That is if you master it. The language is so context sensitive and there are so many words that are untranslatable it will take a while before you get to understand or have a functional conversation.
@@philswiftreligioussect9619 tbh that's all languages like English mineral lead and the verb lead, or Spanish where "sobre" can mean about, over, envelope, following...
is it though? natural speech is fast and not very clear, not to mention that a lot of stuff is implied instead of said so you just have to develop an intuition for it. some common words and expressions can sometimes be shortened to basically just grunts. there's a variety of dialects and accents within japan which can add difficulty in communication and understanding. if you really get into it there's also pitch accent. and with writing you just have to memorize some cool looking squiggles 😂 (I'm not seriously suggesting that written Japanese is easier, just saying that there are difficulties to both)
Strongly disagree. Grammer is absolutely alien to native English speakers, and I have a much easier time with kanji than conversation. Grammer is far more logical and consistent than English, but that doesn't make it easier to learn imo.
Agree! The grammatical concepts can be a little bit confusing at first just because they’re different, but really simple once you realize what’s going on. For me the hardest part has just been memorizing words, but that’s an issue you get with any language lol
@@yeetbigly5827 Yeah, I find myself occasionally failing to recall the reading of a word during immersion that I've already reviewed in Anki. When I get reminded, the word tends to sticks better in my mind though. Overtime we'll keep improving. 頑張れ！
but that's what difficulty is isn't it, is any language truly more difficult than time consuming? learning languages is easy, that's what you find out when you study them.
@@bahaman19901 Are some languages not simpler to learn than others? I don't have enough experience to know for sure if there are languages particularly more difficult, but I presume there is some variation.
@@shade0636 no, it's probably not the case that any language is more simple to learn than another (if by simple you are using the same definition as used in the original post). irregularities are easily learned through memorisation, the same way one learns vocabulary and conjugations in the first place. grammar is learned simply over time by engaging with the language. even a language like Modern Standard Arabic (known for complication) can be spoken comfortably with enough practice. in the end , the personal "difficulty" of a language is what one finds more 'hard', or 'tedious': learning complicated grammatical differences and very different words and structures from their first language, or memorising conjugation tables and learning how cases work in a language more similar to their own.
kanji is inevitable when writing chinese words so the only possible way japanese couldve been written without it is if it didnt get influenced by chinese however i think that kanji is what made japanese a rich language with complex vocabulary also if u look at korean which had a significant chinese influence and has been using hanja for centuries until recently when they completely abolished it for the use of hangul, there are a lot of homonyms that are indistinguishable without context and can cause confusion
I've been learning for about 2 years now. The language itself is easy, the hardest part is consistently studying for long enough since it's so time consuming 😅
The hardest part is that it isn't Indo-European. I didn't know what that word was or anything about the evolution of language until I looked up why Japanese is 100+ times more time consuming than Romance, Germanick, and Slavic languages (which I have experience with). Japanese seems like genuine Martian when you try to learn it after building confidence by learning various European languages to differing degrees. I thought I was getting good at language learning, but Japanese showed me I was only getting good at learning Indo-European languages lol
To clarify, most of Japanese is, thankfully, very simple which makes the differences so much more fascinating. Some of the grammar structures that make up for having no verb tenses are... illogical to say the least, but those are fine. My long winded complaint is more so about learning so much new vocab with almost no link to other known languages (obviously this excludes all of the ingurishi and Chinesel oanwords).
