Why People Say Japanese Is Hard To Learn And Why They’re Wrong

February 22, 2012 by Hashi 132 Comments

Japanese can be a tough language to get into. Not because it’s a hard language to learn, necessarily, but because there are a bunch of mental barriers and misconceptions. Koichi’s talked a bit about this before, but there’s a bit of an elephant in the room: Japanese has a reputation for being hard to learn.

I can kind of understand why – Japanese can be scary to people. You have to learn all these brand new characters, grammatical structures and – oh God – there’s kanji. Nothing scares off a potential Japanese student like kanji.

Native English speakers instead like to learn Romance languages (Spanish French Italian) because they’re so similar to English in a lot of ways.

But I’m here to tell you that it’s all a bunch of crap. People tend to build up Japanese as an impossible language to learn but, in my experience, Japanese is straight-forward and easy to learn.

Let’s look at the nay-sayers and why they’re wrong.

Who Says It’s Difficult

Within the US government, there’s an organization called the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). It prepares US diplomats and other government officials for trips abroad by teaching them the language and culture.

The FSI has a ranking system for languages based on how difficult they are and how long they take for native English speakers to learn.

The FSI prepares US diplomats for foreign affairs

The easiest languages are our old buddies, the Romance languages: Spanish, French, and Italian, among others. Most of these languages are in the same language family as English.

And, according to the FSI, the hardest are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin.

The FSI can be pretty hard to argue against. After all, it has plenty of experience teaching languages, so presumably the FSI knows better than most.

But I think that the FSI isn’t giving Japanese a fair shake. There are lots of aspects of Japanese that are pretty simple and straight-forward, even for native English speakers.

Why Japanese Is Easy To Learn

Most people get hung up over a few specific aspects of Japanese while ignoring the nice and easy ones. When you look at Japanese compared to other languages, there are a lot of things about Japanese that are actually much easier.

Sounds

For one, Japanese phonology (the sounds that make up the language) is really simple. There are only five basic vowel sounds (most of which are common in other languages), and the consonants are pretty basic as well.

Compare that to English phonology. English phonology, especially the vowels, and much more complex than Japanese.

Another nice thing about Japanese is that it isn’t a tonal language. In a bunch of different languages, like Mandarin or Vietnamese, your meaning varies depending on your tone

In Japanese, the pitch of your voice does matter a bit, but it’s not nearly as pronounced as in tonal languages.

Grammar

Anybody who has tried to learn a Romance language knows that subjunctive tense will make you want to rip your hair out. What is subjunctive tense? Basically, it’s expressing a future desire.

In Japanese, it’s really, really easy to do. But in other languages, well…let’s just say that I’m a native English speaker and, to be honest, I don’t have a clue how subjunctive tense works in English.

And if you’ve studied Spanish or French at all, you know that in those languages, different nouns have different genders and need to be treated differently. El biblioteca is different from la biblioteca.

In Japanese, you don’t have to deal with any of this. At all. A chair isn’t male and a library isn’t female. You will never have to guess the gender of an inanimate object.

K-k-k-kanji!

Even kanji, the boogeyman of the Japanese language, is actually pretty easy. Technology has not only made it a lot easier to learn kanji (through spaced repetition systems), but a lot easier to read and write kanji too. You no longer have to memorize the stroke order of each kanji; now, you can just type it in!

Don’t fear the kanji!

And if you don’t know a kanji, it’s incredibly easy to look it up on a phone or electronic dictionary. Much nicer than lugging around a thick kanji dictionary.

Of course, it’s not easy to say that one language is objectively easier to learn than another. Language learning, generally, is a very subjective experience.

Don’t get me wrong – Japanese can definitely be a struggle for new learners. Different people learn differently, there’s no two ways about it.

But learning Japanese might not be as insurmountable a task as you think. Give it a shot – you may even find that Japanese is a breeze for you.

[Header image source.]

