So, how's Japanese compare to other languages?

[Brody]

I'm just curious. Japanese is my only second language.

Are all other second languages this hard (i.e. completely different sentence structures)? I've heard it takes about 6 years of intense study to become fluent in Japanese, what about other languages?

This is all of course being asked from a native English speaker's point of view.

Is there anyone out there who is a native English speaker that studies Japanese and another language and finds the other language to be harder to learn than Japanese?

[Bueller_007]

I'm just curious. Japanese is my only second language.

Are all other second languages this hard (i.e. completely different sentence structures)? I've heard it takes about 6 years of intense study to become fluent in Japanese, what about other languages?

This is all of course being asked from a native English speaker's point of view.

Is there anyone out there who is a native English speaker that studies Japanese and another language and finds the other language to be harder to learn than Japanese?

I was studying Thai for a while, and I found that much harder to get into than Japanese. But I think that's just because most books about the Thai langauge are pretty bad. And I don't particularly care for tonal languages.

We're lucky that there are LOTS of good books out there about the Japanese language for learners of all levels.

Romance languages are a joke.

[Charles]

Are all other second languages this hard (i.e. completely different sentence structures)?

I'd have to say yes.

German is probably the closest foreign language to English, and the sentence structure goes out of whack very quickly. Many times the verb comes at the very end of the sentence, just like Japanese.

Even when you take the kanji into account, I don't think Japanese is significantly more difficult than other languages. Learning the kanji is pretty much the same as learning accurate spelling in other languages, which can also be painstaking.

English seems like an extremely difficult language in retrospect... never stop appreciating your native fluency!

[Brody]

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I will go to my grave thinking English is the hardest language in the world. It makes absolutely no sense! Having English as my native language is one of the things I am most grateful for.

There is no language more ridiculous than English. (That's not to say I don't love English. I am grateful it is my native language in a good way too. It is so expressive and beautiful. Studying Japanese has truly helped me realize that)

Anyway, I studied Spanish for awhile. Not much, it was in school, and I wasn't motivated, so I don't really count it. It is very close to English and, from what I could tell, there is nothing too crazy about it. There are some pronoun tags and the pluperfect (spelling?) that were hard but I don't think they are too bad. Probably other things I never learned about, though.

[alfa1]

... and finds the other language to be harder to learn than Japanese?

In the next year or two I'll take a holiday to Egypt to see pyramids etc..., and in preparation I've been trying to learn to read (and speak) Ancient Egyptian so that I'm not just looking at a big statue and think no more than the vacant 'ohh, look at that big statue'.

This, by far, is harder than Japanese.

Almost no resources anywhere. Very few books, very few websites. Nobody speaks it, so no podcasts, no movies, no TV news, no animated TV shows.
The spelling is inconsistent, the writing is like a telegram, they dont even write down the vowels. No spacing between words. If the last letter of one words sounds like the first letter of the next word, then sometimes they will just write the character once. Sometimes.
And they write all over the place. Left, right, down, little messy scraps of text all over the place thats not even clear to see anymore after thousands of years.
Much of the writing suggests the the reader is already supposed to know what it reads, and so just works as a mnemonic to remind them of what they already (presumably know).
About one in ten of the characters arent even supposed to be read and pronounced out loud anyway. They just work as topic reminders to the reader. You have to know which ones they are so you dont try to read them. Often they are the same character as ones you DO have to read in other sentences. And of course multiple different readings for many of the characters.
Sentence word order is different than engilsh, of course.
It also doesnt help that they often wrote characters, parts of words, or whole words IN THE WRONG ORDER just so that it would look nicer and more balanced.
Its got a whole bunch of sounds that the english language doesnt have.
Much of it works like a mix of Kana and Kanji, except that you really have to know all of the characters from day one of study. About 700 or so should do it. And also know the ones that arent actual words to be read. And names. And understand cultural references.
And do this all with no help from anyone. You want to find a local study group? Native speaker? College course? Nope, sorry. Arimasen.

[gryffindor]

I'm just curious. Japanese is my only second language.

Are all other second languages this hard (i.e. completely different sentence structures)? I've heard it takes about 6 years of intense study to become fluent in Japanese, what about other languages?

This is all of course being asked from a native English speaker's point of view.

Is there anyone out there who is a native English speaker that studies Japanese and another language and finds the other language to be harder to learn than Japanese?

I couldn't agree more with you. I feel English is an extremely hard language to learn. Japanese has just two categories for adjectives with rather consistent endings. English has many adjectives which you just have to learn by heart.

English also has many words that are arbitrary in spelling and pronunciation. So I must say, I too am glad that English is my native language.

[tarokun]

In my experience, Cantonese is ridiculously difficult to learn.

First, you do not speak Cantonese the way you read/write Cantonese. A lot of words used in the spoken version are not used in the written, and vice versa. Not to mention that all characters are kanji; there is no alphabets like kana or kata in Japanese.

