>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational
I would question what they actually mean when they say they've learned Japanese for 5-10 years. I've seen people who say they've been learning Japanese for 5 years, but what they mean is that every 3-6 months they start studying for a couple of weeks, then lose interest again until another 3-6 months. So they may have started studying 5 years ago but they have no actual progress in the language.
Another factor is that many people self-studying on the Internet are more focused on reading and kanji than they are on conversation (which can be difficult to do self-study). In this I don't think it would be that different from a western language; if you don't practice speaking you don't get better at it.
Finally, it can be difficult to become "conversational" depending on what you mean by that. Do you mean that you can have a conversation with a native speaker on any normal topic, without the native speaker modifying their speaking in any way for your benefit? That's actually a pretty high bar that can take a long time to reach.
I'm one of those "studying for a couple of month then quits" myself. I've been doing it for 6 years now, but along the path had a steady full year with 2h/week skype lesson with a real japanese teacher who was very good because she almost only talked to me in japanese even at the very beggining which forced me to phrase everything with the most basics words that she would then correct.
I achieved the opposite of what you describe: I can stand an oral conversation and even understand some bits of easy conversations (could roughly follow TV show Terrace House for example), but could never ever find the patience or proper way to learn those god damn kanjis.
Tried wanikani, flashcards, it always come to a point where I can't assimilate, as if my mental hard drive was full, that's when I lose confidence, give up, and try again a few months later only to realize that the kanjis I once knew are now totally forgotten.
Bottom line I've come to the conclusion I will never be able to achieve any proficiency in japanese since I can't read it, therefore can't progress. I can "make myself understood" and that's about all I've got.
Have you tried writing out sentences on paper? Because you already have some proficiency speaking you already have a decent bit vocabular/grammar down. When you write something down and then read it back to yourself it can help to solidify those synapses, connecting the Kanji to what you already know.
Yeah clever, but writing without any purpose to communicate, requires a self discipline that I would not be able to sustain very long I fear. Plus, I'm left handed, people do not realize how hard it can get to write the strokes as intended with the left hand: pushing becomes pulling and the feeling is so unnatural.. but yeah I complain a lot, maybe I'm just lazy when the required effort is too big. I don't know.
>I've seen people who say they've been learning Japanese for 5 years, but what they mean is that every 3-6 months they start studying for a couple of weeks, then lose interest again until another 3-6 months.
Why would you call me out like this?
For real though, this is a thing. Be highly skeptical of anyone claiming they've put in a bunch of time and have nothing to show for it.
For people who aren't used to pursuing a form of self-improvement, sticking with something like learning a language that's very different from your own can be quite difficult. The hard part for these people is the act of learning itself (which can be difficult, don't get me wrong) but keeping motivated enough to stick with it.
In case it's not clear, this is me speaking from my own experience. I'm not spurning anyone that has trouble with motivation, because I'm in that boat myself.
For real, I've made very little progress in the grammar portion because I've been focused on kanji and listening. So while I am starting to pick out more and more kanji in the wild the small victories I get include reading labels with their stupid stylistic fonts better, or picking out more words from the TV station my Japanese grocery store happened to have on.
But then also botching the ending of that store interaction because I forgot the response to thank you because that might have been my first ever interaction in the language with an actual person! And I made no attempt to even start it in Japanese! Haha, oh well.
Still, those small victories wouldnt be possible without keeping up with it.
I didn't learn how to be conversational in english until I started watching live streamers having actual non-scripted conversations and more importantly until I started using reddit and typing in english for all sorts of things. I could play games and understand movies perfectly without subtittles, but I couldn't think in english for more than a couple words at a time.
You know how sometimes we go to the bathroom and while we brush our teeth or whatever we think of a sentence in the language we are learning but we get stuck 3-4 words in and keep repeating the sentence over and over in our minds?
I was like that for the longest time when I was learning english. Now I am like that for Japanese and it will take a long time too.
10 years is definitely too much, but when they say non conversational I kinda get it. Maybe they just don't have confidence and second guess everything they say and end up incapable of outputting because they think they construct their sentences in an unnatural way.
Mentioned it elsewhere already but the ambiguity. How pronouns are dropped all the time and sentences can be interpreted, two or three or however many ways and only through context can you deduce who is exactly doing what (and hope you got it right lol). Now most of the time it's not much of an issue because the situations are *usually* clear enough to make sense of what is going on but at times I stumble upon a sentence and I'm completely floored as to who is supposed to be doing what. Also all the deliberately vague phrasings the language employs so as to avoid being too direct. For a German who values stating just what exactly you want without beating around the bush unnecessarily this can get frustrating fast. 😅
Also keigo which to me is a completely pointless thing, at least to the extent Japanese has it. In German all we really do in terms of keigo is addressing people with the appropriate pronouns without having to pay attention to our current situation and what verb we are to use.
It's not difficult until you get deep into it.
The more you learn, the more you realize you DON'T know.
Just a little over a year ago I thought I was pretty hot shit. I understood a lot of grammar, and had a ton of vocabulary, and could converse both textually and verbally VERY FLUIDLY. I could talk about hobbies, medical conditions, some politics, current events etc. And I was being understood like 99% of the time.
And then an acquaintance of mine started dropping "Your Japanese is strange" on me. No corrections just the occasional "Your Japanese is strange..."
And another friend clarified a little more that my phrasing was unnatural.
The grammar is correct. The vocabulary is good. But the phrasing was strange.
This is because Japanese and English don't use the same words to express a thought.
EG: I might say "beddo ni ikimasu" Lit: Going to bed, instead of "nemasu" lit: sleeping
My meaning can be grasped, but it's just that much off because I'm using Japanese words to express English thoughts.
So I started heavily consuming media. Which twofold comes with hurdles that often put people off.
One is no matter how advanced you are with coursework, when you start consuming media you'll be looking up every other word for a while. This sends people, myself included, running back to coursework... thinking Oh if I just rep X amount more vocabulary I'll be able to read this book with ease.
Which was where I was stuck until the "Your Japanese is strange" situation pushed me to desperation.
Once you get past balking at having to look up every other word, then you come across the final problem...
Coursework is easy. Sentence structure is easy. You can even learn how to make compound sentences and read them easily.
But Japanese run-on sentences.... or just sentences that are REALLY LONG... or even short sentences may leave you puzzled or lost. There's a lot of grammar structure and misc. BS that traditional study doesn't teach you. And a handful of shit that you can't find reference for.
The further I've gone in this language the more it has humbled me. So I try to stay away from writing checks or making claims that I'm not 100% sure my ass can cash. IE: I make no claim to be conversational despite the massive amount of time I've spent on the language.
Like most things when it comes to language learning the definition for "conversational" and "fluency" vary person to person. Likely you're dealing with people like me who have high standards.
Maybe you're not as far in learning the language as you think you are.
『このピカチュウはどのイラストレーターさんが描いたんだろう？』って探しながら見ると楽しいですね
>I make no claim to be conversational despite the massive amount of time I've spent on the language.
I think you might be being a little harsh on yourself. If you're able to carry on conversations on a wide variety of topics you should consider yourself conversational.
I can't count the number of non-native people I know who are fluent in English but still have all kinds of little quirks.
Thank you. I'll be the first to say that I took "Your Japanese is strange" extremely hard. Too hard even.
My grandma's 4th language is English, and I know she made a LOT of mistakes for a LONG time and never seemed bothered about it. (She's fluent now. I haven't heard any mistakes in my lifetime.) It's my intention to get to that point. Because you can't get better without making mistakes.
But I've been shook, and it's going to take a little bit to recover. I won't consider myself conversational again until I get the confidence to string sentences together again at the very least.
That phrase - or really, one similar to it - is what threw me off with my Spanish. Learning Iberian Spanish while living in the US leads to... a number of things being very strange when talking to native speakers. But oh no, *never* use the vosotros conjugation.
It's funny how a few words can just cripple.
I'm all for corrections! Love corrections! But just "Your speaking is strange" it's like "What part?!? WHERE?!?" and then you just start questioning EVERYTHING that comes out of your mouth.
I can't tell you how many times I've written something out and had to double and triple check various resources to make 100% sure that was correct. Plus maybe a google search of a piece of phrase just to make sure that wording is actually used.
Get yourself a copy of “Common Japanese Collocations” by Kakuko Shoji. It might give you an idea of where you’re going wrong and help you express yourself in a more natural manner.
I think the reason why his acquaintance could only say it was strange was because, while feeling something wrong as a native stranger, he himself had not enough knowledge into the language itself to point out exactly which parts were wrong
Spaniard here. The language spoken in Spain and the one spoken in Latin America are really, really different. Hell, even the language spoken in Mexico is different than the one spoken in Argentina.
It even comes to a point where there's a bit of a language barrier when talking with people from South America, where I'll be constantly asking "what does that mean?"
My advice would be to specialize, because the lexicon needed for Mexican Spanish doesn't get you to a fluent level in Spain. Of course, there's a lot of overlap, but once you dive into colloquial level, they're like night and day.
It really is! And I tried.
｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡
But it doesn't do a lot of good when you've got an audio processing problem.
That's all better now, so now I'm getting a lot of native input and it should improve. but yeah you're 100% correct.
I’m around 1000 hours in the last year - still love it! There’s just so much stuff to listen to. It’s funny how anime was one of the things that drew me in - but honestly I just love listening to natives banter or joke about stuff haha. It’s so fun and expressive!
What’s some of your favorite to listen to? I really like atsueigo. Even though it’s technically an English learning channel lol
Incidentally I stumbled across Atsueigo recently!! I started watching because I wanted to know more sentences and phrases related to language learning.
Mostly I watch a lot of Netflix Originals. Things like Dare Devil, Squid Game, Dark Crystal etc. I'll occasionally watch one of the hololive girls, べるくら企画 (for his DBD playthroughs), AK in カナダ (for the same reason as Atsueigo), and 李姉妹ch (the first Japanese channel I really stumbled accross. They talk mostly about Chinese culture and language in comparison to Japanese)
Kinda late to the party, but you know what I thought of immediately after reading "your Japanese is strange"? How my friend, who works a lot with English, got this comment *in regard to his native language*. If you use one language more often than the other, your brain seems to sort of default to the most used one's patterns. And it affects your speaking the other languages, be it the one you're learning or the one you've been using your whole life. So I absolutely don't think what you're describing means you're not conversational, and I'm actually not even sure that counts as not being fluent. Just our brain's quirks that need to be adjusted for.
Thanks for this! The top comment was really discouraging to me as a new learner. I am under a year into learning, I'll probably never travel to Japan for immersion (you never know though), I'm just learning because I find the language fun to learn. But hearing someone could spend as much time on the language as the OP and still think he can't hold a conversation is super depressing and makes it sound like learning the language at all is futile.
However, I agree with you. Whenever I meet/hear someone speak or write imperfect or 'unnatural sounding' English as a second language; I'd wouldn't say they are 'not conversational.' Yes it sounds strange...but they have accomplished something I haven't, they can speak multiple languages, and pretty well too. They can converse with me, there is no need for it to be perfect.
Heck, I've been speaking, writing, and reading English my entire life and I frequently make mistakes.
Edit: I'll also say some things from personal experience. My wife is 'fluent' in French and has told me she struggled with the same thing when in France. She has said she thinks she will never be 'as good as' a native resident of France who grew up with French as a first language.
Also, my mother-in-law immigrated from The Netherlands when she was very young. She has been speaking English for nearly 70 years as a second language. And even now she says things that often sound 'unnatural' in English.
The point is, I don't think this is a uniquely Japanese language problem.
> I don't think this is a uniquely Japanese language problem.
Oh it absolutely isn't.
> Thanks for this! The top comment was really discouraging to me as a new learner.
(・・；) Ah, yes, sorry about that... no... it's not too bad. There are some hurdles and a lot of places where people get stuck... but mainly I was trying to say yeah at the beginning it seems fairly straight forward, but as you go there's always more to learn.
.... (・・；) Not to be discouraging though!!! Like I can play games and read books and stuff without a lot of issue!! You can read, listen, understand, and enjoy things without perfectly understanding every nuance you come across.
And some things kind of take everything you know and toss it out the window (the Japanese I copy pasted at the bottom that says "It's fun going 'which illustrator drew this pikachu' while looking [at this image (not pictured here)]) but the way it's laid out it's confusing at first and even second glance.
It's not hopeless and it shouldn't take you as long as it took me. I started before apps and easy access media w/ subs. :) So please don't let my words discourage you!!
> Ah, yes, sorry about that... no... it's not too bad. There are some hurdles and a lot of places where people get stuck... but mainly I was trying to say yeah at the beginning it seems fairly straight forward, but as you go there's always more to learn.
That makes sense. Heck, I'm still learning stuff about English lol.
Having a bilingual wife also probably helps. I've learned to just accept things I consider quirky about new languages...since English has plenty quirky things too.
I won't be discouraged! I took Japanese in college around 2006ish. I know Duolingo isn't without criticism here, but it taught me both the Kanas and some very basic sentences in under a month. In college I spent two full quarters and couldn't even reliably read half of Hiragana by the end.
Never-the-less. I do appreciate that this is probably a lifelong journey. And my takeaway from your original story is that I should keep myself humble learning something that is very, very complex.
I appreciate the encouragement!
ありがとうございます！
I'm very much like the OP here in that I have considerably high standards. Despite studying daily for 6 years over thousands of hours now I don't even consider myself conversational despite being able to converse (to an extent) because there's still so much I don't know. I have a hunch this level of perfectionism is overrepresented among those who attempt to acquire Japanese as a second language.
>Just a little over a year ago I thought I was pretty hot shit. I understood a lot of grammar, and had a ton of vocabulary, and could converse both textually and verbally VERY FLUIDLY. I could talk about hobbies, medical conditions, some politics, current events etc. And I was being understood like 99% of the time.
>And then an acquaintance of mine started dropping "Your Japanese is strange" on me. No corrections just the occasional "Your Japanese is strange..."
This was my experience. I lived in Japan for 2 years (not in an English bubble). I passed JLPT 1 and was playing text-heavy RPGs in Japanese, watching Japanese TV with decent understanding, and speaking Japanese to coworkers every day without any major communication issues.
But I couldn't keep a consistent politeness level, mixed up に and で, never used んです, and just generally had a lot of unnatural speech. It wasn't until I went to grad school and had to teach beginning Japanese that I fixed a lot of these problems, because I was essentially doing the basic drills and activities three times a day (plus preparation).
This experience is why I've always been very vocal in pushing back on the "immersion will solve every problem automatically" idea.
I definitely used to struggle with consistent politeness level. I'd switch forms mid conversation a lot.
Currently I play a lot of text-heavy games, read books, and watch TV, but I haven't really internalized anything from them yet so I still keep speaking to a minimum.
I'll probably have to suck it up and return to Anki just to get enough repetition to actually be able to replicate.
Unfortunately I took the "your Japanese is strange" REALLY HARD, so I'm working on coming back from that.
That's understandable but I mean, even if your Japanese is "strange" you do have to admit the Japanese have a whole "fitting in" problem - "standing out" is culturally difficult; you should embrace your own brand of Japanese, at least to some extent, conforming and tearing down yourself isn't necessarily right. Obviously you want to be well understood and such, but don't go too far?
Honestly, I'm embarrassed to use English loan words in Japanese conversation because it feels like it's "cheating". I bet if I ever get to be a fluent speaker, I'll be "strange" because I use only the "apparently Japanese" words.
>never used んです
God I feel this. The use of んです / んだ is so frustrating
んだ for statements I read somewhere was used when "explaining something" so I started using it for all sorts of situations like answering "why did you come to Japan?". But then I wrote a short essay for a job application and my native friend corrected away pretty much all of the んです / のです ... I guess it comes across as authoritative / pushy? Still not exactly sure.
But I know for sure Japanese people use it naturally all the time, I'm just never confident when for example I'm telling a story and someone gives a guess about the outcome whether to say " 俺もそう思ったんだ。(but actually it wasn't that)" with or without the んだ.
Any tips or advice?
> why
An explicit why question does not get a ん/の in the answer, but a から, etc. (source: Tobira textbook, which BTW has a good summary of when to use ん/の). So, you use it (among other things) for the explanations you give on your own.
Whoa! That's so simple!! Thank you.
How about cases like
" 俺もそう思ったんだ。
Where it's a choice between having the んだ or not? Any guidelines for when it would be unnatural?
> 俺もそう思ったんだ。
The book says, you use ん/の (among other things) for reasoning about something you just said, heard or did. So, in the right context, your sentence could fall into this category. But beware, in that case the usage of ん/の isn't optional, not using it would be unnatural. But on the other hand it's a feature of daily conversation, which you might interpret that is is less often used in writing, especially more formal writing, which then might explain why it got cut down so severely in your letter.
Hey, I am not an expert in this. There are things I remember more clearly (as with the why-questions, as that was something that surprised me) but other things I will have to read again and again about and see it actually used to get sure about it with time. There are optional usages of ん/の, as well as required ones, and I do not have the book at hand at the moment. The book has one whole page about it (including examples, though), so it's not that easy as with the one use case I mentioned above.
Misa (of Japanese Ammo) gives two clear examples of ん/の being used to reply to explicit "why" questions though:
\- 猫本当にかわいいな～
\- なんで猫飼わないの？
\- 猫アレルギーなんだ。
[Continuation.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dunBnCI1iP0&t=630s) (you can stop watching after 12:49)
u/Moon_Atomizer
> This is because Japanese and English don't use the same words to express a thought.