About Hashi

Futurist, Portlander, Tofugu employee #1.

rodrigo

What you say about Spanish might actually be true! We have 6 different past tenses 2 of which I had never heard of until I studied some grammar on my own. Also, here in Peru most people speak with fairly simple constructions and, as such, use an incorrect tense or mood.
http://twitter.com/toranosukev Toranosuke

Whenever people learn that I’m studying Japanese, they’re amazed, and they make comments about how difficult it must be. Sure, there’s keigo, and I do find it quite difficult to manage politeness levels (not in concept, but in practice, on the spur of the moment as I’m talking), but kanji really aren’t that hard once you get the hang of it, and most of all, as you say, (1) no tones, simple vowel pronunciations, and nothing weird (to the view of a native English speaker) such as the glottal stops in Okinawan; (2) very few irregular verbs! wooo!; (3) less complex conjugations. Where Spanish has voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van, Japanese has 行く、行く、行く、行く、行く、行く。
http://twitter.com/Reevine Vladimir Krasko

Several actually. They all toil away in a basement making his ale.
http://twitter.com/Reevine Vladimir Krasko

I concur. I took four years of Spanish and despise it! Spanish = no bueno.
However I love Japanese! (when I’m actually doing my studies like I’m supposed to lol)
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3AWQP2SWYKSRM6G3IPOHKDNWUA Viking Nieku

I wanna learn japanese right now!!!
But I can’t. Not because I think it’s hard to learn but because my school in the netherlands makes it required to learn English, German and French. I still need to wait another year till i can drop my French and German lessons. :( But then i’ll have the time and money to learn japanese! :D
Great article btw!
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_3AWQP2SWYKSRM6G3IPOHKDNWUA Viking Nieku

I wanna learn japanese right now!!!
But I can’t. Not because I think it’s hard to learn but because my school in the netherlands makes it required to learn English, German and French. I still need to wait another year till i can drop my French and German lessons. :( But then i’ll have the time and money to learn japanese! :D
Great article btw!
juli

i am german and i started to learn japanese a while back and having english and latin and spanish in school i got an impression of learning grammar. and japanese is a blessing. only thing you have to learn is vocabulary and kana and kanji. what i think is most important is that you have someone to talk to in japanese. i hadn’t and i think i forgot everything over the last years. or it’s hidden somewhere in my brain, i don’t know.
about learning other languages: i once saw an interesting documentary on some elementary school in Finland, where they have a lot of foreign kids and they are teaching 51 languages. they say, only if you really understand the grammar of your native language, you are able to learn any other languages.
Ivesomthingtosay

Bad example. Eat is a middle English vowel combination. It’s not Eat (emphasis on E) but EAt (emphasis on EA.) See also : sEA, mEAt, sEAt, pEAt. The EA structure once had a distinct pronunciation (as can still be heard in Northern Irish pronunciation, where Sea and See are not homophones.) However, because of other spelling inconsistencies in English, you could have used ‘be’ and ‘edible’.
Ivesomthingtosay

For an English speaker, Dutch is far closer to English than Japanese is. English and Dutch are the most closely related National languages (with Frisian being the most closely.) The issue is that English adopted big chunks of Latin and French vocabulary, which clouds this relationship. But think on this:

My name is John. How goes it? What is that? I have five fingers. Monday it was cold
Mijn naam is Jan. Hoe gaat het? Wat is dat? Ik heb vijf vingers. Maandag was het koud.

