What’s the hardest thing to learn Japanese?

37 comments

1. That depends on a learner’s level. Beginners will say kanji no doubt (because that’s the first hurdle they run into, completely unaware of the rest of the language). Intermediate speakers will say kana-only words, loanwords, and onomatopoeic and mimetic words, and advanced speakers will probably say sounding natural and blending in.

2. The hardest part to learn about Japanese from English is the foundation of elements are wildly different

   It starts with the 3 visual alphabets

   Then the sounds of the language

   Then the grammar

   Then the attitude of the culture

   The combination of those 4 things is wildly difficult to get over the hump. I always say from my experience that the journey to learn Japanese is a learning experience as well

   For me, an example of that is maybe 3 times I had to examine my methods to see if they were serving the way I learn properly anymore. Not that the methods were wrong but each method served as a stage to get me to the next stage…

   Cheers, my 2 cents as an American. 4 years in

3. it depends. a lot of the difficulty comes down to either both people not being equally interested enough in helping the other, or there being a huge difference in speaking ability. i like fellow nerds that love language and society and psychology and we can discuss both our languages and their social contexts. but that’s a hard ask.

4. For me it’s not necessarily kanji itself, but the fact that nearly every kanji has two (or more!) pronunciations.

   My brain has a terrible time remembering which one is appropriate where.

5. Overuse of Katakana for foreign words. Due to the limited variation of sound, pronouncing Indo-European loan words directly through Katakana downsamples the quality and the accuracy of the original pronunciation, rendering it unrecognizable for the most of the time

6. As a beginner, I would say not knowing what I don’t know. Or rather, there are so many different ways to say the same thing, but as a beginner you’re often only taught one or two of those ways. It really locks down what you are and aren’t able to say imo

7. Grammar and syntax

8. 語彙力だな。ネイティブの語彙力は高すぎる。どんだけ勉強しても知らない単語はまだある

9. Besides learning Kanji and kana, for me the most difficult part is learning all the verb inflections. Taberu, tabemasu.tabetai,tabenai and so on.

10. When speaking, the order of the words. Putting the verb at the end still feels weird and I will accidentally put sentences in SVO order pretty frequently

11. 今の日本語能力の私は語彙、文法、読解、聴解が自分でほとんど勉強できるけど、会話はまだ一番難しい。なぜなら、話す時に、語彙と文法を能動的に考えなきゃいけない。語彙と文法の知識が広くても会話で使用できないっていう問題が多いと思うよ。

12. For me, it’s Kanji not having a direct correlation between text and speech.

    Words in a language like english, that uses latin alphabet, are all symbols that directly correlate each to a specific sound, so whenever you read a word, you’re just reading instructions on how to speak them.

    Kanji having multiple readings each just bugs my brain so much because it basically separates the learning of writing and speaking. Like, most of the times, I read a sentence containing a Kanji, I know what the sentence and what said Kanji mean, but I can’t read out loud because I don’t know how to pronounce the Kanji, only the hiragana/katakana parts.

13. Being consistent.

14. You guys have very difficult grammar haha

    I’m Chinese myself so a lot of the culture and kanji is easy for me to understand but the grammar is very complex.

    I think it is very cool that some of the sentences in Japanese sound straight out of the Tang Dynasty. 君 is a great example!

15. A lot of words have same meaning but you have to use them in different situations. Im not english Native speaker so…

16. I sort of just started like 3 weeks ago and have put in ~25 hours of so far. Most difficult at this point is the 2 alphabets plus kanji. I have been somewhat surprised that some things are actually easier to learn than they were in French (specifically not having to remember like 10 forms of the to be equivalent). Pronunciation isn’t too hard. I am sure I sound pretty bad but getting kinda close to the right pronunciation is easier than many other languages. I am sure as I go further grammar will be confusing but at this point with simple sentences it makes sense.