@@GrizikYugno-ku2zs Japanese was the first language I chose to learn, so when I started Spanish in school I was like “wait this is actually kinda hard” (native language is 🇬🇧) so i guess it works the opposite way around too 😅
@@kumoricI'm lucky, I'm Chinese and I learned English, so I'm familiar with both kinds of languages and grammar rules! (Greek grammar is pretty weird for me tho, with the order of the words and everything)
As a japanese learner, I think the trickiest part (specially when reading) are the constant pronunciation changes that kanji have, they have no phonetic cues and even if you know all the listed readings, you are not guaranteed to be able to read a word at all (一本 ippon 心強い kokorozuyoi 七夕 tanabata 発展 hatten 今朝 kesa, etc). Even IF you are able to memorize the most common exceptions, a vast majority of kanji gain two or more unique readings if they are used in names, so yeah, learn how to speak and how to read japanese are basically two completely unrelated things (Btw I love the new renders he's so fcking cute :3)
@@TheLingOtter The few times I've seen Juu so far it's been because it's the 2nd or later kanji in a word although I'm only about N5 idk when I'm gonna come across more complicated pronunciation changes
As you touch on at the end of the comment, I do think it's a mistake to expect pronunciation to be tied to the Kanji. You mentioned people memorising all readings of Kanji and yeah I'm gonna be completely real, that is 100% the most backwards horrible misuse of the language I've ever heard... The Kanji _is_ _not_ the language. It's simply an _extension_ to it, slapped "on top of" the _real_ Hiragana words to make sentences look nice. Study the _actual_ Japanese first by learning a *word* (not a Kanji, a WORD, in Hiragana), _then_ assign Kanji to that word after, either when you learn it or way down the line when you learn how to write that Kanji and wanna see where it's used. And don't expect that Kanji to always be that word, they can indeed be reused for lots of different words. What's funny is we have exactly the same thing in English with digits. "1" is "one", "11" magically becomes "eleven", "111" becomes "one hundred and one" (where'd the "and" come from?) etc. etc. Learn the words, the letters, then later down the line you can assign pictures to them like this
No phonetic cues? If it's an all-kanji compound, on+on is a safe bet more often than not, which phonetic components are actually fairly reliable for. 一本, 心強い and 発展 aren't examples of irregular readings but rendaku and gemination. Very straightforward ほん→ぽん, つよい→づよい, and はつ→はっ. Rndaku has its own tricky parts of course (さんぼん but よんほん etc.), but that's not an issue with the kanji reading itself.
Hearing the vowels in the order あえいおう (a e i o u) sounds surprisingly jarring and weird after getting used to the usual japanese order あいうえお (a i u e o). Even though I would also order the vowels (barring äöü) of my native language, german (which are at least kind of close to japanese) a e i o u.
That's so true, I'm rarely confronted with aeiou these days, but with Japanese phone virtual keyboards, they are based on the あいうえお order. So now the German order of vowels just feels off.
@@gartore in german there is a rhyme type thing (not sure what to call it) refering to how the mouth or rather the lips close and round more and more. So at least in that sense the order makes sense, and of course alphabetically (totally didn't just realize that now).
This perfectly describes what it was like learning japanese for me, the beginner parts are just so comfortable because of the relative simplicity of the phonetic and consistency of grammar rules, but the deeper I got though the more I realised just how much time it would take to actually become proficient in the language. The hardest part of the language is the fact that it is so different from english that you basically have to learn an entirely new culture, but that is also its biggest strength in my opinion. I had so much more success learning a language far away from english because everything felt new and fresh, and I was forced to change the way I think giving me a whole new perspective. Amazing video, x2 points for otter which totally didn't distract me the whole time by being too cute...
As a person that studies Japanese on and off for the last ten years or so, here's a few comments. Regarding phonology: Standard Japanese, as well as most dialects have merged /z/ and /dz/, as well as /ʑ/ and /dʑ/ and the orthography doesn't distinguish them either. So, it's fine if you can't distinguish those, only few dialects in southern Kyuushuu still do. A weird thing not reflected in orthography is "bidakuon", the nasalization of /g/ to /ŋ/ in some contexts. I think Japanese phonotacts are also easier to get accustomed to than Polynesian ones. For one, Japanese doesn't have phonemic glottal stops. And also, it might just be me, but with Polynesian phonologies being so small, some legitimate words end up sounding like tongue twisters. This occasionally happens in Japanese, too, such as with あたたかくなかった. Regarding morphology: -tachi isn't really a plural marker. The best translation that I can think of for it is "and the rest". It doesn't imply that the additional objects/people are of the same kind as the explicitly named one. For example, just saying 猫たち, doesn't imply that that the rest are cats, too. Of course, in the absence of context it's most reasonable assumption, but if you have a pet cat and a pet dog, you could use 猫たち to talk about them collectively just fine. Regarding syntax/semantics, while Japanese does have a pretty free word order, because the particles scope over entire phrases, you have to be careful not to create what my friends called "parsing errors". This is whenever the sentence you've created can have two different grammatically valid interpretations and the one that the person you're talking to interprets isn't the one you meant. For a funny example, Google the phrase 頭が赤い魚を食べる猫. The biggest challenge with syntax is to learn how Japanese people interpret syntax by default, so that you can create sentences that will be interpreted the same way you intend them to be interpreted.