“How goes it?” is a little convoluted, but is still valid English. What we can conclude is that Dutch is pretty similar to the basic structure of English. The main differences are the wider vocab and specific grammatical points.
Ivesomthingtosay

I thing the problem with vietnamese is that it has both tone markers and vowel markers. So, some of the diacritic change the tone (your acute, grave, and the weird fullstop (period) under a vowel and little questionmark) and some change the vowel sound (so, the ^ (roof) the ‘ (single quote)) So toi, to^i (hat over O) and to’i are different, but the same tone. If you miss one of the vowel modifiers, you are going to mess the basic phoneme up – which is pretty bad for a phoneme based language. Once you have those basics down, I think it’s a lot easier to get the general pronunciation right. Kinda..
Madbeanman

Its really weird but I dont know if youve ever heard of hedging. Its like when you put in lots of extra things into a sentence to advoid offense. Obviously Japanese people are amazingly good at this but the people who do it best in English are Irish people (I know because Im the closest thing to a leprechaun Ive found in Ireland and we learned all about it in linguistics). So for some reason when I read what you write I always think you were Irish from the way you phrase stuff. Its endearing dont worry :)
blacky

Japanese is even easier to learn than English. ^^ And you don’t trap in false friends that often, ’cause Japanese isn’t really connected to any other language. While all those Romanic languages are so easy to mess up -.-
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Well, I’m part Irish and part Japanese, so I guess that makes me the ultimate in hedging! I’m at least glad that it’s endearing hahaha
simplyshiny

Great article! Very informative comments too! Now if I just had you hear to kick my ass into actually studying, maybe I could see how easy it could be!
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

That documentary sounds really interesting, do you happen to remember the name of it?
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Okinawan has glottal stops? I had no idea.
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Thank you for this fantastic comment, I don’t think I could have explained kanji and kanji learning better than you did.
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Oh, interesting. I guess I didn’t really understand what grammatical gender is, thank you for correcting me.
Mescale

The easiest language I learnt was German, that said that was quite a few years ago, and I didn’t really learn it, but I didn’t have any problems making teachers think I was learning it. Which sometimes is all that matters when you’re 12 and at school.

I lived in France for 4 years and didn’t learn French. I would put this down to 3 reasons.

1. Whenever I was taught French it was through a rigorous and deranged grammatical method it was assumed I understood. Conjugation, futur imperfet, passe compose, etc. etc. I never got around to struggling with French because I was struggling with the grammar. Sorry I never learnt English that way.

2. Very little chance to speak French. I worked in at an American company speaking English all day. The French people at the company didn’t talk to us. And its actually really easy to survive in a foreign country with no knowledge of the language. Through…

3. Non-verbal communication. I am very adept at communicating with people through non-verbal methods. I didn’t talk until I was 3 years old because I didn’t have to, I could easily make myself understood with my expressions, gestures and so on. Now you may think, hey maybe you were just retarded, and that is what everyone thought. However, I first really began speaking when my mother took my sister to Junior school, my mother left me in the care of the head mistress, whilst my mother and my sister talked to the teachers.

When I was left, I was the uncommunicative child whose first word at 3 years of age was cake, when she came back I was talking in full sentences. The head teacher had taken me around the school and shown me the wall displays and talked to me about new and interesting things, and I spoke back, in full sentences, my mother was then astonished when she returned to the head teacher who told her how incredibly talented her son was at speaking and expressing himself for his age, when the only word she could get out of me was cake, and had taken me to numerous doctors to find out why I wasn’t speaking and they could find no reason.

Its also worth noting this head mistress was the first woman’s heart I broke, apart from my mothers, when I ran away from school and got caught by the lollipop lady. Sorry Mrs England. Now I feel bad now for my Senior School Chemistry teacher whose heart I also broke, when I arrived I was so bright eyed and eager then she went to japan got married, came back and found out I had turned into a lousy student, I’m sorry to you too, but I don’t remember your name. The drama school teacher can still go to hell, you caused me to become more introverted and self concious and did great damage to myself as a person, I am glad I said bad words to you. Art teacher lady, you meant nothing to me either way, though I think she was only disappointed in me.

Anyway I digress. I am very adept at reading a the context of a situation, reading body cues and expressions, to a point I can understand what someone is saying without understand what they are saying.