17. そもそも一般的に言語ような事が覚えられるのは難しいかもしれませんが、現在個人的には日本語のところが３つのむずって事あると思うんです。
    第一：漢字、以上です。はい。
    第二：敬語、大体わからないです。
    第三：文化を学ぶことは言語を学ぶ事と同じくらい重要です。

    I learn Japanese as a self-study. I consume media I love and recently I have started actively studying outside of that (no text books or anything like that). Reading, writing, listening are my primary means of immersion. I’ve been trying to improve my writing ability lately and enjoying it.

18. I would say unique grammar concepts that sometimes can’t be directly translated to other languages such as the whole transition to different verbal tenses when speaking informally, construct such as jisshyou-kei + koto ga dekimasu vs ta-kei + koto ga arimasu

19. For me, right now, it’s keeping hold of the unsaid part of the thread of conversation. The tiny extra bit of thinking I have to do to fill in the unsaid subject (“見ましたか？” Oh, “Did *she* see it?”) is often just enough for me to miss something important in the next sentence, and that drops me straight out of the conversation. Once I’ve lost the thread, I have to wait for a whole new topic before I can start tracing who is talking about what.

    If native speakers want to be a little more inclusive to Japanese learners whose native language is from Europe (and maybe other languages too, but I can’t speak from that perspective myself), what I’d ask them to do is to include “signposts” more often. Basically, more “私は。。。” and “中村さんの。。。” than is strictly necessary or natural. I am always *so thankful* when I hear those. It’s a lifeline!

20. The hardest thing for me right now (at around N5 level) is listening. I am struggling the parse the words as they come in to my brain in realtime. I get the start and end of the sentence, but everything in between is like もう一回下さい。。。

21. Personally for me, I hate kanji bc it’s just rote memorization, which I find super boring. Otherwise, for me at least, it’s pushing past intermediate into actual fluency. I can get around fine in Japan and I can get my message across. Native Japanese speakers know I’m not perfect but for the most part, we can communicate. After that I feel like it’s difficult to move into more advanced fluency bc you really have to put in the effort. It’s easy to plateau and to be like, well I can communicate enough. Especially now that I don’t live in Japan anymore and I don’t have it regularly in my life.

22. んだ

    ２５年間ほど日本語勉強してきたけど「んだ」はまだうまく使えない気がする。

    アクセントも難しい。

23. For me a few hard topics are using the following correctly:

    -そのとあの、それとあれ (talking not about things of course)

    -んです、のです, なんです、なの

    ーついに、いよいよ、とうとう、結局

24. The grammar for sure, textbooks are awful at introducing grammar and explaining it the way it is, they only make parallels to English grammar and explain things like “Using this here means this” without going into detail about word origin and what words actually mean

25. 私はもうそろそろ十年間ぐらい日本語を勉強しているけど、一番難しいことは一つではなく、3つがある。

    １．高低アクセント

    勘弁してくれ。単語のアクセントはいいけど、文章の中のアクセントは嫌だー
    という気持ちをお持ちしております。

    ２．助詞

    まだ「に」や「が」や「を」など使い間違っている。

    ３．英語に使っている慣用語は日本語できないこと

    例えば「ルールを守ってください」は英語で言わない慣用語から、全ての使用と使い方を勉強しなければならない。

26. Native Japanese in real life always speaks way too fast compared to anime or something…

27. Find it really difficult to learn understanding the grammar structure in the most natural way. I know the particles, I know conjugations, but when you combine it and give me a long ass sentence, I immediately get lost. My brain just automatically goes translation mode trying to decipher what it means.

    A lot of reference materials are readily available but I also find it overwhelming having to go back and forth different resources. I just want a gradual progression where you take on longer sentences slowly.

28. The key difference in understanding basic concepts.

    Long time ago i got japanese teacher and it was awful and useless experience. Not because teacher was bad – she was probably brilliant – but she taught like she would teach japanese people with Japanese basic education. Core differences in perception made it fruitless.

    So that was the most difficult thing for me.