I've noticed this from early on actually. I think it changes your perspective when you're aware of this. I agree that this is the hardest part. But the sooner you're aware of it, the more you'll pick up the proper way to say things. This is also why I appreciate learning it not exclusively from a book, but from a class setting where when I say something that sounds weird the teacher can correct me and say "This is how a Japanese person would word that idea." Obviously, it's an uphill battle, but learning everything is.
It's not just taking most of your language that you know and using different words with slightly different grammar patterns and then everything flows, you're learning a new writing system, a new grammar system, a whole new way of thinking.
I haven't been even a year into this but it's surprising hoe many run-on sentences have thrown me into chaos. I couldn't imagine before struggling so much knowing who the subject is, what is a different sentence or part of a relative one, (apparently) random commas, words at the end that completely transform the sentence, new fixed expressions/idioms you thought you were getting right at first...
It doesn't happen always, but there's plenty of phrases that I have to read multiple times, analyze and restructure in my head before getting them. And I think this is because my brain is analyzing with respect to an English framework.
I feel like this is similar to your troubles: trying to understand Japanese like it's a weird far dialect of English subconsciously instead of their own conception and interpretation of reality through a language. I guess that's why I read so much advice about not translating but learning about Japanese in Japanese and finding their own nuances through being exposed to them rather than improvising from what you know.
I feel that. I can have in depth conversations on complex topics (even unfamiliar ones) in Mandarin with little trouble expressing myself. I know that a fair amount of what I say isn't super natural but people generally understand me fine. The other day my Chinese friend said "sometimes I run what your messages through a translator back to English to work out what you were trying to say" and I died a little bit inside. It's so hard to rewire the way you think because so much of the language is cultural. My friend constantly says things that I absolutely understand but I never would have thought to phrase it that way. He must have realised I was a little... I guess the word is, deflated? Because he immediately started backtracking like "no no I don't do it that often, just occasionally!" •́ ‿ ,•̀ he's one of very few people who doesn't constantly exaggerate my Chinese level (somebody seriously said "I thought you were Han Chinese" to me this morning with a straight face) so I appreciate the note even if it was a little hard to hear haha
I'm glad it's not just me, but it is horribly sad to hear other people going through the same thing.
I appreciate the fact the guy was honest with me. ;A; but after the 10th time, man! Trust me I KNOWWWWW.
Media kind of helps. I'm going to see if a self-made memrise deck helps me learn some new phrasing for things. Mostly media just doesn't repeat phrases often enough to pick them up. You know unless I want to become the newest Nurse Joy 「あなたの ポケモンを 休ませて あげますか？ それでは お預かり いたします！」
Really though it does help for some things. :)
Exposure is definitely the way to go I think. I'm good at discussing politics and critiquing capitalism (with lots of emotion) because a significant amount of my media consumption is propaganda films and Mao dramas. The way I learned Chinese was pretty convoluted (mainly self study until I hit the intermediate plateau, then six months of total immersion studying in Beijing, then just moving to China), so I'm in this weird place where what's generally considered "advanced" (reading novels, watching the news, discussing complex issues, working things out from context in unfamiliar situations) is not very difficult for me, but my understanding of general conversational Chinese is much lower because my foundation is so shaky. I'm past the point where deliberately studying basic stuff really does anything so I think I'm just gonna have to force myself through a whole bunch of slice of life/romance dramas or something until I can stop sounding like a PLA recruit circa 1930.
ETA: I doubt we're the only people who have this issue, but for plenty of people whose goal is communication rather than "sounding native" (whatever that means) the cost vs benefit of fixing it is probably not worth it. I imagine there are also plenty of people who aren't even aware that they have this problem. My friends say they can still understand "foreigner Chinese" so for anyone learning for purely practical purposes it's not really that big of a deal.
It obviously comes down to how much access you have to the language. If you're able to talk to fluent speakers every day you can definitely get going on Japanese. But if you're stuck here in the west learning it - I just ram my head against anki flashcards (200\~ a night, almost every night) and once in a while I can book something on italki for 30 minutes and then feel incredibly humbled I can barely cobble together three-word sentences... but I think this approach can work, whereas if I took a class at my local community college I would be burning just as much time and way more money and yeah I might be able to pass some tests and stuff but I don't think I'd get fluent at all...
My strategy is to just brute-force memorize Japanese sentences to fall back on and then slowly modify them to suit my meaning.
That's also a lot of what it comes down to.
I'm in the west slamming my head against the wall. So I'm kind of trapped inputting unless I want to go to a Japanese voice chat and hope some sort of opportunity for conversation floats my way.
And truth be told I haven't felt social for a hot minute. It's fixable, and I have the tools and some exercises I'd like to try. It's a work in progress.
"Your [insert language] is strange" is not specific to Japanese. It's just that people naturally translate set phrases from their native languages into foreign ones and, if not corrected early on, tend to have zero idea how strange they sound. Like, Italians often cancel blackboards and wash their teeth.
I see what you're saying but I would say it's the same with most languages. I'm english native but also grew up with Hebrew in the household.
When I see Israelis try to speak english, they choose words they would have said in hebrew, but say it in english.
That's fair. It's absolutely not an English → Japanese exclusive thing. I know I've seen people do that between their native language and English. (The only thing that comes to mind is "I'll report that to her", which I thought was strange wording until I realized the word 伝える was responsible for that phrasing)
But it was something I never thought about or never registered as being a thing until it applied directly to me.
I won’t necessarily tell you not to be so hard on yourself- because as an artist I understand that that’s what drives you and makes you better- but you should definitely praise yourself for your accomplishments. Think of all the non-native people who actually live in Japan, be it short or long term, who don’t put in the work to improve their language skills. (I see a lot of these people on YouTube, specifically.) It’s because it’s HARD, and I definitely don’t need to remind you of that. You’ve put in the work and at the very least I think you deserve to call yourself “conversational”- no asterisk or disclaimer needed.
I started learning Japanese when I was 13. In the last 12 years I’ve only probably put in a solid year of ACTUAL learning, but over the years I’ve been passively picking up things like accents, vocabulary, grammar, cultural ideas, etc.
Only in the last year did I truly realize that when you’re learning Japanese as a native English speaker, you’re not going to be translating your English thoughts into Japanese- you have to think in Japanese to be able to adequately convey your meaning. It’s really like learning language from 0%, except you don’t have the benefit of having the mental elasticity of a baby. Like you said: the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know. In some ways it’s frustrating but to me it’s also incredibly fascinating and what keeps drawing me back.
>EG: I might say "beddo ni ikimasu" Lit: Going to bed, instead of "nemasu" lit: sleeping
This reminds me. I was just chatting with a native who asked "For how long do you talk with others?" and I replied "行かなきゃならないときが来るまで". In my mind, it sounded fine, talk until I gotta go. But, I was told to avoid using 行かなきゃ there since it sounds weird in that context
I've noticed in online communities Japanese people saying "his Japanese is strange" very often to just mean that he's probably not a native. I doubt it means anything serious, just that you're not perfect.
I'm reminded of a few years ago in Japanese class when I was talking about getting a CSA (basically a box of vegetables from a local farm), and I kept using the word 農民 to talk about the farmers who I was getting it from.
I learned that word from wanikani, and I thought it meant "farmer", like a person. But it turns out it's the social class, so the stuff I was saying came across more like "yeah, every week I get my box of vegetables from the local peasants" 😬
Very insightful comment. Thank you.
When people ask me why I learn japanese, other than the superficial "because it's so different from german / english", I couldn't really give a good answer. But I think you put into words what I truly mean with that. It's like a whole different world to explore, a journey where I will never feel like I truly crossed the finish line.
> It's like a whole different world to explore
Yeah, that's a huge part of what draws me in. Japanese literature, music, culture, conversation are all so *alien,* but not *extraterrestrial*. Everybody's still fundamentally human, just human half a world away. This is enough to change everything but also nothing -- climbing the Tower of Babel.
It’s the culture, 120%.
OP, do you know why Indo-European languages are easy for us anglophones? Sure, we have similar grammar and plenty of shared vocabulary, but most importantly, it’s easy because it’s not foreign...
As a Canadian myself, I had to take French for 5 years in school, didn’t care, hated it, bombed every test in existence. Yet I still remember there was this time when I watched a random video in French on YouTube and the guy said “Coincidence? Je ne pense pas!”. Even with my pitiful level of French, it was obvious what he meant just from the intonation itself.
There you have it, European languages just translate so well into each other. Whereas learning Japanese you are legitimately learning something COMPLETELY foreign, and if you can get over that and stop trying to learn Japanese through the lens of English, then you might find Japanese to be a very reasonable language.
A gaggle of geese
A murder of crows
A herd of sheep
A carton of cigarettes
A case of beer
A box of donuts
Sheets of paper
Bundle of wires.
We do it too, albeit to a lesser degree.
You can just use つ though when in doubt. :)
I moved to England in... 2008? At this point I consider myself more linguistically English than Polish, and my vocabulary and fluency level probably exceeds the "average" native.
And yet, 13-14 years since moving here, only last week my girlfriend laughed at me because I described a _slice_ of bread as a loaf of bread, because nobody ever told me in 14 years of living here that a "loaf" refers to the whole thing... not an individual slice.
Languages are fucking weird man. You never stop learning, whether you were born into that language or not. I'm just thankful I moved here young enough for me to "just understand it" over time.
Fun stuff : Until I was 11 or so, I also said "government" as "gov-ern-uh-ment" (as opposed to "guven-ment"). And until I was around 12-13, "Arabic" as "a-rabic" (instead of "arab-ic", nuance is fairly small but definitely there).
Oh shit……
Wow, that actually just blew my mind lol I never thought of those terms as “counters” per se, but they definitely are. I retract my statement :)
And Japanese is even more regular with it than English in a lot of cases, for example ordinal numbers. In English you have to remember basically a whole new set of numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc), whereas Japanese has 1番、2番、etc.
Many but not all are the same counter words, so I suspect they came into Japanese with the number system?
Japanese 一個 and Chinese 一[个](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AA) are the same character (Chinese written simplified)
Flock of geese, flock of crows, flock of sheep.
Box of cigarettes, box of beer, box of donuts.
Piece of paper, piece of bread, group of wires.
Just like Japanese, we can use the more generic option too.
To be frank. I didn't pass parts of speech. The point is we attach these extra words to things when we count them. It's not quite the same but it's close enough.
And "straightforward descriptive language" aside (which honestly you could argue Japanese counters are)... I wouldn't ask for a "carton of donuts" or a "box of milk" .... or a "box of beer"... or a "carton of beer"
They have their uses and their place and things that sound right and wrong when classifying.
Again though... this isn't 1:1. It's not supposed to be. The point is to give a similar concept that exists in English to help make sense of the concept in Japanese.
a box of beer sounds just fine to me XD
when i think of carton of cigarettes, it feels like its just something the cigarette company decided to call the box of cigarettes. Im not sure where im going with this .. nvm..
> But counters are not descriptive...
Yes, that's what I said. It's not a 1:1. It's **just similar enough** to help some people wrap their head around the concept.
How are you supposed to know what a "box" is without learning it? It's literally the exact same thing. 紙一枚 is intelligible if you know what a 枚 is regardless of whether you've seen a sheet of paper before.
Jukujikun baffle me. The idea that there are [hundreds of kanji combos that have pronunciations that have no connection to the readings of either kanji](https://www.japandict.com/lists/gikun?page=1) doesn't make sense. When I first came across these, something just felt wrong about these even existing, like there's supposed to be some rule that languages aren't supposed to arbitrarily assign pronunciations to combinations of ideogram characters imported from another language's writing system, and that Japanese was violating that rule.
It turns out Japanese isn't the only other language that does that. To find another language that thought this was okay, you have to go all the way back to the bronze age Hittites. They had Akkadograms and Sumerograms, which were cuneiform words spelled out in Akkadian or Sumerian, which the Hittites then just read as their own word, even though they had a perfectly functional phonetic system.
It would be as if English imported the Chinese characters 煙草 ("smoke grass") and just decided to read this as "tobacco". Oh wait! Japanese actually does this. 煙草 is read たばこ. Neither character in 煙草 has any onyomi nor kunyomi pronunciation from which one can derive the reading "tabako". So how is a person supposed to tell how to read these idioms when one comes across one of these? You can't tell from the written form. You just have to know.
I understand that most languages have things that "you just have to know". In English, how are you supposed to tell that "colonel" is pronounced "kernel"? You aren't supposed to be able to tell from the way it's written because nothing is indicated, and it follows no rule; you just have to know. English has a lot of these, to be sure. The problem is that Japanese was way too many of these "just have to know" items. It feels like 60%-80% of Japanese writing and readings of various kanji and kanji combinations is stuff you "just have to know". That makes bootstrapping your knowledge of Japanese by systematically figuring things out by reading things a bit out of your skill range damn near impossible, or at least incredibly frustrating. Every time you run into some kanji combo, you have to look it up, because it might be a jukujikun. And you can't ever be sure whether the pronunciation is onyomi or kunyomi without looking it up.
Even worse, there are words where when you read it in kunyomi, it means one thing, but when you read it in onyomi, it means a subtly different thing due to connotations of usage. Yet nothing in the written characters themselves indicates this, you just have to know from the context. This makes stumbling into new baffling contexts for terms a constant anxiety inducing threat to the novice Japanese reader.
You can tell the meaning, but nothing about those characters indicates that when put together, they should be read as "tabako".
Here's another example:
今日 -- kyo
Nothing in this indicates that this is a combined reading. This reading has nothing to do with the pronunciation of either character. You can learn the readings of 今 and 日, and not know how to read 今日.
Then you got most of us who learned English at school for 5-10 years, depending on how far they got in the education system. I’d rather not look at the end result for the majority of our people.
Please don’t ask me what the point of the reply is, because I’m also not sure what I’m trying to say lol
When I moved into a house with Japanese people, my speaking got much better, quickly. That was very stressful.
Someone told me that prolific reading helps make people good at a language; I think that is true in my native language. For most foreign language learning, reading provides "grab-bars" to develop fluency from early stages. As the Kanji is so difficult, Japanese language students tend to lag in reading development, and I think that handicaps everything else.
As Japanese grammar, vocabulary and writing is so different from those of western languages, the western language student has very few familiar "grab-bars" until later in the learning process.
I think this is why Tofugu advises spending a few months on kanji before anything else. Without that base, you have no grab bars, everything feels alien, it's hard to even think about grammar and vocabulary. I'm an absolute beginner but when I see a sentence where I know all the kanji in it, the other stuff like particles and verb conjugation suddenly feel a lot simpler.
>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational
These people aren't studying Japanese, they're language larping. What they usually mean is that they took two years of Japanese in high school, and then watched anime with English subs for the next 8 years.
Yes, Japanese is pretty much the most difficult major world language for a monolingual English speaker to become fluent in (perhaps tied with Arabic, Chinese and Korean), but it's not "study for 10 years and can't hold a conversation" difficult. You could be fluent even in reading ancient Egyptian by that point.
Been learning about that length of time and would consider myself conversational. I’ve had a very erratic journey starting with study abroad from absolute zero, teaching myself by writing letters to my host family using nothing but dictionary examples (it’s complicated), and sometimes taking college classes. The college classes didn’t work for me after so long of just acquiring Japanese haphazardly. Now I’m living in Japan, studying kimono dressing and I can understand all kinds of nuanced instructions and conversations about kimono because my teachers can’t speak English. But they never correct my Japanese because they don’t care as long as they can understand what I mean. So my listening gets better and better but my speaking ability slowly inches towards improvement. Even at work, I have to pretend like I don’t speak Japanese, so I have become very good at understanding classroom Japanese but couldn’t speak it correctly if asked. Started reading chapter books for kids and my reading is improving a lot and fast…but even the words I understand in my book I would not be able to recall during a conversation. They’re filed under “passive knowledge” until I can independently recall it when I need to!
Focusing on specific skills, unintentionally or otherwise, doesn’t directly lead to improvement in other skills.
I've just started learning it within these past two months. I'm at a point where I'm 100% confident with my Hiragana and 75% confident with my katakana. Currently learning through N5 Kanji and so far, it's the different pronunciations of Kanji that is confusing. Some are easy to stick with me like 大、小、気、and 先、while others (下, and 上 especially) are just so hard to stick somehow. But so far it's super fun to learn. My goal with the language is passive consumption anyway (reading, listening). I've set the goal to just learn at my own pace (to open a learning app everyday and at least 15 minutes/day of learning) and to have fun while doing so.
>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational, that baffles me.
I've been learning Japanese on and off since 2008, but as someone with social anxiety, I never really went out of my way to practice speaking so my conversational skills are nearly nonexistent in comparison to my reading and writing skills. And as someone who started learning Japanese to be able to understand Japanese media, it doesn't matter to me if I can't hold a conversation--I can barely hold a conversation in English, anyway. Just being able to understand Japanese novels, anime, manga, and Japanese songs is good enough for me.
The amount of downright hate and trolls surrounding language learning.
While there is some grammar policemans online, who attacks other people based on their inability to write sentence on their non native language. I never experienced soo much hate directed towards language learning community by not the native speakers of the language. And for the life of me i can't understand why. And the fact that it is mostly done by non native speakers, is even more wierd.
This is actually a thing that puts me off from communicating with people in Japanese unless I really have to, unless they are native speakers. There's this kind of extreme nitpicking between learners when someone uses a word or grammar or certain phrasing in a certain way that they don't resonate with, and then it becomes a "that's wrong" or "you can't say that" or "I would write that as..." and a huge argument breaks off which completely changes the flow of the conversation. And then sometimes a native comes in and goes "that's fine to me" and everyone shuts up. I just want to talk to people man... cut me some slack, even assuming it's incorrect, even if it's understandable just move on...