Its neat, but its also a bit of an albatross, because everyone thinks you’re really good at understanding the language, when you don’t understand it at all, then they assume you are better than you are and teach you at a high level. And despite all this you occasionally amaze them with your language skills. For instance one French lesson we watched a interview with the French guy that invented Parkour, he explained why he did it etc. I didn’t understand what he was saying so much as his ideas about Parkour. Simply put society pigeon holes us into some way to act or be, paths are made for us to travel along, metaphorically and actually, Parkour is about finding your own path, your own way to travel physically as a way to strike back against the metaphorical cage we are forced into.

Anyway I understood the concepts behind Parkour, not from understanding what he was saying, I got maybe 1 word in 20, but from non verbal cues, from previous experiences, my own personal feelings etc. And when I busted out practically an English translation of what the guy had said my French teacher decided I was super great, and when I swore blind I didn’t and explained it wasn’t from knowing French, he swore blind it was part of understanding of the language.
And so I continued to be taught French in a way which I didn’t get at all.

Now I apologise for my verbosity, I have rewritten this post 3 or 4 times and each time it has ballooned into a monstrosity, but I do think apologising to your Teachers is important. On that though, sorry German teacher who thought I was good at German but really I wasn’t and got a poor grade, I just remembered about that when I re-read my post.
Guest

I’m learning Spanish in school, and it’s pretty easy for me since my grandad is a retired author and english teacher.The Japanese is much harder than Spanish for me, but Japanese vocabulary is about as hard as Scots.
meg

can you tell me more about the puppy in the header?
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Since Japanese can be easy, and not hard like some people think, you should think of happy things like puppies!
Charon

I would agree Japanese is probably easier to learn than English for someone with no relation to either.
And it’s arguable that Japanese is unconnected from anything: Japanese is based off old Japanese which is arguably related to Korean and Mongolian etc. and later took a huge number of Chinese loanwords, in the same way as English is based off Old English and later took in Norman (Latin) loanwords. This is apparent with some words that sound practically the same in Japanese and Chinese, but this by no means means that people who speak Chinese can easily learn Japanese.
Charon

I have to mostly disagree with (the title of) this article. Of course, if the FSI says it’s hard, it’s hard, and they would know. I think that Japanese is one of those languages that’s quick to learn once you get the hang of it, but there’s a few problems:
Take Spanish, where when you learn the word “periódico”. Once you know the word, and that it uses “el”, then you’re done.Now let’s take Japanese: you can learn “shinbun” and great, now you can say “newspaper”.But what if you see 新聞? Now you have to learn what seeing that means and to relate it to “shinbun”.Let’s say you’ve learned that. What if you have a piece of paper and need to write “shinbun”? Now you need to know how to write 新聞 which is a whole other challenge over recognising. And if you have a strict teacher, you’ll need correct stroke order too.Now what if you see the word 新しい or 聞く? That’s not “shinshii” or “bunku”- you need to know the OTHER ways of saying the same character, which is dependant on context and/or other kanji/kana around it.
So every time you learn a new (spoken) word, you feel proud of yourself that you learned something. When you learn a new kanji to use with that word, you feel proud. When you learn the kanji’s on’yomi and/or other kun’yomi, you feel proud. When you learn how to write the word with its kanji, you feel proud. But all of those things put together are just one and a half challenges in Spanish: learning the word and its gender. Once you can say a Spanish word, you can instantly read and write it. (Technically if you use only kana in Japanese you can do that, but Japanese is annoying to read without Kanji and you’d look like a preschooler. Besides, Japanese people know 2000+ kanji and you’d better believe they’ll use them against you).As for grammar, not conjugating verbs by person and number and not having genders and not having subjunctive is really really refreshing, but once you get beyond beginner grammar, Japanese grammar is harder than you’d think. It may be simpler than Spanish grammar objectively, but Spanish grammar is pretty similar to English, and Japanese grammar is wildly different (despite what some teachers may make you think). Being able to talk fluently without grammar mistakes in Japanese is at least as hard as with Spanish (believe me, I have learned both). Particles and collocation are a bitch, and the conjugations get fun once you learn conjunctive, conditional vs. provisional, passive (really weird), volitional, polite (masu), causative, etc. etc. (and note that in Japanese there’s an entirely different theory on grammar than English-language textbooks will ever teach you). And don’t even get me STARTED with keigo. In short, learning Spanish grammar is surely harder than learning Japanese if you’re Chinese, but it’s a different story if you’re anglophone.As for pronunciation, sure it’s nice that each kana is theoretically pronounced exactly one way (with two exceptions that I recall- は and を), but in practicality this is definitely not the case. The す in すき（好き） is indeed pronounced differently than the す in すむ（住む）. 端, 橋, and 箸, all はし, are pronounced differently by native speakers. Fluent, native-sounding Japanese pronunciation is about as hard to learn as the relatively insane-sounding French (again, I have learned both). Far too often do I hear a Japanese student completely butcher the language because they think all morae are pronounced exactly one way and they disregard the pitch-accent system entirely (好き sounds like “ski”, not “sue key”!!!).Knowing all of this, you may ask “why do you even bother learning Japanese then?” Because it’s -fun-. It’s really, really interesting to me learning one of only two (I think) living languages that still ubiquitously use an ideographic script. The grammar is so foreign, and you start to think differently when you know it. And on top of that, it opens up the world of Japanese culture that is normally so secretive and closed-off.Can Japanese be hard to learn? Absolutely. Does it often get me really frustrated? Sure. Should you give up now? Definitely not. Learning Japanese is like exploring a brand new world. (And if you’re American, it’s listed as a “critical language”, meaning great scholarship and job opportunities!)

