanese knowledge can be built.

3. It’s not necessarily too hard, just requires a lot of work to become any good at. But, learning anything is like that. A great place to start is Tofugu’s resources for learning [hiragana](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/) and [katakana](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/). You can get fairly comfortable with both syllabaries in only a few days, which provides the building blocks for the rest of your journey.

   Of course, you need vocabulary and grammar, too. I’ve personally had a lot of success learning with spaced repetition system (SRS)-based systems like [WaniKani](https://wanikani.com/) (for kanji), [KameSame](https://kamesame.com/) (for vocabulary and production), and [bunpro](https://www.bunpro.jp/) (for grammar).

   By some estimates, using these resources can provide you everything you need to become comfortable reading Japanese in only two years. In reality, life isn’t always simple, and it could take far longer than that. Still, in just a few months, if you focus, you should become comfortable enough to start reading simple books, and maybe even playing very simple games.

4. As someone who’s learning casually for a year now, yes it is hard, doesn’t mean it should stop you from trying if you care about the language. Compared to learning languages like Spanish or French as an English speaker, Japanese is noticeably more difficult because they operate in different ways (not a 1 to 1 conversion of words and phrases like Spanish and French). If you use good resources you can make it easier for yourself; it’s a genuinely fun thing to learn.

5. Yes. It’s one of the most complex languages in the world. The grammar is not superhard, but imagine almost every word in language uses different alphabet. And every alphabet is independent, knowing 99 of them doesn’t help to understand 100th. That’s what hieroglyphs are

6. I’ve studied French, Spanish and Japanese. Yes, Japanese is the most challenging but it’s not too hard to learn.

7. Well, let’s put it this way: if you want to be truly fluent, it will take you many, many years. It’s not something that you do as a lark. It takes commitment.

   But it’s also super rewarding. So it balances out.

8. It really depends what your goal is.

   Learning any foreign language is hard. Japanese is a little on the harder side for an English speaker in that the word order is totally different and they use some grammatical concepts (particles and politeness as a grammatical structure being two of the main ones) that we just don’t have, but also there are some things that make it easier (verb conjugation and grammar in general is extremely regular—there are only two irregular verbs in the entire language—which is the number one thing that makes English a hard language to learn). If your goal is just to get to where you can carry on a conversation about everyday things, it’s really not that bad.

   If your goal is to learn to read, well I won’t lie that’s a hell of a lot harder, and if you want to learn to write by hand … I wish you the best because it takes Japanese people a solid 15 years of schooling to learn to do that and many younger people who grew up with digital ways of writing struggle with it.

   Don’t let that put you off though, it’s really not that hard and my impression is that there are a lot of languages that are much harder out there: Slavic languages for instance, holy shit. In a little under three years of living in Japan I got to where I could live my life entirely in Japanese, carry on a conversation about most things, and read comic books and even a few novels (although the latter really came down to the author and the complexity of their prose). Good luck!

9. Definitely, at least if you’re starting off with English. I think the biggest barrier is that even after you gather an understanding of the grammar you’ll need to invest a lot of time into recognizing kanji. Getting to the point where you can read fluently and understand nuances takes a lot more investment than in other languages, but its worth it!

10. The language itself isn‘t too difficult on a conversational everyday level. If you aim to read books or work in a Japanese company, that‘ll be a hell of a journey.

11. Learning to speak Japanese isn’t really that bad, if you have even a slight knack for languages.
    Learning to write Japanese will have you pulling your hair out and vomiting out of sheer frustration. I had lived in Japan for about 6 months when I decided that I was going to just give up on actively learning kanji. I decided it was easier to just ask the nearest person what various road signs say.

12. Every language is hard. You can’t learn it in one day. All of them have easy and hard aspects – the Japanese writing system sucks but grammar is amazing, as a learner.