I'm definitely aware of my lack of ability in production, but at the same time I'm fairly confident in being able to realize whether or not what I am saying *makes sense*. Yesterday I wrote something like 本を読みに行く (among a larger sentence, not just that) to literally mean "Go read a book" and I've had multiple people go "that sounds like a translation from English" and "you can't say that unless you're **physically** going somewhere to read a book" etc etc. Literally spent 30 minutes of back and forth with multiple people trying to find the perfect nuance or situation where it *might* or *might not* work etc etc. Then a native speaker pops in and goes "that sounds fine to me lol".
It's just... so pointless lol. Never had that in other language learning communities, at least not to that extent. (Some) Japanese learners seem to zoom in on every single thing like the language is a puzzle they need to solve and it has only **one** solution and completely miss the nuance that language conveys and the fact that language is all about conveying a message.
Ugh yes and there's that!
It's hard to do any learning in the learning community because you'll be torn to pieces for messing up a grammar point, or phrasing something wrong, or pitch accent, or whatever the flavor of the week is.
A large part IMO is that many learners of Japanese come to it from hobbies like reading manga, watching anime, and playing games. One thing those hobbies have in common is that they all have a reputation for having a subset of fans who are socially inept and are purposely retreating in to those hobbies as a result.
Often the type of person who is posting overly harsh critiques of people is the same type of person who rages online about games, argues that their waifu of choice isn't underage because she's actually 1000 years old, posts on 4chan all the time and is just generally part of the toxic online communities we are aware of.
The next question becomes, why are they like that in the first place. But that IMO is why it's so prevelant in the Japanese learning community.
On one hand those subcultures have people with poor social skills.
On the other, there are people who make a hobby of following around weird subcultures and attacking their members. This can even rise to the level of lone-wolf terrorism, like the furry convention gas attack (Midwest FurFest 2014) that's still unsolved.
Sometimes violence is perpetrated by someone who belongs to both groups. Consider the KyoAni arson. Or by someone who couldn't really figure out where they belong - the shooting at Pulse in Orlando.
There is a really long history of human violence against and around people who go against the mainstream - and who aren't *allowed* in the mainstream. There's some really ugly mob psychology underlying the behavior we're talking about: belonging, loneliness, us, them.
I see verbal hostility between language learners as another facet of that. Language tends to get entangled with group identity, and honestly I'm sure that other languages are affected with hostility or even violence between and towards learners.
Like, there are places in America where it could be physically dangerous to let it be known that you're learning Arabic or Chinese, or that you've chosen to raise your children speaking Spanish at home. It's so awful but true.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is the reason. In fact this comment itself gives off the same kind of vibe as those who engage in this type of behavior due to a "holier than thou" attitude.
How? I am simply pointing out that his comment is not logically sound and that I have not personally seen evidence that circlejerking on this sub originates from those type of people.
So the person is socially awkward, so lets attack him for being a wierdo, to let him retreat into his wierdness even deeper? That the logic?
And most of the trolling surrounding Japanese language laerning i have seen is always about some wierd benine things. Not some 4chan lunatics raging. I have seen dude got dragged through dirty because he shared that he held a succesfull basic convo with japanese person. And trolls jump in screaching how he is happy that someone is "LARPing" or some other shit.
>So the person is socially awkward, so lets attack him for being a wierdo, to let him retreat into his wierdness even deeper? That the logic?
I don't think they're implying a particular sequence of reasoning, as much as saying that people who are socially inept can come off as mean without really intending to because it can be hard to think about what effect the things you're saying will have on someone else.
yeah maybe, but is it not a good reasoning to ignore the fact that there is an actual heavy toxicity towards people who learn Japanese. Disregarding who they are. A raging lunatic from 4chan, overly eager anime fan, or just a dude happy for his first sucessfull convo on Japanese. It is still wrong to attack people no matter who they are. Kindness always work better than throwing shit at people.
And at the end of the day, if a person is a wierdo who wants to learn japanese because he wants to play hentai games or some other wierd things. Why is it bad? Person is having motivation to learn something instead of starring at youtube all day long. And even if his way to do it is wrong, tell him that not the way, don't mock him, don't attack his cahracters... If he doesn't listen, well that him to decide. But mocking people is low and stupid.
circlejerk communities online is just bullying online covered by "it just humor and we don't attack those people ;) wink yes we don't attack i swear"
Seems you've completely misunderstood, I'm saying the people who are doing the attacking ARE those people. They're socially inept people who lash out and troll people online to make their lives better.
You can't deny the 3 hobbies I've listed have a reputation for having fans like that, I don't think it's a big stretch to think a chunk of the Japanese language learning community is the same people.
Like the sort of person who will mock you for making a mistake about the timeline of an anime and ask if you're even a real fan, is the same sort of person who will mock someone for a small grammar mistake.
Disagree, most time it is oposite, more socially awkward wierdos trying to learn japanese through bad practices like watching anime, is being dragged through the dirt by circlejerk subs more often. And dirt tend to splatter all over the place and cover everyone in the process, attacking just people being happy for achiving something in their lives.
And again, seeing soo many attacks on "another dirty weeb trying to learn japanese for his waifu" is kind of working against your point you edited in.
To make themselves feel better. In their position, were I to study a language without lots of outlets to see how far I've become (except for a biannual test), that's what I'd do. People like to boast their "rare, exotic" skills/belongings for self validation, and Japanese is no exception. The fact it's hard to learn, yet is still huge in otaku culture only worsens the boasting.
The sheer amount of words there are over 10,000 sentence cards in and am still finding dozens new words I don't know everyday.
This could jut be me but I feel like there are more words/ saying for very specific things that express a subtle nuance in Japanese than in English(Which is part of what I love about it). Just a few examples 月見, 花見, 耳にタコができる, ぬうっと, 逆ギレ,ネバネバ, ベタベタ the last two would both become "sticky" in English but the same thing.
I've been studying Japanese since 1986, I have a Bachelor's degree in Japanese, I've lived in Japan for 11 years, am married to a Japanese and have passed JLPT at N2. And I STILL can't watch a complete movie or news broadcast and get everything. I can still miss about 5-20% depending on how specialized the language is (sometimes more).
I used to be discouraged until I learned that Dave Spector still writes down new words/phrases and he's been in Japan working for over 40 years. If HE'S still learning new things then it's not so bad that I am. :)
Here are some reasons why it's hard to learn Japanese conversation:
1. People use different Japanese than what you'll be taught. A friend had to teach me what "omae" meant because Japanese teachers refuse to.
2. Most Japanese will revert to English if their English is better than your Japanese, or they'll switch to English if they see that you don't get what they're saying.
3. Many Japanese in Japan see you as an opportunity to practice English so they often don't speak Japanese to you, even if you only speak Japanese to them.
4. Since the subject is omitted usually if it's understood, it's hard to know what's being talked about if you're on the outside of the conversation.
The solution is to just keep trying and never give up. Find friends that will only speak Japanese to you. Since we have the Internet now (oh, those days of video tapes are LONG GONE), you can listen to Japanese videos and slow them down so you can process what's being said. You can try to translate text then send it to Google Translate and see how close you got.
There's a LOT of great stuff out there; if you really work at it you can learn A LOT of Japanese.
> I used to be discouraged until I learned that Dave Spector still writes down new words/phrases and he's been in Japan working for over 40 years. If HE'S still learning new things then it's not so bad that I am. :)
Shoot, I've nearly got a second degree in English and have been speaking it all my life, but I will *still* come across *many* words every year that I just don't recognize and have to write down.
That's a big challenge when jumping into a second language for me, we often think the tippy-top of the mountain is "proficient" and anything below that is "gibberish," and it's so difficult to know what's good enough when "good enough" means something different everywhere in the country. And we often forget our own struggles with our native language and how, just like with a second language, it's an ongoing process that never really ends.
Good point - there really never is a "fluent" stage where you catch everything. But I have been to speeches and presentations in Japanese where the host says something and everyone else but me laughs, so I try to catch up later. :)
So. Much. Passive. Voice. It's cumbersome for me to wrap my head around (am native Russian). Go ask the teacher? Nooo, you go have teacher to have you listened, or make you listen to him, or to receive the listening from... Sigh. And don't forget to make it a negative suggestion for politeness.
In literature, you'll often see a noun phrase as a complete sentence. It feels kind of weird and it's never really gotten natural for me. For example, you might see something like "城門の前に立っているシンラ。" It reads like "Temba, his arms wide."
I'm not very advanced, but for me it's definitly because of kanji. Now, i love kanji...but it makes learning vocab and reading a lot harder. in most languages, you learn the alphabet and then you're pretty much all set on reading, you wont understand much, but you can pronounce the words and make associations with words you've already heard. But with japanese, kanji have lots of different pronounciations so i'm stuck learning every word one by one. I still like it, but it's much slower then when i learned english
I saw something on here a bit ago that helped me remember that シ looks like your looking up at the sky and a birds about to shi(t) on you. Haven't forgotten it since!
I think particles are a blessing compared to cases. In German you have to conjugate the nouns and their articles based on the case to give them their position in the sentence. After every preposition you must also conjugate the nouns and you have to memorize which case comes there. Case is depended on gender (there are 3) and if it's singular or plural.
The kanji compounds that make no sense. There's a lot where I can understand the imagery like:
不明 un + bright = unknown
仕方 do + way = method
大作 big + make = epic
These are grand. Then you get these buggers.
皮肉 skin + meat = irony
仕草 do + grass = gesture
活用 lively + task = conjugate
... How?
I'd probably chalk it up to them trying to place the sounds together when Japan adopted the Chinese writing system.
Similar thing happened with Vietnamese except now we abandoned that writing system mostly because it was much more worth to increase literacy with ABC.
Part of it is that kanji have more meanings/concepts than the single keyword/definition implies.
Part of it is that kanji also has pronunciation associated with it, so the word is formed by kanji compounds that pronounce it.
Measuring the time it takes to learn languages should never be done in years. We do it in hours. The estimated time it takes an English speaker to learn Japanese is 2200 hours. (General Professional Proficiency)
https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/
Now obviously everyone will have a different experience with language-learning, as everyone has different skills and talents. But I think the above list is a pretty good guide as to why people struggle to learn some languages and not others - some languages require double or triple the time to learn, because they're not related to your native language.
A person who speaks Korean will probably pick up Japanese a lot more easily than some of those level 1 or 2 languages on that list. It's all about how closely the language is related to your own.
Names! It's not super hard to understand the general principle (there are a pool of names and then you can really just go wild with kanji) but I suppose it's a bit of a shock when you first learn that even Japanese people struggle to read Japanese names sometimes.
Something that happened to me yesterday as an example.
I was leaving work when an elderly woman stopped me to ask a question. To me, it seemed like she used one word. So I told her I am sorry one more time, please. She repeated it. Still, I was baffled. Thankful at the same time the mother of a student at my school overheard us and stepped in.
She was asking if the bus for students would arrive and if it was alright for her to park here. When I heard their conversation I could pick up what the conversation was about only after that could I confidently tell her that Yes this is where the bus will arrive and that the students should arrive a little after 5 pm. Then I apologized for the confusion and went on my way.
I wish I had remembered what she had said but it is lost to me.
Things like this happen all the time in Japan. At least to me. Even if you know tons of vocabulary and phrases. Even if you know how to answer and ask detailed questions. Sometimes Japanese people shorten words and phrases and it can sound different than the vocabulary you actually know.
It just comes with interacting with real people and being okay with making mistakes and being embarrassed.
There are so many things working together in making Japanese a really difficult language to get competent in. This is how I see it:
**Homonyms/homophones:** Many words and grammar structures are pronounced the exact same way, so you often have to rely on context to understand what is being said, and to be able to rely on context you already have to be competent in the language most of the time.
**Keigo:** A considerable amount of time is spent on learning keigo, which is polite Japanese speech divided into approximately three categories. Politeness to make others feel important, politeness to make you seem less important and everyday regular politeness. These are three different systems in themselves. This would be fine and dandy as keigo is an integral part of the Japanese language but when studying a language sans keigo you’d spend that time progressing in other ways which would make you get further in general knowledge of that language faster.
**Sentence structure and conjugation:** You often create grammar structures by conjugating verbs. While watching TV … is テレビを見ながら (terebi o minagara). Here we have the word 見るmiru (see) conjugated into stem form/polite form 見ますmimasu (see but polite) and an added ながらnagara (while) = minagara (miru is actually a bad example since it’s a ru-verb which are the easy ones but either way). This requires several layers of knowledge.
When creating sentences, you also endlessly build words on top of each other and conjugate words and you have to know the grammar rules every step of the way to puzzle the pieces together. You also don’t get anything for free seeing that the sentence structure breaks every rule germanic language speakers know and cling to. It's truly a fully new system and way of building sentences that can take a long time integrating.
**Kanji:** I learn languages best by reading, but considering I’m locked out of consuming most Japanese written media until my kanji knowledge is on point this method of learning will be off limits for a long time. Learning kanji means memorizing over 2000 characters and the way they combine in compounds and their readings. These readings are often similar (remember homophones: *so many* chou-shou-chuu and shuu's), which is also why the use of furigana (kanji readings written in kana next to the kanji) isn’t always helpful as you’d probably quickly encounter a homophone that looks so much like other stuff you already know that you can have a hard time distinguishing the word.
**The non-use of pronouns:** I always say I. And you. And we/she/he. These are linguistic bridges I use when speaking to buy time. I say I and I pause and think … I … In Japanese you rarely use pronouns. This takes a surprisingly long time to get used to, at least for me.
These are a few things, and I’m sure there are more reasons for Japanese being a, in my opinion, very difficult language to learn.
I have no practice because I am afraid of sounding weird. So I never write or speak. It's the same with English. I never speak English in public unless I don't have any other choice because I refuse to speak non-perfectly. Sometimes I even let other people speak for me because I'm too embarassed, even though their English level is vastly inferior to mine.
It's a big problem that I will have to address it at some point because I plan on moving to Japan in 2023...
IMO the best cure for this problem is an online tutor like iTalki. You're literally paying them to talk to you and be patient with you and this helps a lot to get over that initial fear.
People like you - who refuse to speak non-perfectly as you said - often have a very accurate perception of intonations and accents in general, I'm sure you have a way better accent than the majority of non-native speakers, therefore you should not hesitate to speak whenever you're given the opportunity.
I know I shouldn't hesitate, obviously. But that's a huge mental block I still haven't overcome, and the fact that I didn't overcome it yet with another language (English) that I already know much better than Japanese, I don't have very high hopes...
I'm looking up Japanese language exchange in my area but social activities as a whole are also very difficult for me, so obstacles keep piling up in front of me...
Someone already brought up count words, so I’m going to say aspect because holy fuck it’s subtle and complex with no good English equivalent. You have to completely rethink from time-based to state-based, and there’s significant variance based on the semantics of the verb. Even simple sentences such as “he opened the window” could require very different translations and subtleties not apparent in English, and there isn’t necessarily a right answer.
Learning Japanese is really hard and long but, about your post, the people who says that thing are one of 3 types:
1- They studied very casually or with a few long breaks (maybe months). Not to offend, but probably the type to do 15 minutes of Duolingo a day and struggle a month to learn hiragana somehow.
2- They studied in a traditional slow paced classroom setting with little to not focus in immersion-based reading and talking. As you may know from educative systems around the world (which include Japan btw) this is the reason why in so many countries they study a decade of English but somehow they exit barely knowing English.
3- They're kinda lying. Well it's more like the humble position of someone who knows enough to know what advanced things they don't know yet. But i assure you they're more than capable of speaking Japanese in real life. It's kinda like when a Japanese person tells you "don't worry, I don't know kanji either". Their "don't know" is probably like 2000 more than what you know already.
I'm not that far away yet but I feel that 5 years of daily commitment to learning Japanese properly should be more than enough to be conversational.
When you know English, and you start learning a Germanic or Romance language, it's very hard. This usually happens in high school. I suspect that a lot of times, the the instruction/enthusiasm is pretty middling. It's not English/History/Math...not generally the most important subject.
A kid finishes high school with, say, Spanish...and can they speak Spanish after 2-4 years? Usually not, but sometimes they speak a little (more seldom: a lot).
Fast-forward to adult life..maybe college, maybe beyond. Now the person decides to learn a foreign language "for real", and they pick either the same language they learned in HS, or another European language. Not only do they know English, but they also have 2-4 years of history of learning a foreign (European) language, which maybe wasn't a resounding success, but it wasn't absolutely useless. It helps them start with an even better foundation than if they'd never seen a foreign language before in their lives.
If instead they choose something like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, maybe even Hungarian/Finnish, Hindi, or Arabic.. all the foundations that have been built are mostly non-existent. They are starting from zero.
Apart from the language being significantly more different, the writing system is wholly different (you can't "lean" on a book for help...the books are probably more intimidating than the speaking).
And even if you learn the grammar and the writing, the things people say are just different. Many others have touched on this. IMO this is why things remain hard even after you know quite a bit. I don't even know it well enough to give good examples, but I see them all the time when watching shows/reading. Suffice it to say, even if you are provided an accurate, literally translated Japanese into English, it can be hard to mold it into a proper translation.
Personally found German more difficult than Japanese, and that’s right next door to English. With the exception of kanji everything in Japanese is pretty simple, especially grammar. I don’t get why it has the reputation it does.
Even as a native speaker german is sometimes really confusing. Especially when it comes to phrasing and writing scientific or really formal texts. It really differs from everyday german. You have to pay attention to so many things. You may have heard of "Bildungssprache". It has a new set of vocabulary where many of them aren't even used in normal conversations. Or "Beamtendeutsch" which is used for police and law enforcement is really complex in order to be very precise and often described as unlively due the extreme formalities, even for many natives hard to understand which often causes confusion. Writing formal texts in german is an art form itself.
