I really think any techie would appreciate the consitency of two of the three alphabets in Japanese. (Hiragana and Katakana) The very fact that both of these alphabets are the exact same phonetic pronunciations, but written slightly different to visually distinguish them, is the only complication. But that they are designed specifically to distinguish between Japanese and foreign words is just brilliant.
Their Kanji script/written alphabet is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese. But the spoken language is easy, easy to learn. The variations with polite (public or hierarchical relationships) vs common speaking, seem to mainly affect verb conjugations.
But their sentence structures are reversed from ours, but many languages seem to be, but they have fewer words, and make a number of a assumptions about context that make speaking actually less complicated, but require more understanding.
Also, they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation like English, which is huge. The extra effort saved on this alone can balance out the other complications.
This is my limited experience with a few years training in the language, family members learning it and a few relatives that lived there for years. (one permanently now)
Feel free to correct any errors I've thrown out.
My point is that Japanese can be easier to learn than other languages, but for reasons that may not be obvious.
Sorry, but I really strongly disagree with this. I've studied Japanese for 6 years, Chinese for 3 and am currently in Japan.
Some of your comments come off as extremely ignorant. For example, neither the kana syllabries nor the logographic kanji system are alphabets.
The distinction between Hiragana and Katakana is more of a distinction between emphasis on sound (Katakana) and normal writing of words. Katakana is used for more than foreign words.
Kanji / hanzi is absolutely not a travesty. In fact, Japanese would be nearly unusable without it (in my opinion). But your calling it "left over from cave paintings" seems to imply that you're simply not familiar with it, so I'll do my best to explain:
A very small percentage of kanji / hanzi are pictographic (in the range of 1-3%) with a similar percentage being ideographic. Thus nearly all kanji / hanzi have written forms that have nothing to do with what they mean.
There are around 200 radicals which make up kanji. They're compounds of these simple pieces, much like letters make up a word. For example, it doesn't make sense to ask why there's a "t" in water and it doesn't make sense to ask why a radical is part of a character (in general, there are exceptions to this in both English and Japanese).
I wouldn't describe Japanese sentence structure as strictly reversed. For simple sentences it often is, but in general sentences are just structured in an entirely different way.
Japanese "exceptions in pronunciation" are in fact the hardest part of the langauge in my opinion. Pronunciation of kanji in Japanese can be a bit messy, especially compared to Chinese. In fact the island of Iwojima was famously misread by Japanese admirals. The island's name's proper pronunciation would be something like iwotou.
Despite the pronunciation issue with kanji in Japanese (especially in edge cases), the written form is useful and beautiful enough to justify the cost.
Japanese is a truly beautiful language and I recommend anyone with the patience to commit thousands of hours to it, to absolutely go for it -- you'll be rewarded.
I'm very sorry if this comes off as insulting by the way. It's 12:40am here and I got triggered by this comment and felt a strong compulsion to add my thoughts and opinions.
I was waiting for a response like this so I wouldn’t have to type it myself. Almost everything that looks simple about Japanese at the beginning is complex and deep underneath.
For example, one of the things I was told early on is that pronunciation is easy, since all the sounds already exist in English. First, that’s not even true. Second, if it’s so easy, why have I never met a foreigner with an accent that even I, as a non-native speaker myself, could mistake for native?
Agreed with everything you said. Japanese pronunciation is easy to hit in the right ballpark because Japanese uses a near-subset of sounds found in English and other common languages. But refining your Japanese pronunciation takes effort and is not something to shrug off. Anyway, here are some examples where I think English-speaking Japanese learners butcher their pronunciation:
* し is [ɕi] (tongue fronter), not [ʃi] (tongue rearer).
* ふ is [ɸɯ] (mouth more open), not [fɯ] (teeth touching lips).
* お is [o] (monophthong), not [ou] (diphthong).
* え is [ɛ], not [eɪ]. (e.g. さけ)
* つ is [tsɯ], not [sɯ]. (e.g. つなみ)
* Anything with the Japanese r. The alveolar flap does exist in American English, though it's not consciously recognized as a distinct sound. Japanese sounds funny but still intelligible when the native [ɾ] is replaced with [ɹ] (English R) or [ʁ] (French R).
* Anything with small y (e.g. kya, nyo, myu) should have a quick [ʲ] sound, not a long [i] sound. e.g. きょうと is [kʲoːto], not [kiouto].
* Vowels are never reduced; きもの is [kimono], not [kəmounou].
* But the appropriate times to suppress vowels entirely. e.g. です, ～ます, して.
* The concept of doubled consonants, not grasping it.
* The concept of long vowels, not grasping it.
* Stress is often on the first syllable, not the second.
