Is It Hard to Learn Japanese?

hi there steve kaufman here and today i want to talk about japanese learning japanese how hard is japanese remember if you enjoy these videos please you know subscribe you can click on the bell here to get notifications so you may be aware that the american forest foreign service institute and i'm going to put a link to it here in in the description box has put out their evaluation of how difficult uh different languages are based on you know how many hours of classroom instruction are required to achieve you know a certain level or fluency or whatever i think these uh these studies these comparisons are definitely interesting they have a lot of experience watching people in the classroom i always feel that what's more important than the classroom is the motivation of the learner so and very often this means what the learner does outside the classroom is more important than what the learner does in the classroom so how difficult are these languages obviously the number one factor is how motivated you are also another objective fact is the more a language is different from your own the more difficult it's going to be you have to get used to new structures you have to acquire a lot of new vocabulary where there is relatively little connection to vocabulary that you have for your own from your own language but i would say that so japanese simply in terms of the vocabulary and structure being very different from say english if you're an english speaker is going to be more difficult however there are a number of things that make japanese easier in my opinion um and you know when i learn japanese i i'll tell you i have here i just went through my japanese collection and i found i mean i have so many different dictionaries that i use because i was looking for dictionaries that were more convenient that were maybe based on a romanized uh you know look up system rather than basing it on japanese alphabet or whatever and i mean i did a lot of looking stuff up because i oh here's another one too i had to do so much reading and in those days you know back in the early 70s there wasn't quite as much listening material available it was hard work today with the internet accessing content on the internet uh using link for example where you can either use our many stories where you can immediately look words up with an online dictionary it is easier now i will confess that with asian languages or i shouldn't say asian languages but specifically with japanese and chinese we do have an issue because it's not obvious what constitutes a word because a number of symbols come together to form a word so where do you split where is this with the boundaries between words so we rely on different algorithms and they're not perfect nevertheless even though not perfect because as we often say perfection is the is the enemy of of the good right the perfect is the enemy of the good it's still very effective so it's easier to do than when i did it but the immediate obstacles with japanese are number one there are three writing systems it's the only language i know of where there's more than one writing system in common use so they have first of all the chinese characters which was the first writing system they had and then they have the hiragana which is basically it began as a system of using chinese characters to represent japanese sounds and apparently there were a variety of versions different characters were used in different parts of the country to try to represent these sounds because of course the chinese character is a pictogram it represents meaning but there is also sound attached to that character so that was initially used and this evolved into hiragana which is the most widely used phonetic script in japanese so you have the kanji the chinese characters which are used you have the hiragana which is the most commonly used but then you also have katakana which parallels the hiragana and it's used for you know sort of words that are just sort of sounds crash bang or for foreign words and personally i found the katakana very hard because you don't see much of it so remember in learning any new writing system it's not whether that writing system is intrinsically hard or difficult it's how long is it going to take for your brain to get used to that writing system so if you know in japanese 90 of the words or more are written in hiragana then you're doing most of your reading in hiragana and in kanji in chinese characters and you're not doing very much reading in katakana so i always found the katakana a bit of a you know an obstacle but so so the writing system is a problem uh problem meaning you have to put the time in you have to do see everything boils down to reading and listening the more you read and listen and particularly you read the more you read the more your brain gets used to that writing system the easier it becomes so i began by doing a lot of reading in hiragana because i had kanji from chinese i needed to get used to the hiragana so i did a lot of reading in just hiragana there was a series there called the naganuma books and i just read them all the time stories about you know folktales from japan or what wasn't very interesting but just to get my brain used to it all right several things make japanese first of all more difficult it's more difficult because it's structured differently but it is easier in the sense that it's more forgiving and what i mean by that is like i have no idea or very little idea of the sort of grammatical explanations of japanese because it's kind of japanese to me is like you know an old suit that you get used to wearing and after a while you feel comfortable in the suit because you wear it all the time it's not it the rules are not like it's harder it's been like chinese in that sense it's harder to really there are fewer things