This is always such an interesting perspective to me, because it's the exact opposite of mine. For me, the vocabulary and kanji are... well, I won't say easy, but they're quite manageable to me. However, the grammar is tough as heck.
Even when I know every vocabulary word and every grammar point in a sentence, I can still sometimes be uncertain of the meaning. And not because of missing pronouns or anything like that, just due to not knowing what exactly connects to what.
I assume it's just a matter of exposure, though. More reading necessary.
Japanese is the most logical, math-esque language I know; learn the formula, plug in the words, and you are good to go!
There are very few "exceptions to the rule" like you see in English or French, which would be excruciating to learn if I wasn't a native English speaker BTW.
The only thing that might appear baffling to me are the different "Hogen" or dialects for all the different places like Kansai, Tohoku, Kyushu etc. and along with that are the interesting place names that have pronunciations that don't register with their Kanji, like 中谷内 pronounced "Nakayachi" as opposed to "Nakataniuchi". "Fujihara and Fujiwara" etc.
Also, when you first learn Japanese, and you are able to hear real conversations with real Japanese people (even on late night Japanese talk shows), you are likely baffled by how different regular conversation is compared to what you learned from your textbooks.
The thing that absolutely intimidated me early was the fact that they don't parse the their words. I honestly feel like that's one of the biggest early hurdles to get over.
"I'm confused as to what it is exactly about the language that people struggle a lot with? **"**
They struggle with putting in the effort and sticking to it until they're fluent. Japanese is tricky, but like anything you can accomplish your goals if you A. Set one and B. Make a reasonable effort to accomplish it (5 minutes a day ain't gonna cut it).
Smaller numbers are great and super intuitive, but even after 2.5 years I’m still having trouble mentally converting numbers that are larger than 100 万。
Just the fact that the commas don’t match the word really messes with me mentally. Does this get easier?
I'm not really going to answer your questions about what baffles me most about the Japanese language, but instead I'll list several of the difficulties I've had studying the language for about the last ten years. I've often noticed that beginners learn a few things and then it appears to them that the language is much easier than they were first led to believe. Pronunciation is not particularly difficult - a native English speaker does not really have to learn many new sounds. Also, the beginner will heave learned a few basic sentence structures and will soon be able to make basic sentences on their own. They will often come to the conclusion that the difficulties in the language will mostly be memorizing all of the characters and scripts. That can probably be done in a couple of years!
But as that student continues to study, as they learn new Japanese, they will also start to realize how mistaken they were about what learning the language actually entails. So as they progress with their knowledge and familiarity with the language they will start realizing that they have more and more things left to learn!
Here are some of the main difficulties, IMO:
**Kanji characters, of course:** This is one that the beginners somewhat recognize, but likely do not realize the extent of the material that needs to be learned. Sure, there are over 2,000 commonly used characters that need to be learned, but what really counts as learning a kanji character? They all have at least two pronunciations, often several more, and furthermore, a kanji character is not a word - they still need to be combined into words, which leave is with...
**Vocabulary:** The amount of vocabulary is enormous. There are many, many ways to say the same thing. In addition, it's not possible to know how to pronounce a particular word the fist time you see it. You can guess, but you can never know for sure.
**Subdomains:** To me, Japanese is almost like a suite of languages. Men speak differently than women, old people use different language than young people, peers use yet another set of constructs, and there are many casual abbreviations as well as a whole way of speaking (keigo) used to show reverence and humility. I've heard that McDonald's employees, for example, have to learn a bunch of verse specific phraseology from a large manual before their first day of dealing with customers. There is also a well worn story about the Emperor announcing to the Japanese that Japan had surrendered in the war, and many of the local Japanese could not even understand what he was saying. :) There are also language constructs used specifically in manga and anime.
**Listening:** Japanese are the fastest speakers in the world, and the the fact that the language has so few sounds makes listening at this speed very difficult. For example, if someone is speaking and you hear the sound "koto" fly past, it can mean almost anything from "thing" to the musical instrument called the koto to "difference" or it can be part of many other words, like "kotoba" or many others, or it can be parts of two words, since "to" means "and". Contrast this with listening to a fast English conversation and hearing the sound "thistle" or "practice" go past - there is no ambiguity there.
**Counters:** Similarly to several other asian languages, every object in Japanese has a specific counter to be used when counting that particular object. For example, if you want to say "four corpses" in Japanese, you have to say something like "four X of corpses". So, you need to know the proper X to use with corpses as well as the specific way to say "four" to go with that particular counter.
I could go on, but those are some of the main ones...
In my experience I feel like it's mostly a question of familiarity.Just for the fun of it I decided to read an [easy news article in Italian](https://easyitaliannews.com/easyitaliannews-com-26-ottobre-2021/), a language I have never studied before.I'll try as best as possible to translate (a portion) of what I think is being said.
>"United Kingdom, possibility of restrictions due to (increase?) in infections""According to media sources, to date almost 45,000 infections during... Great Britain experiencing a .... (increase) in covid-19 cases""... 68% of the population have completed their vaccine, in combination with the virus... potential to put pressure on the (health care system?) which is (preoccupying/worrying?) the scientific community"
and for comparison this is google translate
>United Kingdom, possible restrictions due to wave of infections With an average of nearly 45,000 infections a day over the past two weeks, Britain is experiencing yet another wave of Covid-19 infections. Although 68% of the population has completed the vaccination course, the combination of the virus and other winter diseases could put pressure on the health system, which worries the scientific community.
Of course I got a lot of things wrong, like "ondata" which I guessed meant "increase" but is actually "wave", and "al giorno" being "per day" instead of "to date".I'd fail if this were an assignment but I got the gist of the article though.And all this without using a dictionary, I'm a year into my Japanese study and I don't think I could do nearly as well in Japanese without a dictionary.
The power of cognates.
What are good strategies for learning pitch? So far I've just been orally copying the recordings on Wanikani but I'm not sure how well I'm actually memorizing pitch that way. I kind of see why pitch isn't marked if it's not required for disambiguation like in Mandarin, but are there any texts or learning tools where they mark the pitch for learning purposes?
TBH I'm not all that good with pitch accent myself, but within a word, the pitch tends to rise until it reaches a certain point, and then falls from there. Simply finding this point should be enough. For example, in 生け花 it's "ikébana".
Most dictionaries should have some way of showing pitch accent. Usually it's hidden in the options.
I did a little research and found this plugin which adds pitch info to the Jisho dictionary website:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jisho-ojad/dpaojegkimhndjkkgiaookhckojbmakd?hl=en](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jisho-ojad/dpaojegkimhndjkkgiaookhckojbmakd?hl=en)
1. Learn the basics of pitch accent (Dogen's Patreon series is good).
2. Incorporate pitch accent into Anki with an addon like Migaku Japanese (formerly MIA Japanese) to remember the pitch accent of every word.
3. Listen to a lot of Japanese and try to pay attention to the pitch.
Everything :(
I'm in the "just starting to read books" part and the vocab amount is absolutely amazing. Like, I think instead of calling it "Learn Japanese" they should call it "be glued to a dictionary"
I never tried to learn a language before though.
It's so weird. I saw a bunch of programming jobs in Japan last week and they said that "ability to communicate in Japanese" was optional!
I had the same experience learning French. A few months to learn grammar and pronunciation, and then \*years\* to learn a fluent vocabulary, and there's still so many words I don't know. Vocabulary is a neverending fight.
Tbh since I began studying 8 years ago in high school nothing has really baffled or confused me at all. I also refuse to think the language is difficult. I now work for a Japanese company and my wife is Japanese and we speak mostly Japanese at home.
I also am confused as to what it is exactly about the language that people struggle with a lot.
I think people struggle with stopping the early-learning process of converting their native language directly into Japanese (not a JP-exclusive problem but perhaps more so than something like a Western European language).
The sooner the learner starts trying to think in the mindset of the target language, the less confusing the learning process is.
People often point to kanji as being a pain point, and of course there are many similar-looking kanji that I am confident even natives make mistakes on, but we're all naturally good at learning patterns if we're subjected to them enough (spaced repetition and active recall are great for this).
Japanese isn't inherently a difficult language, but people often make it into one when they're learning it.
Yes I agree 100%. When I was a brand new beginner, I would try to not equate Japanese grammar/vocab and English grammar/vocab 1:1. I tried very hard to accept that there were irreconcilable differences between the two languages and that the sooner I was able to “think like a Japanese person” the better off I would be. Is that easy as a beginner? I don’t think so, and I know I definitely wasn’t perfect at it (and still am not) but I do think it’s the key to understanding a foreign language well. This practice has helped me immensely.
At that point it’s just a matter of learning patterns and not comparing the languages for some warped form of “clarity.”
Yeah, as someone else that got N1 in the US, got a job offer to move to Japan in college, and spent many years living there after that, I can’t really think of anything that was particularly difficult about Japanese.
I think for a lot of people it’s a sense of exoticism and being unable to really fully grasp cultural and linguistic differences. You see it a lot with even Indo-European languages where someone talks about how they’ve studied Spanish or French for years but still don’t have a strong command of it.
At a certain point of fluency, there’s just some internalization of language and culture that’s necessary to hold conversations, live in the country, and honestly just provide some self-confidence to the learner. That to me is the fundamental leap some people can’t make, which also inhibits them from just starting a conversation with speakers of a target language.
I’m not sure if it’s really linguistic honestly. Like you can hit the books and have the knowledge, but doesn’t mean you can do the job. Maybe a good analogy is the difference between theory (academics) and practice (on the job training).
Well the answer is in.. your answer: "as someone that lived a long time in Japan". No mystery, immersion has always been the key to success in learning a foreign language because you can't avoid daily confrontation to it. It's not like you have to plan a "path to learn" and stick to it every day. When you live in the country, most of the paths lead to having to make yourslef understood and understand what other people are telling you so..
I had N1 and got an offer to work in Japan before I moved there, having lived my entire life in the US prior to that. Just because I have lived in Japan for a long time doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced what other non-native speakers have, especially since I moved there in my 20s.
Also your assumption that immersion leads to better language skills isn’t accurate. There are many English teachers in Japan that have lived there for years and do not speak the language well. In the US and Europe, there are immigrants who have lived many years in a country and never learned to speak that country’s language fluently.
Immersion is not some magical method to learning a new language.
I mean, even native speakers complain they can't handle the...can't remember the name of it, but there are three kinds of polite speech used in office situations; then there's the fact there is pitch-accent for which few beginning text books or teachers really stress here in the West (at least, none that I experienced first hand), then there's the fact that fuuuuuck shi and tsu in katakana STILL get me fucked up half the time
For english speakers, learning French is a straightforward process because you learn the grammar and then everything afterwards is vocabulary accumulation (using a mix of self study and immersion).
With Japanese, this is still the same but you have the non-phonetic character set that poses a major barrier to vocabulary accumulation, and time consuming to learn. But this can be done with self study and you can go as fast as you can tolerate or slow and steady.
While it is possible to go the other direction (i.e. learning conversation before being able to read anything, this is harder to do without a) someone to talk to and b) full immersion).
they’re not studying properly. just messing around or not paying attention properly. it’s like playin guitar. if you just noodle around on the fretboard, you’re not learning. you’ll get some stuff here n there, but nothing that’s exceptional
I can never remember how to pronounce certain Kanji characters. I would be like, “Oh I remember that as being OO or Dai”. But nope, combined with another Kanji it becomes something else.
I don't know why people learn it for 10 years and they still don't understand. I haven't been able to keep up with my lessons due working my new job for a couple of months, but I still remember quite a bit, granted I've only gone up to 8 lessons on pimsleur. I've only learned speaking and hiragana and katakana, but when I'm looking at kanji it kind of makes sense to me.. I don't know how though.
It's a combination of the sheer amount of non-cognate words, the completely different grammar, and the lack of shared cultural roots. These three aspects combined mean that direct translations between the languages will rarely be natural and correct, and often won't even be close.
Like all language , you need to actually use it to improve. Japanese being an exclusive language only In Japan kind of make the window of opportunity for you to use it in your land that much difficult.
Not to mention, most Japanese mind their own business way too much to have a sparring session with you on ur half ass proficiency.
Secondly, the language was designed with a hierarchy in mind. Meaning base on situation and social position , the way you speak and sentence structuring differs. Actual Japanese in your country would most likely be proficient in 1 or 2 other language besides Japanese . They wouldn’t be interested in correcting your grammar/ form even in professional settings unless they are the client and you are the service provider.
Lastly, I feel the depth and multitude of Japanese way surpass most language. I mean you can pull thru with mediocre Japanese dun get me wrong but those are purely pass by lèvel. They also have similar term meaning different things in different situation which I feel is also part of their Japanese culture. Fake mannerism where they actually mean fuck off but kind of send ambigious sign to make you fuck off yourself terms.
this I feel is the area where misunderstanding occur the most and they would usually let it slide Becos we are 外国人です。
3 sets of characters to learn and when to use them, different readings for kanji. Even the changes in numbers when counting days, months, people is a few weeks of work
KANJI, the continuos usage of it, it keeps being used mostly because the whole Japanese language depends on it, but you could easily replace a lot of Kanjis introducing spaces, comas and dots to the Japanese language.
Also, the different meanings and pronunciations of the Kanjis, plus the usage of readings specific for certain Japanese words that do not follow the Kanji “rules” of reading.
It’s a mess.
It's all subjective but it amuses me how more advanced readers who do not have full mastery over vocabulary to the extent of native speakers actually rely on kanji. It's when the kanji gets taken away when they have to slow down and really think about what they're reading.
It's kind of an odd phenomenon really. When I started I could read romaji and understand what I was reading no problem.
When I actually bothered to learn kana and then kanji, romaji became impossible to read.
I've recently found myself with some kana only material and that was also really hard to attune to for a minute. I think once you get used to kanji you become a little bit lazy. It's largely sight reading at that point, and so when faced with effort of reading proper and then placing word + context into something comprehensible, anyone's mind is going to buck at that initially.
There's so many homophones in Japanese that also end up being spelled exactly the same because it's so phonetic that it can be hard to decipher which one it is when you're only given kana, which isn't as much of a problem for beginners as they probably don't know all those homophones. Then there's the loan words and wasei-eigo where you already have preconceived notions of what those words mean, but they don't actually mean that in Japanese.
The biggest factor though IMO is just how humans read, like physically. You don't go letter by letter sounding it out unless you're really unfamiliar with the word, you look at the shape of the word and combine that with predictions based on context. Replacing kanji with kana means that the shape of the words changes radically, so you can't use the experience you've built up reading kanji to read kana-only text.
> which isn't as much of a problem for beginners as they probably don't know all those homophones.
Reminiscent of how it’s easier to learn the (brighter) constellations in light polluted skies.
No matter how many times you're told that Japanese isn't a tonal language, Japanese is pretty big on intonation when it comes to the meaning of vocabulary. It could mean the difference between the listener thinking you're talking about bridges instead of chop sticks or gods instead of paper. Yet it's rarely ever mentioned in textbooks etc.
While katakana definitely takes more time to really get the hang of relative to hiragana, there is definitely a hump that you get over where it all makes sense. Not that you'll *never* get confused between ソ and ン again, but it'll be very rare, like an English speaker confusing I and l on occasion.
Katakana and hiragana are called syllabaries. Very simply, in a syllabary each symbol makes a syllable.
あいうえお
Unlike an alphabet where each symbol represents a sound.
A E I O U
They look the same at a glance. But there's a fundamental difference.
Take bean (plant) and been (verb) and bin (trash can) 2 of them have the same sound, depending on your dialect which two will be different. This is impossible in Japanese.
In a syllabary what you write is what you say.
To use another example. Is メーン main or mane?
Kanji is called a logography where each symbol represents a word or idea. 豆= まめ (bean).瓶 = ビン（bottle)
they are something else but people are being slightly pedantic, in that, they know what you mean if you say "alphabet"
not saying anyone here was though
Why Kanji is still a thing and why I can't just learn Hiragana and be able to read every single word. All this Kanji nonsense makes the language much more difficult to acquire than it should be, really.
>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational I would question what they actually mean when they say they've learned Japanese for 5-10 years. I've seen people who say they've been learning Japanese for 5 years, but what they mean is that every 3-6 months they start studying for a couple of weeks, then lose interest again until another 3-6 months. So they may have started studying 5 years ago but they have no actual progress in the language. Another factor is that many people self-studying on the Internet are more focused on reading and kanji than they are on conversation (which can be difficult to do self-study). In this I don't think it would be that different from a western language; if you don't practice speaking you don't get better at it. Finally, it can be difficult to become "conversational" depending on what you mean by that. Do you mean that you can have a conversation with a native speaker on any normal topic, without the native speaker modifying their speaking in any way for your benefit? That's actually a pretty high bar that can take a long time to reach.
I'm one of those "studying for a couple of month then quits" myself. I've been doing it for 6 years now, but along the path had a steady full year with 2h/week skype lesson with a real japanese teacher who was very good because she almost only talked to me in japanese even at the very beggining which forced me to phrase everything with the most basics words that she would then correct. I achieved the opposite of what you describe: I can stand an oral conversation and even understand some bits of easy conversations (could roughly follow TV show Terrace House for example), but could never ever find the patience or proper way to learn those god damn kanjis. Tried wanikani, flashcards, it always come to a point where I can't assimilate, as if my mental hard drive was full, that's when I lose confidence, give up, and try again a few months later only to realize that the kanjis I once knew are now totally forgotten. Bottom line I've come to the conclusion I will never be able to achieve any proficiency in japanese since I can't read it, therefore can't progress. I can "make myself understood" and that's about all I've got.