* Intonation is flatter than in English.
* How to use high/low/rising/falling tones correctly on particles.
* A natural and even pacing of syllables, not the choppy speech that foreigners seem to exhibit.
I think you need to do this blind folded. If you see someone is a foreigner you'll believe you're hearing an accent. If you had to do it without seeing them I think you'd find there are plenty of foreigners that have native level accents.
I've gotten in taxis more than once at night, gave the guy directions, had a conversation, and then when he finally stopped and turned around to get the fare nearly jumped out of his seat because he was startled he had been talking to a foreigner the whole time. That's happened at least 3 times.
I'm not trying to brag, it's just my experience. I know others that can do the same.
I think the main difference between your post and the post you are replying to is how high-level or low-level your analysis is. I dont see many disagreements between you and the OP, your post added a lot of detail which is all correct but none of which violates the spirit of the parent.
Eg what is an alphabet vs character vs whatever.. in a very colloquial sense, the list of graphemes used to represent the language is commonly referred to as an alphabet.
Re: kanji, I believe this was a frustration in character-based approaches vs phonetic approaches, particularly for a language with relatively few phonemes, and particularly coming from a quasi-phonetic language like english.
I respectfully disagree. As someone with knowledge on the subject, the post I responded to was just incorrect.
Alphabet is a specific term with a specific meaning and connotations. It's factually incorrect and misleading to call anything other than romaji that Japanese uses an Alphabet. Very little intuition about alphabets applies because they're just not alphabets.
The issues with Kanji are unqiue to Japanese. Chinese does not have them.
I'm going to stop posting because it seems people more calm and well-spoken than me with knowledge on the subject are posting.
Sorry again for the poor tone. I'll try harder next time.
In commonly spoken English we have one word for alphabet, and that is alphabet. Just like a doctor can say "oesophagus" for "throat" doesn't mean saying "throat" is wrong.
Kanji is an alphabet to us, so it hiragana and katakana in every Japanese class I took in America.
The wikipedia article on hiragana[0] call it "syllabaries", which may be technically accurate, I would consider this pedantic for the average American. And alphabet is accurate enough.
>The issues with Kanji are unqiue to Japanese. Chinese does not have them.
First sentence from wikipedia: [1]
"Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system"
I am an amateur, and I made that clear with my post, I only know what I have been told and experienced, and I stated nothing inaccurate or out of the ordinary regarding Japanese language from the American perspective.
That's a fair point and I agree in general. However, in this specific case I disagree.
To show that I agree, allow me to point out how in my earlier comment I used the word "radical" in a technically incorrect but more useful (in my opinion) way. Technically each kanji has only a single radical and the rest are pseudo-radicals, but for most purposes it's simply more useful to just refer to them all as "radicals". Additionally, I don't know of a more proper term than pseudo-radicals and the distinction isn't very important anymore because radical order dictionaries have essentially become obsolete by technology.
I fully acknowledge that excess pedantry can be a roadblock to clear communication.
Now I'll explain why I disagree in this specific case:
The issue is that "alphabet" is a very specific term like "x86 CPU". While it's not too wrong to go around calling the things inside GPUs and most phones "x86 CPU"s, it's technically incorrect and to those with in-depth knowledge, it's needlessly confusing when there's a perfectly good word that we can use to describe them, "CPU" or in the case of writing systems, "writing system".
Although, I do agree that syllabries and alphabets are not too dissimilar, logographic systems and alphabets are quite dissimilar.
Perhaps it's simply a matter of who I've talked to, but I've never heard anyone who knew how to use these writing systems refer to them as "alphabet"s, so I felt the need to correct it. I'd be willing to believe that my friends are much more pedantic than the average person.
Thus, it is somewhat pedantic but I feel that it's a useful distinction and that an adequate alternative word exists. Additionally due to this being on HN as opposed to a casual conversation, I think using the more correct, more precise, and more useful word when possible is a fair goal to strive towards.
Exactly. People can understand each other just fine without explaining which word they are using in Kanji. Korea was able to jettison Chinese logograms (Hanja) entirely from its education standards, and the only reason Kanji remains is due to tradition instead of any inherent superiority over the syllabaries.
Spoken Japanese is much more ambiguous. There's a reason subtitles are ubiquitous here. Americans who didn't understand the language tried and failed to get rid of kanji after world war 2. The langauge just does not work without them.
Additionally spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones such as 雨 and 飴. Long strings of kana are difficult to read period. Native Japanese people struggle and can easily be confused by them in my experience.
Korean isn't comparable because it's phonetically much more diverse and uses spaces.
