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Is Japanese "hard" to study?

I can only agree with many things posted here. I also find that Japanese is not "such" a difficult language to learn. I am actually English but live in Germany for a number of years now, German was a difficult language for me to learn. Even though there are many same sounds and words etc...grammer is a real pain and one must really use the language to speak it fluently. After 3 years in Germany my German is up to a good standard, great i certainly wouldn't say. However conisdering for the first 2 years I only worked with foreigners, one will not become fluent not speaking with natives and that goes for every language.

One has to use the language daily and with natives, something I din't do.....
 
I remember learning German. It was hard for you? It was basically English just reconfigured for me, but yeah, I get what you mean about grammar...Ich bin suhr traurig :p
 
Don't worry yourself people, the OP is not interested in this thread anymore...
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Dave, I believe this is the second time I've asked you to refrain from trolling.
 
I Love Japanese Language and i use it time to time at home and with my friends who like Japanese,I find it very beautiful language..
I dont consider it a foriegn language,It's as accent to me.
I am searching to find the best japanese language dictionary.
 
I'd say Japanese is very hard to learn. And by learn I mean learn properly.
Just today in class we were reading an interesting piece that discussed the follies Japanese presents for its learners.

Japanese has three main elements: Japanese itself (和語)wago, Chinese (漢語) kango and various others (mostly but not limited to English) loosely grouped as (外来語) gairaigo. Linguistically speaking, it's said that it's possible to carry on an every day conversation in English and many other Latin-based languages with a vocabulary comprised of as few as 2000 words. With Japanese this is not the case, in fact the average Japanese grade-schooler has a vocabulary of 6000 words. This isn't light years ahead of other linguistic groups/cultures or anything but its quite high and more importantly points out the 'technical requirements' of speaking Japanese.

Another statistic the article mentioned was that to read 80% of a Japanese newspaper you need to know around 10000 words. That varies of course depending on the complexity of the content but again, on average, statistically, this is the general criteria. With English I think it was something like around 6000 words and you're set.

In English there are many synonyms but they're not always used so much, whereas in Japanese there are many synonyms and they get used a lot more. Japanese culture has remained essentially unmolested by exterior meddling/colonization and its history can be thought of as layered, where old traditions and disappearing customs manage to retain a certain level of permanence since nothing is carelessly tossed away or trampled by outsiders. So even old and outdated words find daily application in Japanese culture.

On example the article mentioned was the idea of canceling something. There's キャンセル (cancel) which is used for canceling things like dinner reservations. Then there's 解約 (kaiyaku) used for canceling bank transactions and other important or business related things. Then there's 取り消す (torikesu) whose natural application I can't recall but also essentially means cancel or literally translated 'pick up and extinguish' or what have you.

Anyway I'm not trying to sound smart here this is just what the article was saying but as it was written by a Japanese person I'm inclined to believe it quite readily.

There are many examples like the above. Japanese is a very high context language syntactically and along with that comes a very rigid set of nuances where words of similar meaning, so similar that they'd pop up in an electronic dictionary interchangeably, end up actually having very specific applications.

So to make a long story short, sure you can pound a phrase book, learn your kana and pick up a few kanji and get away with saying 'I can speak Japanese, it's not so hard', but speaking Japanese properly is really hard and not something casual learners would probably bother doing.
 
The main difficulty factor in learning japanese and/or chinese is definitely the logograms.
You have no choice but to learn 漢字 and memorize them.
If you don't know a kanji, you just can't read it. I know japanese people who forget 漢字 or others who just can't read some particularly specialized kanji. You can try to decipher the meaning by studying the component of a kanji but most of the time it just don't work.

I'm not a professional linguist nor do I know the opinion of those professionals but in my opinion there is more disadvantages than advantages with logograms.

I'd not be so surprised to see Japan eventually give up logograms for phonograms as information is more and more computerized.

If you consider only grammar and phonetic, japanase is a very easy language to learn, easier than french for exemple. When it comes to 漢字 it is another story though.
 
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