Second, it is a tonal language with a possibility of SEVEN pitches to a single sound, all of them having unrelated meanings. For example, the sound 'ma' depending on the pitch can mean 'mom,' 'horse,' 'sesame,' 'sparrow,' 'paralyzed,' 'scold,' and one other that I can't recall. If you can't hit the right pitch correctly, you can be saying totally different things.

There used to be joke based on this. First some background: The word 'chinese' in the wrong pitch can mean 'to butcher.' Also the word 'know' in the wrong pitch could mean 'eat.'

And so a foreign missionary came to a (Cantonese-speaking) village in china preaching the Good News. Where ever he goes, he would attempt his half-baked Cantonese and say,

"I like chinese people, and I want to know you all."

Need I say more the response this poor missionary got in return?

[Bueller_007]

In my experience, Cantonese is ridiculously difficult to learn.

First, you do not speak Cantonese the way you read/write Cantonese. A lot of words used in the spoken version are not used in the written, and vice versa. Not to mention that all characters are kanji; there is no alphabets like kana or kata in Japanese.

Second, it is a tonal language with a possibility of SEVEN pitches to a single sound, all of them having unrelated meanings. For example, the sound 'ma' depending on the pitch can mean 'mom,' 'horse,' 'sesame,' 'sparrow,' 'paralyzed,' 'scold,' and one other that I can't recall. If you can't hit the right pitch correctly, you can be saying totally different things.

There used to be joke based on this. First some background: The word 'chinese' in the wrong pitch can mean 'to butcher.' Also the word 'know' in the wrong pitch could mean 'eat.'

And so a foreign missionary came to a (Cantonese-speaking) village in china preaching the Good News. Where ever he goes, he would attempt his half-baked Cantonese and say,

"I like chinese people, and I want to know you all."

Need I say more the response this poor missionary got in return?

Hmm, I don't speak Cantonese, but I believe the characters at least have a regular pronunciation, no? Once you learn one character, you know the pronunciation every time that you see it.

In Mandarin, for example, 上 is pronounced "shang" (like "Shanghai") in every single word.

In Japanese, however, it can be pronounced as: ジョウ, ショウ, シャン, うえ, うわ, かみ, のぼ, よ, あおい, あげ, い, か, かき, かず, かん, こう, のぼり, ほつ

I've read that the two most difficult languages for English speakers to learn are Japanese and Basque.

[metablue]

What are the easiest? I plan on taking up one of those next time I get the impulse to learn a language =)

[JockZon]

I am very grateful that the swedish education system is so good that children in Sweden can almost speak english fluently because they learn it for more than 10 years, starting about 2nd grade or something. There are so much material in english also, so it's quite easy to learn. But I agree that it would take about 6 year to become fluently in a language. I learned german for 3 years at school and I was very ambitious, so I learned more than I was supose to. I took a test and got to know that I am half-fluently in german now. On a grade from A1 to C2 I am in the middle of B1 and B2

I can understand german very well and I hope that my japanese will be as good as my german I think that it's hard to compare japanese to other language. They all have something that's hard to learn. Japanese has weird sentences sometimes and leave much out and it can be hard to now what they are talking about but I think japanese are quite easy, you just have to accept that there are sertan particles to sertan words. It's just like that different languages use different prepositions connected to sertan words. I have learned not to think so much and just learn that you say it in a sertan way.

[Bueller_007]

What are the easiest? I plan on taking up one of those next time I get the impulse to learn a language =)

I'd say romance languages (like the French you so deplored) are probably the easiest. But I don't speak any Germanic languages, so I don't know how they compare. They seem much more difficult than French though.

I've also heard that Bahasa Indonesia is ridiculously simple. They have no tenses, for example. They say "yesterday, i go", "today, i go", "tomorrow, i go".

[JockZon]

French are not easier than germanic languages! You should learn german, it's one of the easiest but french is nice too. French has very irregular spelling and grammar is quite difficult.

[Jason]

What are the easiest? I plan on taking up one of those next time I get the impulse to learn a language =)

I've never studied it myself, but German is English's closest relative. So for native English speakers, German would likely be the easiest I would think. I think you'll find if you study another language in the same family as the one(s) you already know, you'll pick it up faster since you can draw on the knowledge you already have and don't have to start completely from scratch. I found both Spanish and Latin to be fairly easy. Not complete walks in the park or anything, but not too hard either.

[Bueller_007]

French are not easier than germanic languages! You should learn german, it's one of the easiest but french is nice too. French has very irregular spelling and grammar is quite difficult.

I guess because I studied it for 9 years that it seems second nature. I don't think the grammar/spelling is very difficult at all. Remembering noun genders is a pain in the ass though. And they serve no purpose whatsoever.

I've never studied it myself, but German is English's closest relative. So for native English speakers, German would likely be the easiest I would think.

Dutch and Germans (especially the Dutch) tend to speak excellent English, yeah. I don't know if it's a cultural/educational thing, or a language similarity thing, but they definitely speak English much better than the French. So yeah, maybe it's true in reverse as well.

But I still don't like German.

[JockZon]

Maybe the spelling isn't so hard but I thought in general. Not everyone thinks that languages are easy so.