Kanji / hanzi work just fine for over a billion people. They make skim reading easier and add a lot of character and depth to the language. Westerners have a perception that kanji are hard to learn, and perhaps they're a bit harder than an alphabet, but in the age of computers, it really is a non-issue to learn and use them.
Pitch accent isn't necessary either. Just like English, Japanese has many different regional accents that sound different, yet people from one region can still understand people from another.
The difference is that people write with more homophones than they speak with, just as written English is different from spoken English (more subtle word choice for brevity), but that is not necessary for communication, and written language can adapt just like children's books which don't use Kanji.
Hanja worked fine in Korea, and there still remain a contingent who insist on it, just like there remain people who insist that Kanji is necessary. The fact that people born blind can speak and understand both languages shows this to be a lie.
> without explaining which word they are using in Kanji.
Actually if you spend any length of time in Japan as a speaker, you will notice native speakers writing kanji on their hands to figure out words their interlocutors are using ("wait, you mean this 'kou'? or this one?). If people are not physically present (e.g. phone) you'll hear them describe the radicals (components) of a kanji or ask "is it the 'kou' in 'kousoku' or the one in ...?
Pitch accent + clarification when needed. Subtitles are extremely common here. See my response to a response of this comment for more details.
The tl;dr is that the language is harder in speech than in writing. If you stick to well-worn paths people will know what you're saying, but I often have to discuss the written form of the more obscure words I say or just write it down and show it to my conversational partner.
>"Sorry, but I really strongly disagree with this"
You disagree that I think something is easy? Is it possible for you to provide evidence that I am wrong that I think it's easy?
I know very little Japanese and I was able to visit there and have a great time. Again, multiple relatives that are American that don't have a hard time in Japan speaking with people there.
I had a great time conversing and talking with people. If it's hard for you, maybe it's just personal or your needs are very specific.
Just comparing the i-before-e-rule (except all the exceptions to the exceptions) compared to Japanese, and there you have it.
Conversational Japanese is way easier (my expeirence) than English (many Japanese friends over decades and many conversations with my relatives they had with Japanese)
Just because it's hard for you, and you can technically explain why it should be hard, doesn't mean it is for everyone else.
Lastly, Japanese seem to love it when Americans care enough to speak their language and were impressed with my limited abilities and were a joy to communicate with. Even if I stink at it.
There are occasionally Japanese words written in katakana (e.g. ラーメン) and foreign words written in hiragana (e.g. たばこ). Also, katakana can be used to emphasize Japanese words (like WE DO in English) (e.g. キミ).
> Kanji script [...] is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese
There is no evidence that Chinese characters come from cave paintings. You haven't explained what makes kanji a travesty, so I'll grant you the assumption that you think it's hard because there are thousands of characters to learn.
I assure you, from all the people I've met who can read kanji/hanzi (including Chinese, Korean, and American people), they agree that the writing system makes sense and delivers a lot of meaning in a small space.
> the spoken language is [...] easy to learn
Again, no justification given. I would say it's a mixed bag. Some aspects of spoken Japanese are easy to learn, such as most phones overlapping with other languages (i.e. not needing to learn many new sounds), no European grammatical stuff like {plurals, subject-verb agreement, noun genders, case}. But some parts are harder, like distinguishing long consonants and vowels, politeness levels for verbs and nouns, dropping subjects and other information implied by context, and the postfix word order.
> they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation
There are a couple I can think of. The consonant g can be pronounced [g] or [ŋ], for example in が. The consonant in ず/づ can be pronounced [z] or [dz]. And the major one is that many -u and some -i should be suppressed (e.g. です, ～ます, して); in fact if you don't do this, you sound noticeably non-native.
I think overall, Japanese is okay to learn at a casual/colloquial level. The pronunciation structure is transparent, the particles make it easy to prescribe some known-good sentence structures, and the vocabulary seems reasonable. But mastering Japanese, oh boy, that will take a lifetime. (e.g. Just to name some off the top of my head - politeness, nuances over vocabulary, onomatopoeia, different registers like manga vs. newspaper vs. legal, classical Japanese, classical Chinese, reformed spellings and grammars, multiple on'yomi and kun'yomi readings, how to read personal name kanji, reverse-engineering loanwords, studying kanji, puns, distinguishing homophones in speech, ...)
AFAIK ラーメン is not a Japanese word. It is Chinese "Lo mein". 中華そば is a effectively a synonym for ラーメン. Also no Japanese restaurant guide lists ラーメン under Japanese cuisine. They either list them on their own or under Chinese cuisine.
