I am learning Japanese now, actually, and the hardest part is the writing system, but that is really just a matter of rote memorization. (I already learned Chinese years ago, mastering the kanji is just repeating the same process of flashcards, except with the need to learn two readings for most characters and not just one.) Rote memorization of glyphs is something open to anyone with adequate time, but matters of phonology/morphology/syntax might ultimately defeat a learner regardless of how much time they throw at the problem.
The problem with Japanese kanji vs Chinese Hanzi is not just that Japanese has two (or more) common readings for every character, it’s that they don’t follow the phonetic element to nearly the same degree as Chinese.
In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.
In Japanese you will regularly come across names consisting only of known to you characters and you will still have no chance of knowing how to read them out loud.
But I totally agree with your main point: Japanese is not as difficult as it’s reputation will lead would be learners to believe but it does have some road blocks (mainly the writing system) that will stand in the learners way.
Not really. Sometimes you can guess the root without the tone, but you won’t get the tone itself, and so you can’t really claim to recognize the word. Tones are not optional in Chinese.
The writing system is hard, but learning it helps complement your vocabulary in the same way that learning greek and latin prefixes/suffixes expands your english vocabulary.
Not even to get into the fact that, as a high context language, you can get away with extremely simple sentences and rely on context way more than in other languages.
Mandarin is an order of magnitude harder than Japanese. Japanese is easy to speak and hear. It has two phonetic alphabets, and fewer pictograms in its Kanji than Mandarin. It has a highly regular grammar. So much easier than Mandarin. Just my 2c.
Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day [2].
[1] http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...
[2] https://www.meridianlinguistics.com/news/learn-to-read-korea...
I really, REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Korean. Sure, there's a couple of dozen letters and you can learn their individual default pronunciations in a single day, I'm not doubting that.
But that literally doesn't get you even close to being able to correctly pronounce many common words, because, guess what, when these letters are together in a word they influence each other in different ways and their pronunciation changes or they may not even get pronounced at all.
There is a reason why all these "learn hangul in 1 hour" web pages/videos never mention the existence of four-letter syllables. ;)
Learning Japanese phonentic alphabet(s) on the other hand, really can be done in one day and they are consistent and phonetic and there's no weirdness in pronunciation, but of course then you have to deal with thousands of kanji too. So I guess from that perspective, Korean really is easier, but learning to correctly pronounce the sounds and words in Korean is in my opinion much harder than in Japanese.
I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?
The consistency in phonems in mandarin probably makes it a bit less demanding than Japanese, but I find that difference marginal on the whole.
(Studied Japanese 1y+, Mandarin 6 months)
I looked into traditional methods, I also know about Antimoon, AJATT, MIA, RTK, WaniKani, Anki/SRS, etc. But I'm too low in conscientiousness to stick to a plan, and I burn out on SRS and mnemonics after about 500 cards, even with reasonably low card rates. The mnemonics become a frustrating scramble of meaning in my head.
Just last night I learned the words for mirror and crime with almost no effort and I still remember them today. That's two words learned, both only encountered once, in context. I even have the image in my head of one of the in game mirrors. That kind of "fast mapping" just doesn't occur any other way (that I can find). I've also picked up plenty of written Japanese, including kanji, from menu screens, subtitles, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBuQ61lSIBI He rambles on about dementia and reading ant the start but i think he explains Comprehensible Input here. http://sdkrashen.com/
If it works for you then fine, but it doesn't work for me.
But if the author wants to have any chance of understanding spoken Japanese or speaking, this will never get the author there - much better off watching and listening to as much Japanese material as possible. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, the Mass Immersion Approach [1] gives a good overview of how one can reach a good level of fluency relatively quickly without being in Japan.
I do agree that immersion is important in reaching fluency, but I've decided for myself to build up a bigger foundation of kanji, vocabs and grammar than what MIA prescribes, so that the immersion will be more enjoyable.
Newspapers? How boring. I would want to be able to read the text in video games and manga!
On a semi-related note, I heard of someone who learned English largely by playing Final Fantasy 7 with a dictionary in hand. [Also learned practical bonus vocabulary like "mako energy" and "materia" I assume. ;-) ]
Reading and understanding video games & manga is more challenging in that the way the people speak in these situations is much more informal, i.e. lots of slang.
You won't be able to get to the latter without spending some time on the former because the grammatical structures in idiomatic Japanese are full of contractions that arise from the spoken language.
Just as an aside, if you actually spoke like a manga/game character, you'd definitely raise some eyebrows. Probably not in a good way ;)
I think that's a matter of interest. I personally like reading the newspaper but I am more of a fan of online news than newspapers, my personal favorite being: https://news.tv-asahi.co.jp/
EDIT: I should add that this method is not the "One True Way". Different people learn in different ways. If you want to see a radically different approach to learn Japanese, check out https://massimmersionapproach.com/
On top of that the shows tend to have a lot of text on screen to emphasize points etc, and will cover really easy to understand topics.
It might be boring/low brow, but you'll absorb a lot more in shorter amounts of time IMO. And like... who wants to read the news?
Anime is by far the most over the top, but I do find variety to also be over the top. Or maybe I’ve only been looking at the comedy ones.
Do you have any recommendations?
This time around I'm instead primarily using Anki, and I have 4 main decks. A hiragana/katakana deck, a WaniKani kanji deck, a KanjiDamage deck, and a custom deck for anything else I want to learn. I work through the first three decks each day, but I'm not great at learning through memorisation, so instead the third deck is where I put things I actually want to learn; useful phrases, text from manga that I didn't know, poetry, and regional dialect words. I've bought a moderate amount of Japanese-language manga (CDJapan ships internationally, and buyee.jp is great), and I'm trying to acquire more poetry books (send me recommendations if you have them!)
Ultimately this means I'm learning lots of fairly obscure stuff early on (like how nakagama is a billhook) but as that's what I'm interested in it's far more likely to hold my attention. And my short-term goal is to be able to write in the various Japanese poetry forms.
Kanji is still immensely frustrating to learn, no matter the techniques used. I am ultimately resigned to learning it though; in my lifetime I must learn a second language, and Japanese is one of the few that has ever held my interest.
I do quite like the KanjiDamage method so far, in that it teaches you lots of kanji that use the same radicals early on, even if they're obscure kanji. If I find I'm getting stuck on one repeatedly I just mute it if it's an obscure one rather than getting caught up on it.
I'll probably start on a RTK deck too because I'm not finding the numbers of cards overwhelming yet. And I have bought a book and pen for learning to write them out, as I figure that will help a lot too :D
Now when I wanted to take an JLPT exam, I realized that my listening skills are awful, and my grammar skills aren't very good either. I started watching grammar lessons on Youtube in Japanese, as well as random videos in Japanese (mostly about trains/traveling). In the end I just barely passed listening (JLPT N2) but my grammar skills were really good.
I've got nothing really to add here, except that I've been using LingoDeer (another app in the same category as Duolingo) based on recommendations in /r/LearnJapanese, which if nothing else has made the process feel less like schoolwork and more like a game.
Hiragana and katakana weren't hard to pick up at all — I can read and type them comfortably now without too much latency — and I'm 62.5% through the intro course that LingoDeer claims to be N5-equivalent. Picking up enough kanji for this to become a useful skill does seem a bit daunting, but as others have said, rote memorization is only a matter of time and consistency.
Now that I’m learning Korean also as a beginner I googled sentence mining and downloaded Korean deck which after 2 months of using seems to work well and now I’m at the point where I will start study of basic grammar once a week to support the anki study
Arguably more important the reading and writing is correctly pronouncing words in a language and being able to identify what's being said.