@@spiritsplice To be fair "parsing errors" of various kinds can happen in basically every language all the time, and context is needed in basically all circumstances to prevent them from happening. In English, for instance, the example that's always brought up is the difference between something like "Let's eat mom" and "Let's eat, mom," which can easily be distinguished in written language (assuming the writer correctly uses commas) but is harder to parse in spoken language. There's also the lack of a distinction between the inclusive and exclusive first person plural in English, so using the word "we" in any circumstance can leave a large amount of ambiguity as to whether the speaker is including the listener in the statement or not, as well as the lack of a distinction between the singular and plural uses of "they" creating ambiguity in a number of contexts (with many people deliberately misusing or ignoring the singular "they" for political reasons in recent years)
I teach japanese to spanish speakers and i love telling them that we have the upper hand when it comes to pronunciation given how similar our vowels are. I especially like comparing it to english vowels since most people here in Argentina have a general grasp of how they work, but alas, they call me a nerd and don't pay it much mind... Some day they'll understand just how interesting this can be!!😈 Super interesting video! you've got my sub big guy!
Even as someone who only otherwise knows english, I've gotten used to kanji so fast that my reading is significantly better with kanji than without. Sure the language would be easier for people who aren't used to characters if it never had any, but it's amazing how fast the brain adapts to things.
As a japanese learner I agree with this. In the very beginning it was harder with the kanji, but the more vocabular appears, the more I need the kanji. Otherwise I have sometimes to guess what it written.
@@Locho17 I don't think that's exactly right. Most germanic languages that haven't been in contact with the gluttural R sprachbund in mainland europe such as most of central and eastern norwegian, swedish, icelandic, faroese etc. use a tapped r just like in scottish english. Even in the mainland, many many german dialects (and yiddish) use a a tapped r. Dutch traditionally uses a tapped r though that's in a process of change into something like the standard english r. English of high society in southern london such as that of the royal family also typically has a tapped r as a sign of refined speech in some words(a remnant of early 20th century recieved pronunciation which uses a tapped r). Most older extinct germanic languages have a tapped or trilled r and most indoeuropean languages outside of the germanic family also have a tapped r such as latin, sanskrit, avestan, persian, albanian, the slavic languages etc. It's a pretty widely known phenomenon that highlands and in general countryside dialects of english in england are a lot more conservative in phonology. Some kentish dialects of english still use the Old English "y" in words where standard english uses g (borrowed from norse) such as yive for give and eye (said like "ey!") for egg. highland dialects preserve monophthong pronunciation of standard english diphthongs (as in middle english) such as cu for cow (ger. Kuh), hoos for house etc. Middle and Old english are almost certain to have had the tapped r. There's grammars of latin in Old english and there's a distinct lack of mention of the Latin r (a tap) being any different from that of the english r. The change of english r to the modern form might be a relatively recent urban innovation that's spread out from there. English dialects from england that have it likely have it as a remnant of older english, though dialects like south african or indian english have it since the local languages all have a tapped or trilled r. Even still there's uses of the tapped r in RV and also in american english especially from utah in cases like the r in thread. Is the preservation of taps and trills in irish, scottish english and high country english due to the influence of gaelic? Probably but it could also be highland conservatism. But i don't think it's likely that the tap present in English dialects is due to contact with scottish or irish gaelic.
Hardest is not just learning kanji, but learning a language's ENTIRE vocabulary, or close enough - I already know maybe(??) 10,000 English words, but I really need to know about 10,000 Japanese words to be as fluent. Also, all of the words that sound alike but have different meanings is also pretty damned tough.
i dunno that i agree that there are no consonant clusters in japanese beyond きゃ or にゃ, because in words like 失礼します or 疲れ, they are effectively pronounced as clusters, and even the "u" sound is left off at the end of ます. native japanese speakers tend to reduce these sounds, if not delete them entirely. part of this comes down to the japanese timing system, but i think for an english speaker it's easier just to call it a cluster
Ahh yes! I forgot to mention this. This is actually called vowel devoicing, which occurs when /i/ and /u/ occur between two voiceless consonants within a low-pitched syllable. This completely flew over my head so thanks for bringing it up! This devoicing, in practice, basically creates new consonant clusters as you mentioned. I still believe these consonant clusters would be easy for an English speaker, but it slightly increases the difficulty of the phonology by a bit!
I don't even fully agree with the palatized consonants being clusters since like I just said they're palatalized. Also the /u/ and /i/ aren't left out they're just whispered.
I am currently learnig japanese, mostly using anki and reading books. I found that after getting a certain amount of words in, kanji actually helps me remember the meaning of words better. Even if you have never seen a word, if you know the kanji, chances are that you can 1. guess the approximate meaning of a word and 2. guess the reading, which (i think) makes it possible to learn more words faster. At least that's what it feels like to me :)
Definitely! Kanji is daunting at first, but it actually does help a lot with memorizing vocab in the long run. I found learning words much easier in Japanese than Korean because I had the visual aid of Kanji
@@TheLingOtterit's eerily similar experience to how East Asian people learn English. Despite being a spelled language, English is irregular enough for young age students to have difficulty grasping the underlying phonology rules, the majority of us just blindly remember how every single word should be pronounced and spelled, just like how we learn how to write a character and it's pronunciations. One day, the student clicks and finds there is actually a vague rule to how a word/character should be spelled/wrote, and it's components (roots, prefixes, post fixes, and radicals) indicates or reference another meaning.