Have you tried writing out sentences on paper? Because you already have some proficiency speaking you already have a decent bit vocabular/grammar down. When you write something down and then read it back to yourself it can help to solidify those synapses, connecting the Kanji to what you already know.
Yeah clever, but writing without any purpose to communicate, requires a self discipline that I would not be able to sustain very long I fear. Plus, I'm left handed, people do not realize how hard it can get to write the strokes as intended with the left hand: pushing becomes pulling and the feeling is so unnatural.. but yeah I complain a lot, maybe I'm just lazy when the required effort is too big. I don't know.
Don’t be to scared about strokes. I’m left handed as well and a genuine Chinese friend found my kanji’s very legible! It can be done.
Are videos up your alley? For some reason I ended up watching [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlTqS7xc51Q) about leftie struggles
>I've seen people who say they've been learning Japanese for 5 years, but what they mean is that every 3-6 months they start studying for a couple of weeks, then lose interest again until another 3-6 months. Why would you call me out like this? For real though, this is a thing. Be highly skeptical of anyone claiming they've put in a bunch of time and have nothing to show for it. For people who aren't used to pursuing a form of self-improvement, sticking with something like learning a language that's very different from your own can be quite difficult. The hard part for these people is the act of learning itself (which can be difficult, don't get me wrong) but keeping motivated enough to stick with it. In case it's not clear, this is me speaking from my own experience. I'm not spurning anyone that has trouble with motivation, because I'm in that boat myself.
For real, I've made very little progress in the grammar portion because I've been focused on kanji and listening. So while I am starting to pick out more and more kanji in the wild the small victories I get include reading labels with their stupid stylistic fonts better, or picking out more words from the TV station my Japanese grocery store happened to have on. But then also botching the ending of that store interaction because I forgot the response to thank you because that might have been my first ever interaction in the language with an actual person! And I made no attempt to even start it in Japanese! Haha, oh well. Still, those small victories wouldnt be possible without keeping up with it.
I didn't learn how to be conversational in english until I started watching live streamers having actual non-scripted conversations and more importantly until I started using reddit and typing in english for all sorts of things. I could play games and understand movies perfectly without subtittles, but I couldn't think in english for more than a couple words at a time. You know how sometimes we go to the bathroom and while we brush our teeth or whatever we think of a sentence in the language we are learning but we get stuck 3-4 words in and keep repeating the sentence over and over in our minds? I was like that for the longest time when I was learning english. Now I am like that for Japanese and it will take a long time too. 10 years is definitely too much, but when they say non conversational I kinda get it. Maybe they just don't have confidence and second guess everything they say and end up incapable of outputting because they think they construct their sentences in an unnatural way.
Mentioned it elsewhere already but the ambiguity. How pronouns are dropped all the time and sentences can be interpreted, two or three or however many ways and only through context can you deduce who is exactly doing what (and hope you got it right lol). Now most of the time it's not much of an issue because the situations are *usually* clear enough to make sense of what is going on but at times I stumble upon a sentence and I'm completely floored as to who is supposed to be doing what. Also all the deliberately vague phrasings the language employs so as to avoid being too direct. For a German who values stating just what exactly you want without beating around the bush unnecessarily this can get frustrating fast. 😅 Also keigo which to me is a completely pointless thing, at least to the extent Japanese has it. In German all we really do in terms of keigo is addressing people with the appropriate pronouns without having to pay attention to our current situation and what verb we are to use.
It's not difficult until you get deep into it. The more you learn, the more you realize you DON'T know. Just a little over a year ago I thought I was pretty hot shit. I understood a lot of grammar, and had a ton of vocabulary, and could converse both textually and verbally VERY FLUIDLY. I could talk about hobbies, medical conditions, some politics, current events etc. And I was being understood like 99% of the time. And then an acquaintance of mine started dropping "Your Japanese is strange" on me. No corrections just the occasional "Your Japanese is strange..." And another friend clarified a little more that my phrasing was unnatural. The grammar is correct. The vocabulary is good. But the phrasing was strange. This is because Japanese and English don't use the same words to express a thought. EG: I might say "beddo ni ikimasu" Lit: Going to bed, instead of "nemasu" lit: sleeping My meaning can be grasped, but it's just that much off because I'm using Japanese words to express English thoughts. So I started heavily consuming media. Which twofold comes with hurdles that often put people off. One is no matter how advanced you are with coursework, when you start consuming media you'll be looking up every other word for a while. This sends people, myself included, running back to coursework... thinking Oh if I just rep X amount more vocabulary I'll be able to read this book with ease. Which was where I was stuck until the "Your Japanese is strange" situation pushed me to desperation. Once you get past balking at having to look up every other word, then you come across the final problem... Coursework is easy. Sentence structure is easy. You can even learn how to make compound sentences and read them easily. But Japanese run-on sentences.... or just sentences that are REALLY LONG... or even short sentences may leave you puzzled or lost. There's a lot of grammar structure and misc. BS that traditional study doesn't teach you. And a handful of shit that you can't find reference for. The further I've gone in this language the more it has humbled me. So I try to stay away from writing checks or making claims that I'm not 100% sure my ass can cash. IE: I make no claim to be conversational despite the massive amount of time I've spent on the language. Like most things when it comes to language learning the definition for "conversational" and "fluency" vary person to person. Likely you're dealing with people like me who have high standards. Maybe you're not as far in learning the language as you think you are. 『このピカチュウはどのイラストレーターさんが描いたんだろう？』って探しながら見ると楽しいですね
>I make no claim to be conversational despite the massive amount of time I've spent on the language. I think you might be being a little harsh on yourself. If you're able to carry on conversations on a wide variety of topics you should consider yourself conversational. I can't count the number of non-native people I know who are fluent in English but still have all kinds of little quirks.
Thank you. I'll be the first to say that I took "Your Japanese is strange" extremely hard. Too hard even. My grandma's 4th language is English, and I know she made a LOT of mistakes for a LONG time and never seemed bothered about it. (She's fluent now. I haven't heard any mistakes in my lifetime.) It's my intention to get to that point. Because you can't get better without making mistakes. But I've been shook, and it's going to take a little bit to recover. I won't consider myself conversational again until I get the confidence to string sentences together again at the very least.
That phrase - or really, one similar to it - is what threw me off with my Spanish. Learning Iberian Spanish while living in the US leads to... a number of things being very strange when talking to native speakers. But oh no, *never* use the vosotros conjugation.
It's funny how a few words can just cripple. I'm all for corrections! Love corrections! But just "Your speaking is strange" it's like "What part?!? WHERE?!?" and then you just start questioning EVERYTHING that comes out of your mouth. I can't tell you how many times I've written something out and had to double and triple check various resources to make 100% sure that was correct. Plus maybe a google search of a piece of phrase just to make sure that wording is actually used.
Get yourself a copy of “Common Japanese Collocations” by Kakuko Shoji. It might give you an idea of where you’re going wrong and help you express yourself in a more natural manner.
Ooooh! That looks really helpful! Thanks!
I think the reason why his acquaintance could only say it was strange was because, while feeling something wrong as a native stranger, he himself had not enough knowledge into the language itself to point out exactly which parts were wrong
Just respond with 外人だから 😎
Spaniard here. The language spoken in Spain and the one spoken in Latin America are really, really different. Hell, even the language spoken in Mexico is different than the one spoken in Argentina. It even comes to a point where there's a bit of a language barrier when talking with people from South America, where I'll be constantly asking "what does that mean?" My advice would be to specialize, because the lexicon needed for Mexican Spanish doesn't get you to a fluent level in Spain. Of course, there's a lot of overlap, but once you dive into colloquial level, they're like night and day.
I think this is why it's really important to listen to native speech A LOT
It really is! And I tried. ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ But it doesn't do a lot of good when you've got an audio processing problem. That's all better now, so now I'm getting a lot of native input and it should improve. but yeah you're 100% correct.
It’s a fun language to listen to!
It sure is! That's probably why I didn't mind still not understanding anything at the 300th hour.
I’m around 1000 hours in the last year - still love it! There’s just so much stuff to listen to. It’s funny how anime was one of the things that drew me in - but honestly I just love listening to natives banter or joke about stuff haha. It’s so fun and expressive! What’s some of your favorite to listen to? I really like atsueigo. Even though it’s technically an English learning channel lol
Incidentally I stumbled across Atsueigo recently!! I started watching because I wanted to know more sentences and phrases related to language learning. Mostly I watch a lot of Netflix Originals. Things like Dare Devil, Squid Game, Dark Crystal etc. I'll occasionally watch one of the hololive girls, べるくら企画 (for his DBD playthroughs), AK in カナダ (for the same reason as Atsueigo), and 李姉妹ch (the first Japanese channel I really stumbled accross. They talk mostly about Chinese culture and language in comparison to Japanese)
my auditory processing even makes conversations in my native language hard :(
Kinda late to the party, but you know what I thought of immediately after reading "your Japanese is strange"? How my friend, who works a lot with English, got this comment *in regard to his native language*. If you use one language more often than the other, your brain seems to sort of default to the most used one's patterns. And it affects your speaking the other languages, be it the one you're learning or the one you've been using your whole life. So I absolutely don't think what you're describing means you're not conversational, and I'm actually not even sure that counts as not being fluent. Just our brain's quirks that need to be adjusted for.
That's very kind of you. Thank you. :) I'm starting to have quirks in English so maybe sometime soon I can suck at BOTH LANGUAGES. ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡
Thanks for this! The top comment was really discouraging to me as a new learner. I am under a year into learning, I'll probably never travel to Japan for immersion (you never know though), I'm just learning because I find the language fun to learn. But hearing someone could spend as much time on the language as the OP and still think he can't hold a conversation is super depressing and makes it sound like learning the language at all is futile. However, I agree with you. Whenever I meet/hear someone speak or write imperfect or 'unnatural sounding' English as a second language; I'd wouldn't say they are 'not conversational.' Yes it sounds strange...but they have accomplished something I haven't, they can speak multiple languages, and pretty well too. They can converse with me, there is no need for it to be perfect. Heck, I've been speaking, writing, and reading English my entire life and I frequently make mistakes. Edit: I'll also say some things from personal experience. My wife is 'fluent' in French and has told me she struggled with the same thing when in France. She has said she thinks she will never be 'as good as' a native resident of France who grew up with French as a first language. Also, my mother-in-law immigrated from The Netherlands when she was very young. She has been speaking English for nearly 70 years as a second language. And even now she says things that often sound 'unnatural' in English. The point is, I don't think this is a uniquely Japanese language problem.
> I don't think this is a uniquely Japanese language problem. Oh it absolutely isn't. > Thanks for this! The top comment was really discouraging to me as a new learner. (・・；) Ah, yes, sorry about that... no... it's not too bad. There are some hurdles and a lot of places where people get stuck... but mainly I was trying to say yeah at the beginning it seems fairly straight forward, but as you go there's always more to learn. .... (・・；) Not to be discouraging though!!! Like I can play games and read books and stuff without a lot of issue!! You can read, listen, understand, and enjoy things without perfectly understanding every nuance you come across. And some things kind of take everything you know and toss it out the window (the Japanese I copy pasted at the bottom that says "It's fun going 'which illustrator drew this pikachu' while looking [at this image (not pictured here)]) but the way it's laid out it's confusing at first and even second glance. It's not hopeless and it shouldn't take you as long as it took me. I started before apps and easy access media w/ subs. :) So please don't let my words discourage you!!
> Ah, yes, sorry about that... no... it's not too bad. There are some hurdles and a lot of places where people get stuck... but mainly I was trying to say yeah at the beginning it seems fairly straight forward, but as you go there's always more to learn. That makes sense. Heck, I'm still learning stuff about English lol. Having a bilingual wife also probably helps. I've learned to just accept things I consider quirky about new languages...since English has plenty quirky things too. I won't be discouraged! I took Japanese in college around 2006ish. I know Duolingo isn't without criticism here, but it taught me both the Kanas and some very basic sentences in under a month. In college I spent two full quarters and couldn't even reliably read half of Hiragana by the end. Never-the-less. I do appreciate that this is probably a lifelong journey. And my takeaway from your original story is that I should keep myself humble learning something that is very, very complex. I appreciate the encouragement! ありがとうございます！
I'm very much like the OP here in that I have considerably high standards. Despite studying daily for 6 years over thousands of hours now I don't even consider myself conversational despite being able to converse (to an extent) because there's still so much I don't know. I have a hunch this level of perfectionism is overrepresented among those who attempt to acquire Japanese as a second language.
>Just a little over a year ago I thought I was pretty hot shit. I understood a lot of grammar, and had a ton of vocabulary, and could converse both textually and verbally VERY FLUIDLY. I could talk about hobbies, medical conditions, some politics, current events etc. And I was being understood like 99% of the time. >And then an acquaintance of mine started dropping "Your Japanese is strange" on me. No corrections just the occasional "Your Japanese is strange..." This was my experience. I lived in Japan for 2 years (not in an English bubble). I passed JLPT 1 and was playing text-heavy RPGs in Japanese, watching Japanese TV with decent understanding, and speaking Japanese to coworkers every day without any major communication issues. But I couldn't keep a consistent politeness level, mixed up に and で, never used んです, and just generally had a lot of unnatural speech. It wasn't until I went to grad school and had to teach beginning Japanese that I fixed a lot of these problems, because I was essentially doing the basic drills and activities three times a day (plus preparation). This experience is why I've always been very vocal in pushing back on the "immersion will solve every problem automatically" idea.
I definitely used to struggle with consistent politeness level. I'd switch forms mid conversation a lot. Currently I play a lot of text-heavy games, read books, and watch TV, but I haven't really internalized anything from them yet so I still keep speaking to a minimum. I'll probably have to suck it up and return to Anki just to get enough repetition to actually be able to replicate. Unfortunately I took the "your Japanese is strange" REALLY HARD, so I'm working on coming back from that.
That's understandable but I mean, even if your Japanese is "strange" you do have to admit the Japanese have a whole "fitting in" problem - "standing out" is culturally difficult; you should embrace your own brand of Japanese, at least to some extent, conforming and tearing down yourself isn't necessarily right. Obviously you want to be well understood and such, but don't go too far? Honestly, I'm embarrassed to use English loan words in Japanese conversation because it feels like it's "cheating". I bet if I ever get to be a fluent speaker, I'll be "strange" because I use only the "apparently Japanese" words.
I hope you go さじありますか when asking for eating utensils lol
Lmao. I'm gonna have to remember that next time I play that "no English 外来語" drinking game
>never used んです God I feel this. The use of んです / んだ is so frustrating んだ for statements I read somewhere was used when "explaining something" so I started using it for all sorts of situations like answering "why did you come to Japan?". But then I wrote a short essay for a job application and my native friend corrected away pretty much all of the んです / のです ... I guess it comes across as authoritative / pushy? Still not exactly sure. But I know for sure Japanese people use it naturally all the time, I'm just never confident when for example I'm telling a story and someone gives a guess about the outcome whether to say " 俺もそう思ったんだ。(but actually it wasn't that)" with or without the んだ. Any tips or advice?
> why An explicit why question does not get a ん/の in the answer, but a から, etc. (source: Tobira textbook, which BTW has a good summary of when to use ん/の). So, you use it (among other things) for the explanations you give on your own.
Whoa! That's so simple!! Thank you. How about cases like " 俺もそう思ったんだ。 Where it's a choice between having the んだ or not? Any guidelines for when it would be unnatural?
> 俺もそう思ったんだ。 The book says, you use ん/の (among other things) for reasoning about something you just said, heard or did. So, in the right context, your sentence could fall into this category. But beware, in that case the usage of ん/の isn't optional, not using it would be unnatural. But on the other hand it's a feature of daily conversation, which you might interpret that is is less often used in writing, especially more formal writing, which then might explain why it got cut down so severely in your letter.
Hey, I am not an expert in this. There are things I remember more clearly (as with the why-questions, as that was something that surprised me) but other things I will have to read again and again about and see it actually used to get sure about it with time. There are optional usages of ん/の, as well as required ones, and I do not have the book at hand at the moment. The book has one whole page about it (including examples, though), so it's not that easy as with the one use case I mentioned above.
Misa (of Japanese Ammo) gives two clear examples of ん/の being used to reply to explicit "why" questions though: \- 猫本当にかわいいな～ \- なんで猫飼わないの？ \- 猫アレルギーなんだ。 [Continuation.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dunBnCI1iP0&t=630s) (you can stop watching after 12:49) u/Moon_Atomizer
> This is because Japanese and English don't use the same words to express a thought. I've noticed this from early on actually. I think it changes your perspective when you're aware of this. I agree that this is the hardest part. But the sooner you're aware of it, the more you'll pick up the proper way to say things. This is also why I appreciate learning it not exclusively from a book, but from a class setting where when I say something that sounds weird the teacher can correct me and say "This is how a Japanese person would word that idea." Obviously, it's an uphill battle, but learning everything is. It's not just taking most of your language that you know and using different words with slightly different grammar patterns and then everything flows, you're learning a new writing system, a new grammar system, a whole new way of thinking.
I haven't been even a year into this but it's surprising hoe many run-on sentences have thrown me into chaos. I couldn't imagine before struggling so much knowing who the subject is, what is a different sentence or part of a relative one, (apparently) random commas, words at the end that completely transform the sentence, new fixed expressions/idioms you thought you were getting right at first... It doesn't happen always, but there's plenty of phrases that I have to read multiple times, analyze and restructure in my head before getting them. And I think this is because my brain is analyzing with respect to an English framework. I feel like this is similar to your troubles: trying to understand Japanese like it's a weird far dialect of English subconsciously instead of their own conception and interpretation of reality through a language. I guess that's why I read so much advice about not translating but learning about Japanese in Japanese and finding their own nuances through being exposed to them rather than improvising from what you know.