13. it’s hard

    you can do it anyways

    you have to make that kind of decision for yourself, no one telling you what to do is going to be the one putting in the effort

14. Learning any language takes a lot of commitment, time and effort. Although Japanese falls on the harder side for native speakers of English, it really won’t stand a chance against someone who is committed

15. Speaking is “easy”. Reading and writing kanji is what makes it crazy hard. Because reading and writing is so difficult, learning new vocabulary is an extremely slow and tedious process. In my opinion that’s what makes people lose motivation.

16. It’s easy to learn a few phrases but learning any foreign language to a high level is extremely difficult. People routinely underestimate how many YEARS of effort and study it takes to learn a foreign language, any foreign language, not just Japanese.

    That said, nothing worth doing is easy. Obviously plenty of people have successfully learned Japanese. But it does take a lot of effort and time. Do it because you enjoy it not because it’s easy.

17. When people say this they mean it’s too hard _for them_.

    I hugely regret ever listening to people who said something like this. I’m now learning and having a great time. I could have started way earlier.

18. I think alphabet is complicated for absolutely no reason. will get downvoted for this but it is what it is

19. it’s hard but it’s worth it. trust me I’ve been 3 years at the grind and I don’t regret it one bit

20. As an English speaker, there isn’t much of a common vocabulary and Japanese introduces a whole new writing system (three of them actually). In most western languages, the grammar is usually “subject verb object” but the grammar in Japanese is very different, it goes by “subject object verb”. Of course more complicated sentences have even more differences when it comes to grammar and what goes where.

    The Japanese language is much much different than English, which makes it harder for English speakers to learn it. But harder does not mean impossible, you can definitely do it if you dedicate yourself. It’ll take time and a lot of patience, but I believe it’s never impossible

21. I started two weeks ago and enjoying it still. I have finished memorizing Hiragana, Dakuon and its combos. That’s after about 25 hours total studying(I spend 1-2 hrs a day). I test myself over and over until I can recite from memory. I’m starting Katakana tomorrow. Learning new words everyday too. I don’t know if this is an average pace but it’s enjoyable. I find the way Japanese has different characters to memorize makes it a fun language to learn compared to many other languages that use the English alphabet.

    Give it a go, the best way I could describe it is more time consuming than hard. If you don’t take the time to learn it then it is hard. If you take the time, it’s fine. So far… lol

    I imagine kanji will be the most difficult part.

22. In short, it’s hard because of the time commitment to internalise everything compared to other languages.

    In terms of actual difficulty/mental effort it’s not that bad. Just takes an insane amount of practice.

23. Hey, if you want to do it, do it

    Who cares if other people think it’s too hard. Why listen to them anyway

24. Japanese is tricky because you have to learn hiragana, katakana, and kanji, and there are often sentences without a subject.

25. In my opinion, speaking and listening aren’t terribly hard only because the Japanese language has a much smaller phonemic inventory than English. As long as you get the phonemes, length, and pitch right, you’re pretty set.

    Grammar is one of the difficult leaps because if you try to learn Japanese grammar through English or Anglocentric concepts, you may fail to grasp the essence of the Japanese word or construction. What makes this difficult, of course, is that you can’t study Japanese in Japanese if you don’t know Japanese (although Minna no Nihongo aims to do this).

    Of course, as most people will mention, arguably the difficult part about learning Japanese for us foreigners is reading and writing. This is why I have such admiration for people who I consider functionally literate in Japanese. There are two phonetic syllabaries that convey sound, and Japanese also uses Chinese characters (kanji) to convey meaning. Most kanji can be read in more than one way, depending on the word it’s part of. Consider if, in English, we used the emoji 💧 to mean the concept of water, but we used it in all words that have “water” or “hydr-” or “aqua” in it — so, 💧melon, 💧ogen, and 💧marine have the same letter (emoji) 💧, but are not pronounced the same in “watermelon”, “hydrogen”, and “aquamarine”. That’s what it’s like to read kanji. (Did I mention the Japanese government has a list of 2,136 of them that are called “daily use kanji”? But you can get by in society only knowing about half, around 1,100.)