to trip you up so when i think of a truly difficult language or languages i think of languages where you have you know declensions and conjugations or you have gender so if you use the wrong gender in french or spanish it's kind of a bit of a clanger you hear that if you use the wrong case endings i i don't know i'm not a native speaker but certainly i'm quite sensitive uh in in french to hearing someone use the wrong uh you know gender although i do it myself it's unavoidable it's just impossible to go from a language where you don't have gender and then you know not make mistakes with nouns in in languages where they have gender but in japanese there's no gender for the nouns there's not even singular and plural so you know book is book book on table uh so to my mind that is much more forgiving uh even in terms of their verbs they're sort of a simple and a more formal form of every verb so you have iku and ikimasu but you can interchange them so it doesn't really matter you can sometimes probably if you're going to interchange you you err on the side of the slightly more formal but you can say i never worry about it i never spend a second thinking about whether here iku or ikimasu is formal you get caught up in the mood of the discussion the the the sense of what's appropriate it starts you start to feel after a while which word you should be using you're hearing the people you're talking to use certain forms of the word so you're going to pick up on that the very formal the very polite is more difficult but you're not expected to use that until you reach a stage where using that becomes natural that was my experience i stuck with my hiku ikimasu and at some point mighty massive shy must whatever started to creep into my usage these very formal you know when you're speaking to someone more senior to you or and i wouldn't use the word the forms for the someone's who is junior to me i just wouldn't do that as a non-native speaker so to my mind those are things that you evolve into uh some people you know find it strange that the verb comes at the end but again through enough exposure you get used to that uh so there are less obvious to my mind and i could be corrected here maybe people will come back at me but there are a few obvious grammatical mistakes that you can make a lot of the language is i wouldn't say vague but you know for example verb tenses you know it's it's you if you say yesterday today or tomorrow that determines the tense so uh [Music] are you going tomorrow hashtag tomorrow the sort of an interrogative at the end all of these things are flexible and you kind of get used to being around people who use the language a certain way and you sort of pick up on it that's been my experience some people find the particles difficult so by particle i mean in japanese you go watashi or watashi like when i lived in japan i used to always say watashi now apparently no one says that they say watashi i watashi i have to admit i don't really know the difference and you know i presumably in a conversation i'll tend to use one or the other for some reason and i don't know what but it doesn't you know prevent proper communication in the language uh the particles for example that indicate you know you're going to you know the direct object so like this is the direct job anata knee so the you have these sort of direction particles that determine the the part of speech here so uh you know the all makes it a direct object knee makes it an indirect like to someone kara is from someone and these did this show up after nouns uh and it helps to indicate who is doing what to whom and you can read an explanation of it but ultimately you have to get used to doing it it's not tremendously complicated there aren't an unlimited number of these particles similarly they're words or at least portions uh of verbs that attach to the end of verbs which imply meaning or purpose or or or reason or whatever uh you know [Music] conditional ikunara and there's often more than one way of saying things and here again it's i find it's a very flexible forgiving language which like with most languages it's just a matter of putting in enough time so i can well believe that japanese takes more time to learn than say spanish because the structure is very different vocabulary there's very little common vocabulary there are you know loan words from english sometimes you don't even recognize them um but it's just a matter of putting in the time and uh so i do have you know i have lots of books that i bought in japanese including on japanese sake the insider's guide to sake same book in japanese but i bought us a small japanese grammar book but i find reading through it i just get confused uh i did by just out of curiosity the living language japanese language course but here again it's all in in romaji in in you know the latin alphabet and and lots of exercises so i didn't find that useful i just think you have to start in using things like that many stories at link simple stories so i used to read naganuma and listen to it i believe i can't remember it's almost 50 years ago and just allow the language to come in you they come into you and occasionally you look things up certainly you look words up and that's how you uh you gradually get used to it so it's not more difficult but it can take longer so basically that's what i wanted to say on japanese and if you poke around here you can find a number of videos that i have made talking about japanese or speaking in japanese if that is of interest to you just go and search here on my youtube channel okay that's what i wanted to say thank you for listening bye for now

Channel: Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve

Views: 164,684

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Id: Zv6nAnaq784

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021