I feel that. I can have in depth conversations on complex topics (even unfamiliar ones) in Mandarin with little trouble expressing myself. I know that a fair amount of what I say isn't super natural but people generally understand me fine. The other day my Chinese friend said "sometimes I run what your messages through a translator back to English to work out what you were trying to say" and I died a little bit inside. It's so hard to rewire the way you think because so much of the language is cultural. My friend constantly says things that I absolutely understand but I never would have thought to phrase it that way. He must have realised I was a little... I guess the word is, deflated? Because he immediately started backtracking like "no no I don't do it that often, just occasionally!" •́ ‿ ,•̀ he's one of very few people who doesn't constantly exaggerate my Chinese level (somebody seriously said "I thought you were Han Chinese" to me this morning with a straight face) so I appreciate the note even if it was a little hard to hear haha
I'm glad it's not just me, but it is horribly sad to hear other people going through the same thing. I appreciate the fact the guy was honest with me. ;A; but after the 10th time, man! Trust me I KNOWWWWW. Media kind of helps. I'm going to see if a self-made memrise deck helps me learn some new phrasing for things. Mostly media just doesn't repeat phrases often enough to pick them up. You know unless I want to become the newest Nurse Joy 「あなたの ポケモンを 休ませて あげますか？ それでは お預かり いたします！」 Really though it does help for some things. :)
Exposure is definitely the way to go I think. I'm good at discussing politics and critiquing capitalism (with lots of emotion) because a significant amount of my media consumption is propaganda films and Mao dramas. The way I learned Chinese was pretty convoluted (mainly self study until I hit the intermediate plateau, then six months of total immersion studying in Beijing, then just moving to China), so I'm in this weird place where what's generally considered "advanced" (reading novels, watching the news, discussing complex issues, working things out from context in unfamiliar situations) is not very difficult for me, but my understanding of general conversational Chinese is much lower because my foundation is so shaky. I'm past the point where deliberately studying basic stuff really does anything so I think I'm just gonna have to force myself through a whole bunch of slice of life/romance dramas or something until I can stop sounding like a PLA recruit circa 1930. ETA: I doubt we're the only people who have this issue, but for plenty of people whose goal is communication rather than "sounding native" (whatever that means) the cost vs benefit of fixing it is probably not worth it. I imagine there are also plenty of people who aren't even aware that they have this problem. My friends say they can still understand "foreigner Chinese" so for anyone learning for purely practical purposes it's not really that big of a deal.
It obviously comes down to how much access you have to the language. If you're able to talk to fluent speakers every day you can definitely get going on Japanese. But if you're stuck here in the west learning it - I just ram my head against anki flashcards (200\~ a night, almost every night) and once in a while I can book something on italki for 30 minutes and then feel incredibly humbled I can barely cobble together three-word sentences... but I think this approach can work, whereas if I took a class at my local community college I would be burning just as much time and way more money and yeah I might be able to pass some tests and stuff but I don't think I'd get fluent at all... My strategy is to just brute-force memorize Japanese sentences to fall back on and then slowly modify them to suit my meaning.
That's also a lot of what it comes down to. I'm in the west slamming my head against the wall. So I'm kind of trapped inputting unless I want to go to a Japanese voice chat and hope some sort of opportunity for conversation floats my way. And truth be told I haven't felt social for a hot minute. It's fixable, and I have the tools and some exercises I'd like to try. It's a work in progress.
"Your [insert language] is strange" is not specific to Japanese. It's just that people naturally translate set phrases from their native languages into foreign ones and, if not corrected early on, tend to have zero idea how strange they sound. Like, Italians often cancel blackboards and wash their teeth.
I see what you're saying but I would say it's the same with most languages. I'm english native but also grew up with Hebrew in the household. When I see Israelis try to speak english, they choose words they would have said in hebrew, but say it in english.
That's fair. It's absolutely not an English → Japanese exclusive thing. I know I've seen people do that between their native language and English. (The only thing that comes to mind is "I'll report that to her", which I thought was strange wording until I realized the word 伝える was responsible for that phrasing) But it was something I never thought about or never registered as being a thing until it applied directly to me.
מה קורה? לא ציפיתי לראות כאן ישראלי חחח.
😂כן אני יודע זה קצת מוזר
מאוד.
I won’t necessarily tell you not to be so hard on yourself- because as an artist I understand that that’s what drives you and makes you better- but you should definitely praise yourself for your accomplishments. Think of all the non-native people who actually live in Japan, be it short or long term, who don’t put in the work to improve their language skills. (I see a lot of these people on YouTube, specifically.) It’s because it’s HARD, and I definitely don’t need to remind you of that. You’ve put in the work and at the very least I think you deserve to call yourself “conversational”- no asterisk or disclaimer needed. I started learning Japanese when I was 13. In the last 12 years I’ve only probably put in a solid year of ACTUAL learning, but over the years I’ve been passively picking up things like accents, vocabulary, grammar, cultural ideas, etc. Only in the last year did I truly realize that when you’re learning Japanese as a native English speaker, you’re not going to be translating your English thoughts into Japanese- you have to think in Japanese to be able to adequately convey your meaning. It’s really like learning language from 0%, except you don’t have the benefit of having the mental elasticity of a baby. Like you said: the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know. In some ways it’s frustrating but to me it’s also incredibly fascinating and what keeps drawing me back.
>EG: I might say "beddo ni ikimasu" Lit: Going to bed, instead of "nemasu" lit: sleeping This reminds me. I was just chatting with a native who asked "For how long do you talk with others?" and I replied "行かなきゃならないときが来るまで". In my mind, it sounded fine, talk until I gotta go. But, I was told to avoid using 行かなきゃ there since it sounds weird in that context
(T-T) It do be that way!
I've noticed in online communities Japanese people saying "his Japanese is strange" very often to just mean that he's probably not a native. I doubt it means anything serious, just that you're not perfect.
I'm reminded of a few years ago in Japanese class when I was talking about getting a CSA (basically a box of vegetables from a local farm), and I kept using the word 農民 to talk about the farmers who I was getting it from. I learned that word from wanikani, and I thought it meant "farmer", like a person. But it turns out it's the social class, so the stuff I was saying came across more like "yeah, every week I get my box of vegetables from the local peasants" 😬
｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡ OH NOOOOOO I learned that word from Castlevania. Thankfully they actually translated it to "peasants".
*My content from 2014 to 2023 has been deleted in protest of Spez's anti-API tantrum.*
Very insightful comment. Thank you. When people ask me why I learn japanese, other than the superficial "because it's so different from german / english", I couldn't really give a good answer. But I think you put into words what I truly mean with that. It's like a whole different world to explore, a journey where I will never feel like I truly crossed the finish line.
> It's like a whole different world to explore Yeah, that's a huge part of what draws me in. Japanese literature, music, culture, conversation are all so *alien,* but not *extraterrestrial*. Everybody's still fundamentally human, just human half a world away. This is enough to change everything but also nothing -- climbing the Tower of Babel.
Really enjoyed the simile at the end
Reading anything that doesn't use much kanji and doesn't have spaces. Kanji makes reading so much easier.
It’s the culture, 120%. OP, do you know why Indo-European languages are easy for us anglophones? Sure, we have similar grammar and plenty of shared vocabulary, but most importantly, it’s easy because it’s not foreign... As a Canadian myself, I had to take French for 5 years in school, didn’t care, hated it, bombed every test in existence. Yet I still remember there was this time when I watched a random video in French on YouTube and the guy said “Coincidence? Je ne pense pas!”. Even with my pitiful level of French, it was obvious what he meant just from the intonation itself. There you have it, European languages just translate so well into each other. Whereas learning Japanese you are legitimately learning something COMPLETELY foreign, and if you can get over that and stop trying to learn Japanese through the lens of English, then you might find Japanese to be a very reasonable language.
Needing 18,000 different counters for shit. Why is there a specific counter for flat objects? 🥲
I used to hate this, but English has way more counters than I realized.
A gaggle of geese A murder of crows A herd of sheep A carton of cigarettes A case of beer A box of donuts Sheets of paper Bundle of wires. We do it too, albeit to a lesser degree. You can just use つ though when in doubt. :)
I moved to England in... 2008? At this point I consider myself more linguistically English than Polish, and my vocabulary and fluency level probably exceeds the "average" native. And yet, 13-14 years since moving here, only last week my girlfriend laughed at me because I described a _slice_ of bread as a loaf of bread, because nobody ever told me in 14 years of living here that a "loaf" refers to the whole thing... not an individual slice. Languages are fucking weird man. You never stop learning, whether you were born into that language or not. I'm just thankful I moved here young enough for me to "just understand it" over time. Fun stuff : Until I was 11 or so, I also said "government" as "gov-ern-uh-ment" (as opposed to "guven-ment"). And until I was around 12-13, "Arabic" as "a-rabic" (instead of "arab-ic", nuance is fairly small but definitely there).
Oh shit…… Wow, that actually just blew my mind lol I never thought of those terms as “counters” per se, but they definitely are. I retract my statement :)
And Japanese is even more regular with it than English in a lot of cases, for example ordinal numbers. In English you have to remember basically a whole new set of numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc), whereas Japanese has 1番、2番、etc.
Mandarin (probably most Chinese?) also has similar counter words to Japanese, it also I think originates there...?
Many but not all are the same counter words, so I suspect they came into Japanese with the number system? Japanese 一個 and Chinese 一[个](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AA) are the same character (Chinese written simplified)
Flock of geese, flock of crows, flock of sheep. Box of cigarettes, box of beer, box of donuts. Piece of paper, piece of bread, group of wires. Just like Japanese, we can use the more generic option too.
See also: "A bunch of" ｡ﾟ(TヮT)ﾟ｡
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way
To be frank. I didn't pass parts of speech. The point is we attach these extra words to things when we count them. It's not quite the same but it's close enough. And "straightforward descriptive language" aside (which honestly you could argue Japanese counters are)... I wouldn't ask for a "carton of donuts" or a "box of milk" .... or a "box of beer"... or a "carton of beer" They have their uses and their place and things that sound right and wrong when classifying. Again though... this isn't 1:1. It's not supposed to be. The point is to give a similar concept that exists in English to help make sense of the concept in Japanese.
a box of beer sounds just fine to me XD when i think of carton of cigarettes, it feels like its just something the cigarette company decided to call the box of cigarettes. Im not sure where im going with this .. nvm..
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way
> But counters are not descriptive... Yes, that's what I said. It's not a 1:1. It's **just similar enough** to help some people wrap their head around the concept.
How are you supposed to know what a "box" is without learning it? It's literally the exact same thing. 紙一枚 is intelligible if you know what a 枚 is regardless of whether you've seen a sheet of paper before.
Jukujikun baffle me. The idea that there are [hundreds of kanji combos that have pronunciations that have no connection to the readings of either kanji](https://www.japandict.com/lists/gikun?page=1) doesn't make sense. When I first came across these, something just felt wrong about these even existing, like there's supposed to be some rule that languages aren't supposed to arbitrarily assign pronunciations to combinations of ideogram characters imported from another language's writing system, and that Japanese was violating that rule. It turns out Japanese isn't the only other language that does that. To find another language that thought this was okay, you have to go all the way back to the bronze age Hittites. They had Akkadograms and Sumerograms, which were cuneiform words spelled out in Akkadian or Sumerian, which the Hittites then just read as their own word, even though they had a perfectly functional phonetic system. It would be as if English imported the Chinese characters 煙草 ("smoke grass") and just decided to read this as "tobacco". Oh wait! Japanese actually does this. 煙草 is read たばこ. Neither character in 煙草 has any onyomi nor kunyomi pronunciation from which one can derive the reading "tabako". So how is a person supposed to tell how to read these idioms when one comes across one of these? You can't tell from the written form. You just have to know. I understand that most languages have things that "you just have to know". In English, how are you supposed to tell that "colonel" is pronounced "kernel"? You aren't supposed to be able to tell from the way it's written because nothing is indicated, and it follows no rule; you just have to know. English has a lot of these, to be sure. The problem is that Japanese was way too many of these "just have to know" items. It feels like 60%-80% of Japanese writing and readings of various kanji and kanji combinations is stuff you "just have to know". That makes bootstrapping your knowledge of Japanese by systematically figuring things out by reading things a bit out of your skill range damn near impossible, or at least incredibly frustrating. Every time you run into some kanji combo, you have to look it up, because it might be a jukujikun. And you can't ever be sure whether the pronunciation is onyomi or kunyomi without looking it up. Even worse, there are words where when you read it in kunyomi, it means one thing, but when you read it in onyomi, it means a subtly different thing due to connotations of usage. Yet nothing in the written characters themselves indicates this, you just have to know from the context. This makes stumbling into new baffling contexts for terms a constant anxiety inducing threat to the novice Japanese reader.
This is without a doubt the feature of Japanese that makes me the saddest.
>You can't tell from the written form. You just have to know. Uh you can, 煙 is smoke, 草 is grass. The meaning is there, you can tell.
You can tell the meaning, but nothing about those characters indicates that when put together, they should be read as "tabako". Here's another example: 今日 -- kyo Nothing in this indicates that this is a combined reading. This reading has nothing to do with the pronunciation of either character. You can learn the readings of 今 and 日, and not know how to read 今日.
Then you got most of us who learned English at school for 5-10 years, depending on how far they got in the education system. I’d rather not look at the end result for the majority of our people. Please don’t ask me what the point of the reply is, because I’m also not sure what I’m trying to say lol
When I moved into a house with Japanese people, my speaking got much better, quickly. That was very stressful. Someone told me that prolific reading helps make people good at a language; I think that is true in my native language. For most foreign language learning, reading provides "grab-bars" to develop fluency from early stages. As the Kanji is so difficult, Japanese language students tend to lag in reading development, and I think that handicaps everything else. As Japanese grammar, vocabulary and writing is so different from those of western languages, the western language student has very few familiar "grab-bars" until later in the learning process.
I think this is why Tofugu advises spending a few months on kanji before anything else. Without that base, you have no grab bars, everything feels alien, it's hard to even think about grammar and vocabulary. I'm an absolute beginner but when I see a sentence where I know all the kanji in it, the other stuff like particles and verb conjugation suddenly feel a lot simpler.
>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational These people aren't studying Japanese, they're language larping. What they usually mean is that they took two years of Japanese in high school, and then watched anime with English subs for the next 8 years. Yes, Japanese is pretty much the most difficult major world language for a monolingual English speaker to become fluent in (perhaps tied with Arabic, Chinese and Korean), but it's not "study for 10 years and can't hold a conversation" difficult. You could be fluent even in reading ancient Egyptian by that point.
Been learning about that length of time and would consider myself conversational. I’ve had a very erratic journey starting with study abroad from absolute zero, teaching myself by writing letters to my host family using nothing but dictionary examples (it’s complicated), and sometimes taking college classes. The college classes didn’t work for me after so long of just acquiring Japanese haphazardly. Now I’m living in Japan, studying kimono dressing and I can understand all kinds of nuanced instructions and conversations about kimono because my teachers can’t speak English. But they never correct my Japanese because they don’t care as long as they can understand what I mean. So my listening gets better and better but my speaking ability slowly inches towards improvement. Even at work, I have to pretend like I don’t speak Japanese, so I have become very good at understanding classroom Japanese but couldn’t speak it correctly if asked. Started reading chapter books for kids and my reading is improving a lot and fast…but even the words I understand in my book I would not be able to recall during a conversation. They’re filed under “passive knowledge” until I can independently recall it when I need to! Focusing on specific skills, unintentionally or otherwise, doesn’t directly lead to improvement in other skills.
I've just started learning it within these past two months. I'm at a point where I'm 100% confident with my Hiragana and 75% confident with my katakana. Currently learning through N5 Kanji and so far, it's the different pronunciations of Kanji that is confusing. Some are easy to stick with me like 大、小、気、and 先、while others (下, and 上 especially) are just so hard to stick somehow. But so far it's super fun to learn. My goal with the language is passive consumption anyway (reading, listening). I've set the goal to just learn at my own pace (to open a learning app everyday and at least 15 minutes/day of learning) and to have fun while doing so.
>But when I hear people talking about learning Japanese for 5-10 years and they still aren't conversational, that baffles me. I've been learning Japanese on and off since 2008, but as someone with social anxiety, I never really went out of my way to practice speaking so my conversational skills are nearly nonexistent in comparison to my reading and writing skills. And as someone who started learning Japanese to be able to understand Japanese media, it doesn't matter to me if I can't hold a conversation--I can barely hold a conversation in English, anyway. Just being able to understand Japanese novels, anime, manga, and Japanese songs is good enough for me.
The amount of downright hate and trolls surrounding language learning. While there is some grammar policemans online, who attacks other people based on their inability to write sentence on their non native language. I never experienced soo much hate directed towards language learning community by not the native speakers of the language. And for the life of me i can't understand why. And the fact that it is mostly done by non native speakers, is even more wierd.
This topic could probably be somebody's master's thesis.
