After reading the previous post comparing the number of vocabulary between Japanese and English, I thought of this question. I always found Japanese grammar to be more simple and fundamental, while English has these bunch of “pretentious” complex rules that sometimes doesn’t make sense but works. some of the concepts are abstract to non native English speakers.
The same can be said for English speakers learning a very different language like Hungarian or something, which has more complex grammar.
I kinda wished English had the same grammar concepts as Japanese, it just makes more sense.
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Slightly tangential, but English (AFIAK) isn’t the peak of ludicrous language laws.
<I ‘heart’ Lojban>
I still can’t wrap my head around the 4 conditionals and I hope/I wish (e.g. 晴れたらいいね, especially when speaking politely), should equivalents (べき, するといい, すればいい, はず), stuff like may (as in my jokes may be bad, but yours are even worse), other structures like とあって (when and how to use it), onomatopoeia (I barely even remember that words like きちんと, ずっかり, etc. exist), etc.
It’s not comprehension or the words themselves, but knowing when to use which and how to phrase things that gets me.
I believe yes, easier pronunciation as well. In my opinion, the hardest part of Japanese is Kanji/vocabulary and levels of politeness.
Casual Japanese is not that hard, but business Japanese is very very hard.
Futile debate, imo because depending on which language you’re coming from the answer is going to differ. A Korean speaker or Turkish speaker might say Japanese is quite easy, grammatically speaking, but a Chinese or English speaker might think it’s quite complex.
German is my native language and i find japanese gramma rly easy in theory, but its kinda Hard for me to translate Things, because japanese is kinda “free” how the language is Used. Dont know how to explain it, but that you can basically make a full sentence with just one word, or That you can just cut words out of a sentence.
I have a feeling in german we have a gramma point for everything and its very defined how to use it with no Real room to play with it. Also we dont rly have something like よ/ね like in ですね or at least i cant think of a proper Translation Thaz you would use in every day life. So its kinda Hard for me to use that, and my japanese friends tells me, that i come across very stiff, because i dont use that at All, because i dont think about it
I think so, at high levels grammar isn’t always easier (at least to me) but it is definitely more logical and consistent then English by orders of magnitude. That logical basis and consistency makes it significantly more straight forward to learn. It’s also well documented in a clear way, but just takes a bit to intuitively know the meanings with context (learning any languages take a bit to do this). I do find myself wishing English had some functionalities like Japanese for sure.
If anything I found Japanese to be a bit gimmicky with all these specific grammar points to express various niche things like “it seems that” versus “I believe that” versus “someone said that” and so forth. But in my mind, as a learner of both languages, English grammar feels a lot more loosely-woven and there’s a lot of little things to remember, so that even advanced English learners make mistakes with what should be the basics like prepositions or articles or using the right adverbs or whatever.
I think the oversimplification is more prone to cause misunderstandings. Some particles seem like they have too many different uses. It’s no surprise that Japanese people have had to develop a high level of “reading the air”.