Congratulations if you read through this whole post.
http://twitter.com/shollum Shollum

True, depending on when and where you are (’cause we always assume time travel is possible) things are pronounced in a completely different way. My example was based on the common US pronunciation of ‘eat’.

Depending on how you pronounce things, ‘a’ and ‘what’ can have a sound similar to ‘uh’. That’s why you look at the most common things instead. Japanese sounds can be pronounced differently as well, but normally they are the same.
Ivesomthingtosay

Well, no.. Ethernet and EAt sound the same to me too… but the reason you gave is still incorrect. Ethernet is EEthernet, because the stress is in the first syllable and English tends to use “EE” (long E, as you put it) for E in that position. EA on the other hand, is generally always pronounced EE, because that vowel combination makes that sound in Modern English spelling.
Untmdsprt

I ignore all people including the Japanese who tell me the language must be difficult for me. I figure they’re failures at their own language learning.

Japanese is easier than English, and I consider kanji to be time consuming. I try to learn a few a day and what do you know, you’ve learn 2000+ in a year. How is that difficult?
http://twitter.com/xalking Xalk

Thanks for this great article, I am always horrified when I see people’s response to my Japanese Language studies as either shock “It’s it hard!?! I’ve heard it’s so difficult…” or “good for you, that’s a tough thing to learn” Kanji is a huge study and comprehension life saver, I will never forget kanji, even if I forget a word.
http://www.twitter.com/christaran Chris Taran

One of these years I’ll figure out how to learn at least a single kanji!
Peter Locke

Of course a website all about Japanese culture would say that Japanese is an easy language to learn!

I’m sure that the websites all about Chinese or Korean culture or whatever would say the same thing about their languages.
Rotten 1

Hello! Enjoyed the article! But, would like to point out, the biggest hurdle to language learning, is training. The more you ‘hear’ how hard something is gonna be, the harder it may be! Also, most schools in the US don’t or won’t offer ‘foreign’ languages, outside the Spanish, French, German set. I’ll be chequing out the rest of the articles. This stuff looks great!
elisabel