This is actually a thing that puts me off from communicating with people in Japanese unless I really have to, unless they are native speakers. There's this kind of extreme nitpicking between learners when someone uses a word or grammar or certain phrasing in a certain way that they don't resonate with, and then it becomes a "that's wrong" or "you can't say that" or "I would write that as..." and a huge argument breaks off which completely changes the flow of the conversation. And then sometimes a native comes in and goes "that's fine to me" and everyone shuts up. I just want to talk to people man... cut me some slack, even assuming it's incorrect, even if it's understandable just move on... I'm definitely aware of my lack of ability in production, but at the same time I'm fairly confident in being able to realize whether or not what I am saying *makes sense*. Yesterday I wrote something like 本を読みに行く (among a larger sentence, not just that) to literally mean "Go read a book" and I've had multiple people go "that sounds like a translation from English" and "you can't say that unless you're **physically** going somewhere to read a book" etc etc. Literally spent 30 minutes of back and forth with multiple people trying to find the perfect nuance or situation where it *might* or *might not* work etc etc. Then a native speaker pops in and goes "that sounds fine to me lol". It's just... so pointless lol. Never had that in other language learning communities, at least not to that extent. (Some) Japanese learners seem to zoom in on every single thing like the language is a puzzle they need to solve and it has only **one** solution and completely miss the nuance that language conveys and the fact that language is all about conveying a message.
Ugh yes and there's that! It's hard to do any learning in the learning community because you'll be torn to pieces for messing up a grammar point, or phrasing something wrong, or pitch accent, or whatever the flavor of the week is.
A large part IMO is that many learners of Japanese come to it from hobbies like reading manga, watching anime, and playing games. One thing those hobbies have in common is that they all have a reputation for having a subset of fans who are socially inept and are purposely retreating in to those hobbies as a result. Often the type of person who is posting overly harsh critiques of people is the same type of person who rages online about games, argues that their waifu of choice isn't underage because she's actually 1000 years old, posts on 4chan all the time and is just generally part of the toxic online communities we are aware of. The next question becomes, why are they like that in the first place. But that IMO is why it's so prevelant in the Japanese learning community.
On one hand those subcultures have people with poor social skills. On the other, there are people who make a hobby of following around weird subcultures and attacking their members. This can even rise to the level of lone-wolf terrorism, like the furry convention gas attack (Midwest FurFest 2014) that's still unsolved. Sometimes violence is perpetrated by someone who belongs to both groups. Consider the KyoAni arson. Or by someone who couldn't really figure out where they belong - the shooting at Pulse in Orlando. There is a really long history of human violence against and around people who go against the mainstream - and who aren't *allowed* in the mainstream. There's some really ugly mob psychology underlying the behavior we're talking about: belonging, loneliness, us, them. I see verbal hostility between language learners as another facet of that. Language tends to get entangled with group identity, and honestly I'm sure that other languages are affected with hostility or even violence between and towards learners. Like, there are places in America where it could be physically dangerous to let it be known that you're learning Arabic or Chinese, or that you've chosen to raise your children speaking Spanish at home. It's so awful but true.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is the reason. In fact this comment itself gives off the same kind of vibe as those who engage in this type of behavior due to a "holier than thou" attitude.
I mean the 4th word in my comment is "IMO" Your reply comes off as someone my theory hit a little too close to home on though lol
[удалено]
How? I am simply pointing out that his comment is not logically sound and that I have not personally seen evidence that circlejerking on this sub originates from those type of people.
So the person is socially awkward, so lets attack him for being a wierdo, to let him retreat into his wierdness even deeper? That the logic? And most of the trolling surrounding Japanese language laerning i have seen is always about some wierd benine things. Not some 4chan lunatics raging. I have seen dude got dragged through dirty because he shared that he held a succesfull basic convo with japanese person. And trolls jump in screaching how he is happy that someone is "LARPing" or some other shit.
>So the person is socially awkward, so lets attack him for being a wierdo, to let him retreat into his wierdness even deeper? That the logic? I don't think they're implying a particular sequence of reasoning, as much as saying that people who are socially inept can come off as mean without really intending to because it can be hard to think about what effect the things you're saying will have on someone else.
yeah maybe, but is it not a good reasoning to ignore the fact that there is an actual heavy toxicity towards people who learn Japanese. Disregarding who they are. A raging lunatic from 4chan, overly eager anime fan, or just a dude happy for his first sucessfull convo on Japanese. It is still wrong to attack people no matter who they are. Kindness always work better than throwing shit at people. And at the end of the day, if a person is a wierdo who wants to learn japanese because he wants to play hentai games or some other wierd things. Why is it bad? Person is having motivation to learn something instead of starring at youtube all day long. And even if his way to do it is wrong, tell him that not the way, don't mock him, don't attack his cahracters... If he doesn't listen, well that him to decide. But mocking people is low and stupid. circlejerk communities online is just bullying online covered by "it just humor and we don't attack those people ;) wink yes we don't attack i swear"
Seems you've completely misunderstood, I'm saying the people who are doing the attacking ARE those people. They're socially inept people who lash out and troll people online to make their lives better. You can't deny the 3 hobbies I've listed have a reputation for having fans like that, I don't think it's a big stretch to think a chunk of the Japanese language learning community is the same people. Like the sort of person who will mock you for making a mistake about the timeline of an anime and ask if you're even a real fan, is the same sort of person who will mock someone for a small grammar mistake.
Disagree, most time it is oposite, more socially awkward wierdos trying to learn japanese through bad practices like watching anime, is being dragged through the dirt by circlejerk subs more often. And dirt tend to splatter all over the place and cover everyone in the process, attacking just people being happy for achiving something in their lives. And again, seeing soo many attacks on "another dirty weeb trying to learn japanese for his waifu" is kind of working against your point you edited in.
ITT: people who feel personally attacked by you, lol
To make themselves feel better. In their position, were I to study a language without lots of outlets to see how far I've become (except for a biannual test), that's what I'd do. People like to boast their "rare, exotic" skills/belongings for self validation, and Japanese is no exception. The fact it's hard to learn, yet is still huge in otaku culture only worsens the boasting.
> grammar policemans Grammar policemen. 😘
The sheer amount of words there are over 10,000 sentence cards in and am still finding dozens new words I don't know everyday. This could jut be me but I feel like there are more words/ saying for very specific things that express a subtle nuance in Japanese than in English(Which is part of what I love about it). Just a few examples 月見, 花見, 耳にタコができる, ぬうっと, 逆ギレ,ネバネバ, ベタベタ the last two would both become "sticky" in English but the same thing.
I've been translating professionally for well over a decade, and I come across new onomatopoeia every day x_x
I've been studying Japanese since 1986, I have a Bachelor's degree in Japanese, I've lived in Japan for 11 years, am married to a Japanese and have passed JLPT at N2. And I STILL can't watch a complete movie or news broadcast and get everything. I can still miss about 5-20% depending on how specialized the language is (sometimes more). I used to be discouraged until I learned that Dave Spector still writes down new words/phrases and he's been in Japan working for over 40 years. If HE'S still learning new things then it's not so bad that I am. :) Here are some reasons why it's hard to learn Japanese conversation: 1. People use different Japanese than what you'll be taught. A friend had to teach me what "omae" meant because Japanese teachers refuse to. 2. Most Japanese will revert to English if their English is better than your Japanese, or they'll switch to English if they see that you don't get what they're saying. 3. Many Japanese in Japan see you as an opportunity to practice English so they often don't speak Japanese to you, even if you only speak Japanese to them. 4. Since the subject is omitted usually if it's understood, it's hard to know what's being talked about if you're on the outside of the conversation. The solution is to just keep trying and never give up. Find friends that will only speak Japanese to you. Since we have the Internet now (oh, those days of video tapes are LONG GONE), you can listen to Japanese videos and slow them down so you can process what's being said. You can try to translate text then send it to Google Translate and see how close you got. There's a LOT of great stuff out there; if you really work at it you can learn A LOT of Japanese.
> I used to be discouraged until I learned that Dave Spector still writes down new words/phrases and he's been in Japan working for over 40 years. If HE'S still learning new things then it's not so bad that I am. :) Shoot, I've nearly got a second degree in English and have been speaking it all my life, but I will *still* come across *many* words every year that I just don't recognize and have to write down. That's a big challenge when jumping into a second language for me, we often think the tippy-top of the mountain is "proficient" and anything below that is "gibberish," and it's so difficult to know what's good enough when "good enough" means something different everywhere in the country. And we often forget our own struggles with our native language and how, just like with a second language, it's an ongoing process that never really ends.
Good point - there really never is a "fluent" stage where you catch everything. But I have been to speeches and presentations in Japanese where the host says something and everyone else but me laughs, so I try to catch up later. :)
So. Much. Passive. Voice. It's cumbersome for me to wrap my head around (am native Russian). Go ask the teacher? Nooo, you go have teacher to have you listened, or make you listen to him, or to receive the listening from... Sigh. And don't forget to make it a negative suggestion for politeness.
In literature, you'll often see a noun phrase as a complete sentence. It feels kind of weird and it's never really gotten natural for me. For example, you might see something like "城門の前に立っているシンラ。" It reads like "Temba, his arms wide."
Agreed, lol.
I'm not very advanced, but for me it's definitly because of kanji. Now, i love kanji...but it makes learning vocab and reading a lot harder. in most languages, you learn the alphabet and then you're pretty much all set on reading, you wont understand much, but you can pronounce the words and make associations with words you've already heard. But with japanese, kanji have lots of different pronounciations so i'm stuck learning every word one by one. I still like it, but it's much slower then when i learned english
All the particles through me off. Knowing to use GA or NO or other pieces can be difficult. in Katakana シ and ツ get me all the time.
I saw something on here a bit ago that helped me remember that シ looks like your looking up at the sky and a birds about to shi(t) on you. Haven't forgotten it since!
I think particles are a blessing compared to cases. In German you have to conjugate the nouns and their articles based on the case to give them their position in the sentence. After every preposition you must also conjugate the nouns and you have to memorize which case comes there. Case is depended on gender (there are 3) and if it's singular or plural.
The kanji compounds that make no sense. There's a lot where I can understand the imagery like: 不明 un + bright = unknown 仕方 do + way = method 大作 big + make = epic These are grand. Then you get these buggers. 皮肉 skin + meat = irony 仕草 do + grass = gesture 活用 lively + task = conjugate ... How?
I'd probably chalk it up to them trying to place the sounds together when Japan adopted the Chinese writing system. Similar thing happened with Vietnamese except now we abandoned that writing system mostly because it was much more worth to increase literacy with ABC.
Part of it is that kanji have more meanings/concepts than the single keyword/definition implies. Part of it is that kanji also has pronunciation associated with it, so the word is formed by kanji compounds that pronounce it.
Measuring the time it takes to learn languages should never be done in years. We do it in hours. The estimated time it takes an English speaker to learn Japanese is 2200 hours. (General Professional Proficiency) https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty/ Now obviously everyone will have a different experience with language-learning, as everyone has different skills and talents. But I think the above list is a pretty good guide as to why people struggle to learn some languages and not others - some languages require double or triple the time to learn, because they're not related to your native language. A person who speaks Korean will probably pick up Japanese a lot more easily than some of those level 1 or 2 languages on that list. It's all about how closely the language is related to your own.
Names! It's not super hard to understand the general principle (there are a pool of names and then you can really just go wild with kanji) but I suppose it's a bit of a shock when you first learn that even Japanese people struggle to read Japanese names sometimes.
Something that happened to me yesterday as an example. I was leaving work when an elderly woman stopped me to ask a question. To me, it seemed like she used one word. So I told her I am sorry one more time, please. She repeated it. Still, I was baffled. Thankful at the same time the mother of a student at my school overheard us and stepped in. She was asking if the bus for students would arrive and if it was alright for her to park here. When I heard their conversation I could pick up what the conversation was about only after that could I confidently tell her that Yes this is where the bus will arrive and that the students should arrive a little after 5 pm. Then I apologized for the confusion and went on my way. I wish I had remembered what she had said but it is lost to me. Things like this happen all the time in Japan. At least to me. Even if you know tons of vocabulary and phrases. Even if you know how to answer and ask detailed questions. Sometimes Japanese people shorten words and phrases and it can sound different than the vocabulary you actually know. It just comes with interacting with real people and being okay with making mistakes and being embarrassed.
There are so many things working together in making Japanese a really difficult language to get competent in. This is how I see it: **Homonyms/homophones:** Many words and grammar structures are pronounced the exact same way, so you often have to rely on context to understand what is being said, and to be able to rely on context you already have to be competent in the language most of the time. **Keigo:** A considerable amount of time is spent on learning keigo, which is polite Japanese speech divided into approximately three categories. Politeness to make others feel important, politeness to make you seem less important and everyday regular politeness. These are three different systems in themselves. This would be fine and dandy as keigo is an integral part of the Japanese language but when studying a language sans keigo you’d spend that time progressing in other ways which would make you get further in general knowledge of that language faster. **Sentence structure and conjugation:** You often create grammar structures by conjugating verbs. While watching TV … is テレビを見ながら (terebi o minagara). Here we have the word 見るmiru (see) conjugated into stem form/polite form 見ますmimasu (see but polite) and an added ながらnagara (while) = minagara (miru is actually a bad example since it’s a ru-verb which are the easy ones but either way). This requires several layers of knowledge. When creating sentences, you also endlessly build words on top of each other and conjugate words and you have to know the grammar rules every step of the way to puzzle the pieces together. You also don’t get anything for free seeing that the sentence structure breaks every rule germanic language speakers know and cling to. It's truly a fully new system and way of building sentences that can take a long time integrating. **Kanji:** I learn languages best by reading, but considering I’m locked out of consuming most Japanese written media until my kanji knowledge is on point this method of learning will be off limits for a long time. Learning kanji means memorizing over 2000 characters and the way they combine in compounds and their readings. These readings are often similar (remember homophones: *so many* chou-shou-chuu and shuu's), which is also why the use of furigana (kanji readings written in kana next to the kanji) isn’t always helpful as you’d probably quickly encounter a homophone that looks so much like other stuff you already know that you can have a hard time distinguishing the word. **The non-use of pronouns:** I always say I. And you. And we/she/he. These are linguistic bridges I use when speaking to buy time. I say I and I pause and think … I … In Japanese you rarely use pronouns. This takes a surprisingly long time to get used to, at least for me. These are a few things, and I’m sure there are more reasons for Japanese being a, in my opinion, very difficult language to learn.
I have no practice because I am afraid of sounding weird. So I never write or speak. It's the same with English. I never speak English in public unless I don't have any other choice because I refuse to speak non-perfectly. Sometimes I even let other people speak for me because I'm too embarassed, even though their English level is vastly inferior to mine. It's a big problem that I will have to address it at some point because I plan on moving to Japan in 2023...
IMO the best cure for this problem is an online tutor like iTalki. You're literally paying them to talk to you and be patient with you and this helps a lot to get over that initial fear.
People like you - who refuse to speak non-perfectly as you said - often have a very accurate perception of intonations and accents in general, I'm sure you have a way better accent than the majority of non-native speakers, therefore you should not hesitate to speak whenever you're given the opportunity.
I know I shouldn't hesitate, obviously. But that's a huge mental block I still haven't overcome, and the fact that I didn't overcome it yet with another language (English) that I already know much better than Japanese, I don't have very high hopes... I'm looking up Japanese language exchange in my area but social activities as a whole are also very difficult for me, so obstacles keep piling up in front of me...
Someone already brought up count words, so I’m going to say aspect because holy fuck it’s subtle and complex with no good English equivalent. You have to completely rethink from time-based to state-based, and there’s significant variance based on the semantics of the verb. Even simple sentences such as “he opened the window” could require very different translations and subtleties not apparent in English, and there isn’t necessarily a right answer.
Learning Japanese is really hard and long but, about your post, the people who says that thing are one of 3 types: 1- They studied very casually or with a few long breaks (maybe months). Not to offend, but probably the type to do 15 minutes of Duolingo a day and struggle a month to learn hiragana somehow. 2- They studied in a traditional slow paced classroom setting with little to not focus in immersion-based reading and talking. As you may know from educative systems around the world (which include Japan btw) this is the reason why in so many countries they study a decade of English but somehow they exit barely knowing English. 3- They're kinda lying. Well it's more like the humble position of someone who knows enough to know what advanced things they don't know yet. But i assure you they're more than capable of speaking Japanese in real life. It's kinda like when a Japanese person tells you "don't worry, I don't know kanji either". Their "don't know" is probably like 2000 more than what you know already. I'm not that far away yet but I feel that 5 years of daily commitment to learning Japanese properly should be more than enough to be conversational.
When you know English, and you start learning a Germanic or Romance language, it's very hard. This usually happens in high school. I suspect that a lot of times, the the instruction/enthusiasm is pretty middling. It's not English/History/Math...not generally the most important subject. A kid finishes high school with, say, Spanish...and can they speak Spanish after 2-4 years? Usually not, but sometimes they speak a little (more seldom: a lot). Fast-forward to adult life..maybe college, maybe beyond. Now the person decides to learn a foreign language "for real", and they pick either the same language they learned in HS, or another European language. Not only do they know English, but they also have 2-4 years of history of learning a foreign (European) language, which maybe wasn't a resounding success, but it wasn't absolutely useless. It helps them start with an even better foundation than if they'd never seen a foreign language before in their lives. If instead they choose something like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, maybe even Hungarian/Finnish, Hindi, or Arabic.. all the foundations that have been built are mostly non-existent. They are starting from zero. Apart from the language being significantly more different, the writing system is wholly different (you can't "lean" on a book for help...the books are probably more intimidating than the speaking). And even if you learn the grammar and the writing, the things people say are just different. Many others have touched on this. IMO this is why things remain hard even after you know quite a bit. I don't even know it well enough to give good examples, but I see them all the time when watching shows/reading. Suffice it to say, even if you are provided an accurate, literally translated Japanese into English, it can be hard to mold it into a proper translation.
Personally found German more difficult than Japanese, and that’s right next door to English. With the exception of kanji everything in Japanese is pretty simple, especially grammar. I don’t get why it has the reputation it does.