I'd say one of the hardest parts is the multiple ways to say every kanji with almost no rules, just memorization. Example: 行, 実行, 行う, 膝行, 売れ行き or 先生, 一生, 芝生, 往生, 千生り, 埴生, 平生, 弥生, 蓬生, 生り, 相生, 下生え, 生える
Kanji were imported into Japan from the continent via scholars or printed material. Many of the different pronunciations happened because kanji came during different time periods or from different parts of China where words were pronounced differently.
> There are occasionally Japanese words written in katakana (e.g. ラーメン) and foreign words written in hiragana (e.g. たばこ). Also, katakana can be used to emphasize Japanese words (like WE DO in English) (e.g. キミ).
If you look back far enough (but as recent as the beginning of the Showa era), you'll even find entire sentences written in katakana+kanji.
>There is no evidence that Chinese characters come from cave paintings.
Sarcasm.
>Also, katakana can be used to emphasize Japanese words (like WE DO in English) (e.g. キミ).
Cool, didn't know that.
>...they agree that the writing system makes sense and delivers a lot of meaning in a small space.
I've done translation work with Greek, Spanish, English and dealt with Japanese in college (helping translate/edit my Japanese room mate's papers), and why on paper, many things may look a certain way, on a computer screen it's an entirely different world.
All the Spanish and Greek stuff took up more space, Spanish especially. But with the Japanese, the keyboards took up more space and were slow to type with. So, the comparisons between space and efficiency and all kinds of other metrics are not universal.
>But some parts are harder, like distinguishing long consonants and vowels, politeness levels for verbs and nouns, dropping subjects and other information implied by context, and the postfix word order.
Sure, but this is all subjective to you. "Harder" by definition is subjective. So you can't claim your statement (is harder) is any more or less valid than mine (is easier).
>"...in fact if you don't do this, you sound noticeably non-native."
So? Not a single Japanese could pronounce "level" or "really" correctly that I ever met. The details that iron out an accent are irrelevant in the question "is this language hard to learn".
>"I think overall, Japanese is okay to learn at a casual/colloquial level."
I guess I should have put that in my post. But again, I have relatives and friends that speak fluently and they've never had an issue saying it was harder than other languages. And everyone polyglot I've met said English was very hard.
I'm currently married to a Chinese born wife who has lived in the US for the past 15 years, but spent most of that time in academia with other foreign born academics. She had developed a habit of saying "BE CAREFUL!" very loudly whenever I was driving and something unexpected happened in traffic. I was patient at first, hoping that she would come to understand that I am quite careful (I'm a bit of a stereotypical asian driver myself) but one day, I snapped at her when the car ahead of me abruptly braked to a stop, then backed towards me to parallel park in a spot they'd spotted last moment.
We did talk about it, but whenever we argue, it seems that she thinks I'm lying when I tell her that saying "Be careful!" in that context sounds like an admonishment.
Japanese grammar structure is almost total inverse of English, worse, it has particle 'screws' system to make sense of any sentence.
Japanese vocab is not robust to noise, i.e. it is high-entropy. Unlike English, there are tons of homophones, plus, its intolerance to dropped/swapped phonemes usually lead to words confusion and incomprehensible sentences to beginners
No. You won't be able to read anything that isn't designed to be read by kindergarteners if you can't read kanji (at least primary-school level [1]). But even learning the most common ones is really useful.
I traveled in Japan with friends, and we were all Japanese language learners. We could all read kana, but only I could read kanji, so I took the opportunity to evaluate how our experiences differed. In terms of street signage (e.g. train station names, place names, restaurant menus, merchandise shopping), it's very hit-and-miss if you only read kana.
Place names are almost always full kanji (especially on maps), but trains and buses usually display the kana version (as well as romaji). Kana will allow you to identify products named with foreign words, as well as some Japanese words that are written in kana for various reasons. Otherwise, any real sentence is written with kanji, with kana only acting as the glue between the substantial words.
Bottom line is that if you don't read kanji, you are missing out on a lot of Japanese text. It would roughly be the equivalent of bleeping out every English word that is more than 6 letters long.
Their Kanji script/written alphabet is a travesty left over from cave paintings and Chinese. But the spoken language is easy, easy to learn. The variations with polite (public or hierarchical relationships) vs common speaking, seem to mainly affect verb conjugations.
But their sentence structures are reversed from ours, but many languages seem to be, but they have fewer words, and make a number of a assumptions about context that make speaking actually less complicated, but require more understanding.
Also, they don't have any exceptions in pronunciation like English, which is huge. The extra effort saved on this alone can balance out the other complications.
This is my limited experience with a few years training in the language, family members learning it and a few relatives that lived there for years. (one permanently now)
Feel free to correct any errors I've thrown out.
My point is that Japanese can be easier to learn than other languages, but for reasons that may not be obvious.