Totally agree with this post. People often look at the hard aspects of a language and then totally ignore all the things that make it easy, or at least balance it out with the native language. Counters in Japanese seem like a bit of a hassle, but since nouns don’t have plural forms, I think it balances out with the English system of having singular and plural forms of nouns, many common ones with irregular changes at that. I may not like having to think about the shape of the objects I’m counting to pick the right counter, and I’m sure my students don’t like having to worry about implying that they are 98 years old by writing “I brush my tooth.” You may have to remember whether nouns are masculine or feminine or both in Spanish, but in return you don’t have to worry about words being pronounced in a radically different way from the way they’re spelled. I think it all balances out rather nicely. : )
http://www.japaneseruleof7.com/ Ken Seeroi

I heard of this one guy who was really fat, and he learned Japanese in an hour. Really. It’s that easy! After that he made a million dollars by stuffing envelopes in his spare time. Then he started eating just one banana for breakfast every day, and in a month he lost 100 pounds! Then he became an astronaut!
Nicholas Meyer

I recently had the fun experience of reading (in english) with kids at all sorts of differing skill levels. I guess I see it often enough with my own kids too – but wow- seeing our twisted stupid native tongue through the eyes of a native “newbie” is a good lesson to the polyglot. We have heavy context laden pronunciations, goofy (and highly inconsistent) grammar and spelling rules. English is brutal. Native speakers just had the advantage of growing up with it as the only option to communicate. We also tend to forget how things were very hard when we were learning them… Seeing fairly bright kids struggle with “simple” common words and grammar constructs like tense and negation reminded me of that.

Long comment – to the payoff: I know english (albeit imperfectly as a native speaker). I use that dumb-luck skill as inspiration that I can learn any other language that I apply my clever little monkey brain to.

(yeah – that’s right, dangling participle – eat that grammarians – HA!)

French, Greek, a ‘smidge of Latin and Spanish…. Come on Japan, bring it on! Just remember – it took you years to learn your native tongue, I’m betting you still are learning it (or at least don’t have it mastered). いそがば　まわれ – 急がば　回れ
nagz

great article. and learning kanjis is FUN. i’m not kidding, it’s like making 2000+ friends. some of them seem like they’ve been friends ever before. some are meanies but still lovable. some are resembling others by behaviour, some give a bad impression at first but realize you tend to hang out with them a lot.
http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

Amazing!
http://twitter.com/gretzky99_ gretzky99

Counters are definitely not grammatical genders and they have nothing to do with them at all! Practically Japanese counters are quite similar to collective nouns in English.

Grammatical genders trigger gender-specific inflections or conjugations and there’s no such thing in Japanese.

If there were genders in Japanese, they would be something like this:
Let us assume that the word 車 has male gender and 電話 has female gender. With grammatical genders the negation of the 2 words could be different because their genders are different. (for example 車じゃない and 電話じない or something like this).
http://twitter.com/gretzky99_ gretzky99

Great post!

Learning vocabulary in a language that uses the latin alphabet basically means that you have to learn a word’s phonetic form and meaning then link them and you’re done because you can usually produce the written form from the word’s phonetic form. In Japanese learning to write individual kanji is no big deal but achieving a reasonable handwriting speed (when expressing your own thoughts on paper, not when copying a text) requires a tremendous effort in my opinion. In my own case it causes a great overhead when I learn new vocab.

Articles that promote Japanese as ‘not that difficult’ tend to avoid this thing.
Edohiguma

Well, I was told, back when I started with Japanology, that it’s not hard, it’s just a lot. And it’s true. The current index of kanji in use lists more than 2,000. You have to learn them actively and passively. Read and write. That’s a lot of work. I kid you not. But it’s not hard work. Same with grammar. The Japanese grammar isn’t really that hard. Of course, if you end up with people making a bazillion sub-sentences in their sentences it can just be as frustrating as in any other language.

