I’ve only ever tried learning French (I gave it up in favor of Japanese.) But it felt like I understood more in less time. Maybe it is attributed to the fact that I’m American but it still :/
I’m just struggling to memorize 2K words atm how do people make time to do this when they don’t live in Japan
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According to Wikipedia: 45% of English words have French origin. So, of course, it’s easier for you to learn French vocab.
Sounds pretty normal that you’d find Japanese harder than French. Lots of English words come from French and Latin, so there’s a nontrivial degree of lexical similarity between English and French. French also uses the familiar Latin alphabet and has fairly similar grammar to English.
I guess the way you make time is the same as for anything else in life. Ultimately you need to prioritize what you feel is important to you and focus your attention on those things. Naturally, that will entail sacrificing time you could have used for other things, but these are all personal choices. Also don’t forget that it’s going to take a long time, so try not to be too hard on yourself. I presume you’re learning Japanese as a hobby, so remember to have fun with it above everything else.
Its way easier from English to French as these languages are related. Japanese is just very, very different. Therefore don’t see the issue in that, just keep learning and when you build a small base, the vocabulary will grow step by step 😉
I’ve seen a graphic that demonstrates how effective the “learn 1000 most common words” method is.
And for Japanese, this is highly ***ineffective***. Daily conversation uses way more words.
I am bilingual in English and Chinese, but I found Japanese a bit easier.
Japanese vocabulary seems a bit limited compared to English which has tons of homonyms and much more ‘flowery’ – English people enjoy using bombastic words to showcase their language ability.
Not that common in Japanese.
There’s very little word overlap between Japanese and English, if we ignore the 外来語 words. The problem is that, although katakana words exist, what really messes with people is the inability to intuit an “origin” to the words, which in turn makes it harder to remember them.
Speaking as an Italian, learning words like “lactose” for me was super easy in English because the root/origin of the word clearly comes from Latin and in Italian latte = milk, so my brain instantly makes a correlation. With Japanese there’s no such thing (if you come from a western language). You have kanji that help a lot, however you can leverage that advantage only later in your studies once you’re already familiar with the language.
On top of that, Japanese has pretty much “two” separate language styles when talking about kanji words: 和語 and 漢語. More often than not most words can be written in “Japanese style” (歩く = to walk) or “Chinese style” (散歩 = a walk/stroll), this is similar to french vs germanic word origins in English (pig vs pork, cow vs beef, etc) except taken to the extreme. *On top* of all of this, Japanese employs several registers of politeness (行く vs 参る, もらう vs いただく, etc) which also add more and more words to the mix.
So yes, Japanese is definitely a very complex language not only because you come from a language that is not familiar/similar to it, but also because it’s a very complicated mix of multiple languages, writing systems, and cultures.
But hey, at least you don’t have to remember a lot of irregular verbs and conjugation tables like in French 🙂