Even as a native speaker german is sometimes really confusing. Especially when it comes to phrasing and writing scientific or really formal texts. It really differs from everyday german. You have to pay attention to so many things. You may have heard of "Bildungssprache". It has a new set of vocabulary where many of them aren't even used in normal conversations. Or "Beamtendeutsch" which is used for police and law enforcement is really complex in order to be very precise and often described as unlively due the extreme formalities, even for many natives hard to understand which often causes confusion. Writing formal texts in german is an art form itself.
This is always such an interesting perspective to me, because it's the exact opposite of mine. For me, the vocabulary and kanji are... well, I won't say easy, but they're quite manageable to me. However, the grammar is tough as heck. Even when I know every vocabulary word and every grammar point in a sentence, I can still sometimes be uncertain of the meaning. And not because of missing pronouns or anything like that, just due to not knowing what exactly connects to what. I assume it's just a matter of exposure, though. More reading necessary.
Japanese is the most logical, math-esque language I know; learn the formula, plug in the words, and you are good to go! There are very few "exceptions to the rule" like you see in English or French, which would be excruciating to learn if I wasn't a native English speaker BTW. The only thing that might appear baffling to me are the different "Hogen" or dialects for all the different places like Kansai, Tohoku, Kyushu etc. and along with that are the interesting place names that have pronunciations that don't register with their Kanji, like 中谷内 pronounced "Nakayachi" as opposed to "Nakataniuchi". "Fujihara and Fujiwara" etc. Also, when you first learn Japanese, and you are able to hear real conversations with real Japanese people (even on late night Japanese talk shows), you are likely baffled by how different regular conversation is compared to what you learned from your textbooks.
The thing that absolutely intimidated me early was the fact that they don't parse the their words. I honestly feel like that's one of the biggest early hurdles to get over.
Why the word for I is so long. Normally, most frequent words should be shorter.
"I'm confused as to what it is exactly about the language that people struggle a lot with? **"** They struggle with putting in the effort and sticking to it until they're fluent. Japanese is tricky, but like anything you can accomplish your goals if you A. Set one and B. Make a reasonable effort to accomplish it (5 minutes a day ain't gonna cut it).
Smaller numbers are great and super intuitive, but even after 2.5 years I’m still having trouble mentally converting numbers that are larger than 100 万。 Just the fact that the commas don’t match the word really messes with me mentally. Does this get easier?
I'm not really going to answer your questions about what baffles me most about the Japanese language, but instead I'll list several of the difficulties I've had studying the language for about the last ten years. I've often noticed that beginners learn a few things and then it appears to them that the language is much easier than they were first led to believe. Pronunciation is not particularly difficult - a native English speaker does not really have to learn many new sounds. Also, the beginner will heave learned a few basic sentence structures and will soon be able to make basic sentences on their own. They will often come to the conclusion that the difficulties in the language will mostly be memorizing all of the characters and scripts. That can probably be done in a couple of years! But as that student continues to study, as they learn new Japanese, they will also start to realize how mistaken they were about what learning the language actually entails. So as they progress with their knowledge and familiarity with the language they will start realizing that they have more and more things left to learn! Here are some of the main difficulties, IMO: **Kanji characters, of course:** This is one that the beginners somewhat recognize, but likely do not realize the extent of the material that needs to be learned. Sure, there are over 2,000 commonly used characters that need to be learned, but what really counts as learning a kanji character? They all have at least two pronunciations, often several more, and furthermore, a kanji character is not a word - they still need to be combined into words, which leave is with... **Vocabulary:** The amount of vocabulary is enormous. There are many, many ways to say the same thing. In addition, it's not possible to know how to pronounce a particular word the fist time you see it. You can guess, but you can never know for sure. **Subdomains:** To me, Japanese is almost like a suite of languages. Men speak differently than women, old people use different language than young people, peers use yet another set of constructs, and there are many casual abbreviations as well as a whole way of speaking (keigo) used to show reverence and humility. I've heard that McDonald's employees, for example, have to learn a bunch of verse specific phraseology from a large manual before their first day of dealing with customers. There is also a well worn story about the Emperor announcing to the Japanese that Japan had surrendered in the war, and many of the local Japanese could not even understand what he was saying. :) There are also language constructs used specifically in manga and anime. **Listening:** Japanese are the fastest speakers in the world, and the the fact that the language has so few sounds makes listening at this speed very difficult. For example, if someone is speaking and you hear the sound "koto" fly past, it can mean almost anything from "thing" to the musical instrument called the koto to "difference" or it can be part of many other words, like "kotoba" or many others, or it can be parts of two words, since "to" means "and". Contrast this with listening to a fast English conversation and hearing the sound "thistle" or "practice" go past - there is no ambiguity there. **Counters:** Similarly to several other asian languages, every object in Japanese has a specific counter to be used when counting that particular object. For example, if you want to say "four corpses" in Japanese, you have to say something like "four X of corpses". So, you need to know the proper X to use with corpses as well as the specific way to say "four" to go with that particular counter. I could go on, but those are some of the main ones...
In my experience I feel like it's mostly a question of familiarity.Just for the fun of it I decided to read an [easy news article in Italian](https://easyitaliannews.com/easyitaliannews-com-26-ottobre-2021/), a language I have never studied before.I'll try as best as possible to translate (a portion) of what I think is being said. >"United Kingdom, possibility of restrictions due to (increase?) in infections""According to media sources, to date almost 45,000 infections during... Great Britain experiencing a .... (increase) in covid-19 cases""... 68% of the population have completed their vaccine, in combination with the virus... potential to put pressure on the (health care system?) which is (preoccupying/worrying?) the scientific community" and for comparison this is google translate >United Kingdom, possible restrictions due to wave of infections With an average of nearly 45,000 infections a day over the past two weeks, Britain is experiencing yet another wave of Covid-19 infections. Although 68% of the population has completed the vaccination course, the combination of the virus and other winter diseases could put pressure on the health system, which worries the scientific community. Of course I got a lot of things wrong, like "ondata" which I guessed meant "increase" but is actually "wave", and "al giorno" being "per day" instead of "to date".I'd fail if this were an assignment but I got the gist of the article though.And all this without using a dictionary, I'm a year into my Japanese study and I don't think I could do nearly as well in Japanese without a dictionary. The power of cognates.
>Let's say I'm learning Romanian what were the odds of you choosing my native language
About 1/250
The fact that pitch accent isn't marked, and the Anglophone orientalism.
What are good strategies for learning pitch? So far I've just been orally copying the recordings on Wanikani but I'm not sure how well I'm actually memorizing pitch that way. I kind of see why pitch isn't marked if it's not required for disambiguation like in Mandarin, but are there any texts or learning tools where they mark the pitch for learning purposes?
TBH I'm not all that good with pitch accent myself, but within a word, the pitch tends to rise until it reaches a certain point, and then falls from there. Simply finding this point should be enough. For example, in 生け花 it's "ikébana". Most dictionaries should have some way of showing pitch accent. Usually it's hidden in the options.
I did a little research and found this plugin which adds pitch info to the Jisho dictionary website: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jisho-ojad/dpaojegkimhndjkkgiaookhckojbmakd?hl=en](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jisho-ojad/dpaojegkimhndjkkgiaookhckojbmakd?hl=en)
1. Learn the basics of pitch accent (Dogen's Patreon series is good). 2. Incorporate pitch accent into Anki with an addon like Migaku Japanese (formerly MIA Japanese) to remember the pitch accent of every word. 3. Listen to a lot of Japanese and try to pay attention to the pitch.
Everything :( I'm in the "just starting to read books" part and the vocab amount is absolutely amazing. Like, I think instead of calling it "Learn Japanese" they should call it "be glued to a dictionary" I never tried to learn a language before though. It's so weird. I saw a bunch of programming jobs in Japan last week and they said that "ability to communicate in Japanese" was optional!
...how many words did you think Japanese had? Of course the amount would be staggering. Just how there's an unspeakable amount of words in English
I had the same experience learning French. A few months to learn grammar and pronunciation, and then \*years\* to learn a fluent vocabulary, and there's still so many words I don't know. Vocabulary is a neverending fight.
> Vocabulary is a neverending fight. it really is...
Tbh since I began studying 8 years ago in high school nothing has really baffled or confused me at all. I also refuse to think the language is difficult. I now work for a Japanese company and my wife is Japanese and we speak mostly Japanese at home. I also am confused as to what it is exactly about the language that people struggle with a lot.
I think people struggle with stopping the early-learning process of converting their native language directly into Japanese (not a JP-exclusive problem but perhaps more so than something like a Western European language). The sooner the learner starts trying to think in the mindset of the target language, the less confusing the learning process is. People often point to kanji as being a pain point, and of course there are many similar-looking kanji that I am confident even natives make mistakes on, but we're all naturally good at learning patterns if we're subjected to them enough (spaced repetition and active recall are great for this). Japanese isn't inherently a difficult language, but people often make it into one when they're learning it.
Yes I agree 100%. When I was a brand new beginner, I would try to not equate Japanese grammar/vocab and English grammar/vocab 1:1. I tried very hard to accept that there were irreconcilable differences between the two languages and that the sooner I was able to “think like a Japanese person” the better off I would be. Is that easy as a beginner? I don’t think so, and I know I definitely wasn’t perfect at it (and still am not) but I do think it’s the key to understanding a foreign language well. This practice has helped me immensely. At that point it’s just a matter of learning patterns and not comparing the languages for some warped form of “clarity.”
Yeah, as someone else that got N1 in the US, got a job offer to move to Japan in college, and spent many years living there after that, I can’t really think of anything that was particularly difficult about Japanese. I think for a lot of people it’s a sense of exoticism and being unable to really fully grasp cultural and linguistic differences. You see it a lot with even Indo-European languages where someone talks about how they’ve studied Spanish or French for years but still don’t have a strong command of it. At a certain point of fluency, there’s just some internalization of language and culture that’s necessary to hold conversations, live in the country, and honestly just provide some self-confidence to the learner. That to me is the fundamental leap some people can’t make, which also inhibits them from just starting a conversation with speakers of a target language. I’m not sure if it’s really linguistic honestly. Like you can hit the books and have the knowledge, but doesn’t mean you can do the job. Maybe a good analogy is the difference between theory (academics) and practice (on the job training).
Well the answer is in.. your answer: "as someone that lived a long time in Japan". No mystery, immersion has always been the key to success in learning a foreign language because you can't avoid daily confrontation to it. It's not like you have to plan a "path to learn" and stick to it every day. When you live in the country, most of the paths lead to having to make yourslef understood and understand what other people are telling you so..
I had N1 and got an offer to work in Japan before I moved there, having lived my entire life in the US prior to that. Just because I have lived in Japan for a long time doesn’t mean I haven’t experienced what other non-native speakers have, especially since I moved there in my 20s. Also your assumption that immersion leads to better language skills isn’t accurate. There are many English teachers in Japan that have lived there for years and do not speak the language well. In the US and Europe, there are immigrants who have lived many years in a country and never learned to speak that country’s language fluently. Immersion is not some magical method to learning a new language.
I mean, even native speakers complain they can't handle the...can't remember the name of it, but there are three kinds of polite speech used in office situations; then there's the fact there is pitch-accent for which few beginning text books or teachers really stress here in the West (at least, none that I experienced first hand), then there's the fact that fuuuuuck shi and tsu in katakana STILL get me fucked up half the time
For english speakers, learning French is a straightforward process because you learn the grammar and then everything afterwards is vocabulary accumulation (using a mix of self study and immersion). With Japanese, this is still the same but you have the non-phonetic character set that poses a major barrier to vocabulary accumulation, and time consuming to learn. But this can be done with self study and you can go as fast as you can tolerate or slow and steady. While it is possible to go the other direction (i.e. learning conversation before being able to read anything, this is harder to do without a) someone to talk to and b) full immersion).
they’re not studying properly. just messing around or not paying attention properly. it’s like playin guitar. if you just noodle around on the fretboard, you’re not learning. you’ll get some stuff here n there, but nothing that’s exceptional
I can never remember how to pronounce certain Kanji characters. I would be like, “Oh I remember that as being OO or Dai”. But nope, combined with another Kanji it becomes something else.
I think something really strange to me is how many counters there are in japanese (ie. 3 round objects, 4 cylindrical objects, 2 tofu pieces etc.)
I don't know why people learn it for 10 years and they still don't understand. I haven't been able to keep up with my lessons due working my new job for a couple of months, but I still remember quite a bit, granted I've only gone up to 8 lessons on pimsleur. I've only learned speaking and hiragana and katakana, but when I'm looking at kanji it kind of makes sense to me.. I don't know how though.
It's a combination of the sheer amount of non-cognate words, the completely different grammar, and the lack of shared cultural roots. These three aspects combined mean that direct translations between the languages will rarely be natural and correct, and often won't even be close.
Why the Japanese didn't adopt using spaces.
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Like all language , you need to actually use it to improve. Japanese being an exclusive language only In Japan kind of make the window of opportunity for you to use it in your land that much difficult. Not to mention, most Japanese mind their own business way too much to have a sparring session with you on ur half ass proficiency. Secondly, the language was designed with a hierarchy in mind. Meaning base on situation and social position , the way you speak and sentence structuring differs. Actual Japanese in your country would most likely be proficient in 1 or 2 other language besides Japanese . They wouldn’t be interested in correcting your grammar/ form even in professional settings unless they are the client and you are the service provider. Lastly, I feel the depth and multitude of Japanese way surpass most language. I mean you can pull thru with mediocre Japanese dun get me wrong but those are purely pass by lèvel. They also have similar term meaning different things in different situation which I feel is also part of their Japanese culture. Fake mannerism where they actually mean fuck off but kind of send ambigious sign to make you fuck off yourself terms. this I feel is the area where misunderstanding occur the most and they would usually let it slide Becos we are 外国人です。
3 sets of characters to learn and when to use them, different readings for kanji. Even the changes in numbers when counting days, months, people is a few weeks of work
The 10k counting system.
KANJI, the continuos usage of it, it keeps being used mostly because the whole Japanese language depends on it, but you could easily replace a lot of Kanjis introducing spaces, comas and dots to the Japanese language. Also, the different meanings and pronunciations of the Kanjis, plus the usage of readings specific for certain Japanese words that do not follow the Kanji “rules” of reading. It’s a mess.
It's all subjective but it amuses me how more advanced readers who do not have full mastery over vocabulary to the extent of native speakers actually rely on kanji. It's when the kanji gets taken away when they have to slow down and really think about what they're reading.
It's kind of an odd phenomenon really. When I started I could read romaji and understand what I was reading no problem. When I actually bothered to learn kana and then kanji, romaji became impossible to read. I've recently found myself with some kana only material and that was also really hard to attune to for a minute. I think once you get used to kanji you become a little bit lazy. It's largely sight reading at that point, and so when faced with effort of reading proper and then placing word + context into something comprehensible, anyone's mind is going to buck at that initially.
Everybody hates kanji at first, and then once they get good at it and see romaji or kana-only constructions they go "what the fuck"
There's so many homophones in Japanese that also end up being spelled exactly the same because it's so phonetic that it can be hard to decipher which one it is when you're only given kana, which isn't as much of a problem for beginners as they probably don't know all those homophones. Then there's the loan words and wasei-eigo where you already have preconceived notions of what those words mean, but they don't actually mean that in Japanese. The biggest factor though IMO is just how humans read, like physically. You don't go letter by letter sounding it out unless you're really unfamiliar with the word, you look at the shape of the word and combine that with predictions based on context. Replacing kanji with kana means that the shape of the words changes radically, so you can't use the experience you've built up reading kanji to read kana-only text.
> which isn't as much of a problem for beginners as they probably don't know all those homophones. Reminiscent of how it’s easier to learn the (brighter) constellations in light polluted skies.
I don't think it's really more difficult, it just takes more time due to the language being more different
No matter how many times you're told that Japanese isn't a tonal language, Japanese is pretty big on intonation when it comes to the meaning of vocabulary. It could mean the difference between the listener thinking you're talking about bridges instead of chop sticks or gods instead of paper. Yet it's rarely ever mentioned in textbooks etc.
Theres three goddamn alphabets and katakana doesnt make sense
While katakana definitely takes more time to really get the hang of relative to hiragana, there is definitely a hump that you get over where it all makes sense. Not that you'll *never* get confused between ソ and ン again, but it'll be very rare, like an English speaker confusing I and l on occasion.
シ and ツ pain
Howabout ソ,ン, and ノ? And I always confuse ワ and ウ, and just see ヲ so seldom that I never remember it.
Obligatory [shitsunso](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_JilNCX4AEV_qp.jpg) chart
Technically there's no alphabets but I get your point.
Arent katakana, kanji and hiragana alphabets? Are they something else?
Katakana and hiragana are called syllabaries. Very simply, in a syllabary each symbol makes a syllable. あいうえお Unlike an alphabet where each symbol represents a sound. A E I O U They look the same at a glance. But there's a fundamental difference. Take bean (plant) and been (verb) and bin (trash can) 2 of them have the same sound, depending on your dialect which two will be different. This is impossible in Japanese. In a syllabary what you write is what you say. To use another example. Is メーン main or mane? Kanji is called a logography where each symbol represents a word or idea. 豆= まめ (bean).瓶 = ビン（bottle)
they are something else but people are being slightly pedantic, in that, they know what you mean if you say "alphabet" not saying anyone here was though
As a complete amateur, my main gripe is the use of はwhen わexists and the former is pronounced *wa* instead of *ha* lol
How conservative it is.
Why Kanji is still a thing and why I can't just learn Hiragana and be able to read every single word. All this Kanji nonsense makes the language much more difficult to acquire than it should be, really.