The only thing you really need to watch out when speaking is simple the right emphasis on whatever syllable you run into (famous example, always used, is hashi, depending on the emphasis it means different things), the double consonants and the double vowels. That is of course done by nailing the vocabulary into your head and practice. It’s a lot of work, but it’s not hard.
Siri

I think anything is possible if you try. Japanese is such an interesting and beautiful language! Its beauty defeats all else, I bet that dear puppy agrees!
coldcaption

I think Germanic languages are pretty easy to learn, though I’ve never tried a Romance. I’ve been studying German for a bit and it barely sounds like a different language to me anymore.
I don’t think Japanese is hard, but it is a lot to learn. That’s what I tell people, anyway. Since I learn by myself online it’s a bit of an “all at once” thing, so sometimes it’s a bit tough to figure out how the verb forms and the like are interweaving, but it does work.
Also, come on, Mandarin isn’t that bad, FSI. The only hard thing is getting your head around the tonal phonology, but that doesn’t take long and it’s pretty simple after that. Usually one reading per character, no verb or adjective forms at all; you really just need to get the syntax and pronunciation down and it’s actually pretty easy. I’m on my second semester of it and that’s what I’ve gotten out of it so far. I do mix up my kanji with it, though. Since various characters were simplified differently or not at all in Japanese, my handwriting is a mess of simplified, traditional, and Japanese-simplified characters.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ümit-Yılmaz/848029350 Ümit Yılmaz

You say learning japanese is easy. But i realy know there are people try to learn and failed and they say if it is easy why i cant learn. It is easy but not easy to learn in one weak. Please know it as well nothing easy in this word usually :D No pain no gain!!!
Sera Kim

I agree with almost every point of your write-up but one. Where you said you don’t have to learn kanjis as we should just “type them out”? This isn’t solving anything for those struggling with kanjis. To look up kanjis you have to know the shape and meaning anyway. So my point is that any language has an easy part and a complicated part to learn. And comparing with English, Hindi, or some other languages, Japanese can be easier for the reasons you simply mentioned. I’ve seen many people struggling with and giving up on kanjis, but I don’t remember anyone who said kanjis is not FUN. You’ve got to have a fun learning languages!
Happy learning :)
d4nie

I know read this blog post for the second time and I still think you’re quite right.
I’m not the fastest Japanese learner in the world and most of the time I don’t do what I should do (studying), but I’m pretty sure even I will succeed sooner or later.
Oh yeah and about the kanji, I recently found this web site to help you with your kanji study. It’s not ready yet but beta’s starting soon, so if you wanna check it out here’s my invite code so you can participate in beta: http://kuerz.es/2SS
So yeah I’m personally really looking forward to it :D
Everyone ganbatte kudasai! :)
Subarashi

I disagree.
Japanese grammar makes me ,figuratively speaking, want to punch babies. It’s almost like that one joke about Russia being backwards, but in japanese’s case I find it being conpletely true in it’s written language (Compared to english). Though chinese has harder vocab and but easier grammar.
This is from my own experience and is by no means applicable to others.
:o.

All points agreed, but for the record, I use “How goes it?” frequently … More often than its more common counterparts.
TheCrimsonLotus

native Arabic speaker xD
Oh god! interesting article Tofugu sensei!
<— currently studying Japanese, I LOVE READING YOUR ARTICLES! keep it up <3
http://www.facebook.com/thomas.punpck Thomas Punpck

You won’t believe … I’m glad there is kanji! I would have to learn japanese vocabular anyway and kanji makes it easy for me to recognize the words. I hate hate hate hate hate(!!!) words in hiragana … It seems almos impossible to memorize them! :)
AnadyLi

Here’s why I fear learning Japanese:
I know both English and Chinese. Yay me, I know some kanji/han zi already,right? Wrong. Japanese basically combines two alphabets with kanji/han zi. I’m used to ONE alphabet being separated from ONE set of han zi in TWO separate languages. It seems like a nightmare to me to essentially have two alphabets mixed with a set of kanji/han zi.
AnadyLi

Actually, there is also a “hidden” 5th tone in Chinese. It’s for stuff like 嘛 and 吧. Basically, there is no tone. Um, it’s sort of hard to explain; I guess it’s like sighing in English? You just have to experience it.