    Yea, there is natural reluctance in Japanese to talk to foreigners so finding someone who will talk (and most importantly, will correct me when i am wrong) is really difficult

29. I’ve studied for 5 years now and the thing I struggle with is the many ways of expresing something with a very specific feeling. For example だけ and しかare some of the easiest that come to mind but there are many others.

30. I don’t know if it’s the hardest thing to ‘learn’, but I would say the hardest part of learning is, at least initially, you know ‘nothing’ and have to build from there.

    And when you know ‘nothing’, going from knowing ‘nothing’ to knowing ‘100 words’, is plenty of work, but in terms of it’s practical application, say if you wanted to have a conversation with someone in Japanese on the street, or if you wanted to read a Japanese news article, the difference between knowing ‘nothing’ and ‘100 words’ is so small you would need an electron microscope to see it. It doesn’t feel like it’s made any immediate kind of difference.

    So it’s like an inverted learning curve until you get over the hump of knowing enough to be able to make practical use of the language, which takes a long time..

31. For me it’s the freaking grammar and keigo 😔

32. I think knowing what particles to use where is the hardest for me right now. You really can’t describe it in any simple way, and there’s so many situations where only a certain one can be used but it’s difficult to understand *why* instead of just trying to remember.

    For example, you use が for ほしい but を for ほしがる? (Unless I’ve mixed them up again) I think it has to do with being an adjective vs a verb, but it’s still a bit confusing. I’m sure I’ll get more of a feel for it eventually, though.

33. やはり言葉の使い分けでしょうね。 言葉の類義語や同意語がいっぱいあって全部知っても気を付けないと変なことを言ったりします。まあ気を付けても変なことを言いますけど。

34. Right now, my biggest hurdle is that Japanese textbooks teach more formal Japanese. However, the vast majority of people don’t talk like they do in textbooks, haha.

    On the other hand, super formal Japanese also confuses me. I remember being at a hotel and calling the front desk. I asked in Japanese if they had coffee. The answer was, “De gozaimasu.” I was like, “?????” Does that mean “yes”? (I guessed it did and got my coffee in the end but it was definitely a moment of confusion for me)

    So, basically, I would say one of the hardest things about learning Japanese is learning all the different ways of speaking it, especially based on the social situation.

    My other biggest hurdle is the sheer amount of homophones. The spoken word かい can be 会, 回, 階, 貝 and that’s just off the top of my head. I know context matters, but as a beginner, when Japanese people speak at normal speeds, I just don’t have the ability to interpret those words at the speed needed to keep up.

35. Right now as Im studying, the different pronunciations of kanji and intransitive/transitive verbs. Im still having trouble with 上げる and 上がる lol

36. The most difficult thing for me is context. Anything that can be inferred from context may be omitted, including but not limited to topic, subject, direct object, indirect object, and even verb!

37. In that order:

    1) The foreignness of the language, I could feel how my brain had to rewire itself over the time. That was much more work than for other languages that are similar to my native language German.
    2) 五十音 – only 50-100 moras, everything sounds similar, words like koushou have countless meanings.
    3) The grammar, e.g. there are 35 translations for “even” and depending on context you have to pick a specific one. Basic grammar is simple and very logical, but when it comes to phrases with iu, koto, bakari, tokoro etc. everything gets very complicated.
    4) The huge amount of everything: over 700 grammar point, basic vocabulary of 10,000 words, around 2500 characters you have to know, multiple expressions for the same thing depending on politeness, family context etc.
    5) Katakana in combination with loan words, I still can’t read most of them fluently (with kanji and hiragana I have no problem).
    6) Kanji, especially that they have multiple pronunciations so you don’t really know how an unknown word is pronounced (I don’t like that in English too).
    7) Horizontal and vertical writing – if your brain already recognizes word patterns instead of single characters in horizontal writing, you don’t get that for vertical writing, you have to train reading both variants to achieve that. I can read horizontally fluently but I completely suck at reading vertical text, I didn’t expect that.

    When people list kanji as the most difficult part, you know that they are just beginners. 😉