Stick with reading. I abandoned it early on because I'm so much more comfortable listening than reading (in English as well), and it's been about 2 years and I only really struggle with vocabulary. Seeing the character, even if it's nonsense scribbles, makes such an impact on remembering words. Vocabulary is the only thing holding me back, and the more I get used to reading, the more I can accelerate my learning. Oh, and the fact that words change pronunciation and not meaning... WOW is that useful stuff. Seeing the character and knowing it has a bunch of pronunciations is so much more useful than wondering why that have 30 words for "big"
0:25 I once came across an American who was learning/spoke Japanese who used this scale to try and dunk on people learning 'easy' languages like Spanish, and had seemingly no conception of the nuances of language difficulty discussed in this video.
sorry for the wall of text, but have some disagreements with the video the phonology section does happen to ignore pitch accent, which is a relatively complicated system, and quite important to one's accent (if you're going to emphasise the different realisations of /n/, pitch accent is more important to japanese people since it's contrastive and not allophonic, unlike /n/ realisations. it also doesn't mention vowel devoicing, something which many people learning japanese get wrong (they delete vowels instead of devoicing, which is only done in certain situations in natural japanese, and they devoice at times when conditions are not natural) and which is necessary for sounding like a speaker of tokyo japanese. also when talking about morphology you didn't mention verbs, which is strange, nor did you mention adjective inflection. both of these involve memorising tables of conjugation and bases, some of which change depending on the style of speaking or whether or not you are writing, and irregular forms. and well you can't talk about japanese grammar being difficult until you actually get into the details, like when are you supposed to use は or が, when can you use the て form to connect things and in which cases must you use the "conjunctive form", what are the differences in use case between へ and に and へに and にも &c., even basic sentences like "X は Y じゃないです。" are based on underlying grammar which is actually relatively complex for an english speaker, ex. the decision to use じゃない instead of でない is a complicated choice which one doesn't even begin to unpack until much later in their japanese journey. So much of japanese grammar is secretly complicated that it doesn't even get discussed until much later in so many japanese resources (and there's a whole industry which revolves around deciding how much of the complication a japanese instructor should teach) if you compare this to french , "X n'est pas Y" is an incredibly simple construction, requiring only the principles of syntax (SVO) and negation. it's even simpler than "X is not Y" and then we get to the biggest thing that you didn't mention, which seem really important to how difficult japanese is (at least in this one's experience): **Listening** listening to japanese is really hard in comparison to french, spanish, or any other language similar to english. this has a lot to do with grammar of course, while romance/germanic conjugations and constructions line up almost perfectly with english, and therefore require little mental effort to understand at speed for english speakers, japanese expresses certain concepts completely differently, (to be able to do something is represented either by using dekiru (relatively intuitive and easy to pick up for english speakers), or by using a conjugation to do the same (which can be much more hard to immediately pick up on, since it requires that you catch that the vowel "u" changes to "e", a very small change for so much semantic information, which is never conjugated for in languages similar to english). syntax is another big contributor, for the very same reasons. but it also has to do with japanese phonology itself: japanese is spoken at an incredibly fast rate, vowels can be devoiced unexpectedly, consonants can be expressed in forms which are not clear, the intonation/accenting of japan is so so much different than any lagnuage similar to english which means one will have to learn new ways to separate words based on stress. and **most crucially**, japanese words just sound really similar *all the time*. japanese has about 100 possible syllables, which they use to generate tens of thousands of words, so it is very easy to become confused which word is being used, which meaning of a word (which is considered the same despite being very different in implication) is being used. all of these things make listening to japanese really really difficult (and it's a very similar problem in chinese and other "simple but hard" langauges) and well, you can add production and comprehension onto the list of things not talked about while basic japanese grammar is simple, even very normal sentences (for a native japanese speaker) can be impenetrable without a lot of thought recently, hearing "変な名前。でもぴったりよねあなたに” really stumped this one, and caused it to be forced to pause and go back and read over the line with subtitles. now, this sentence is really simple, ぴったり means "precisely", よね are used to emphasise something, and あなたに means, basically, "to you" the sentence comes together to say "strange name, but it fits you perfectly" but despite this sentence not involving any complicated grammar at all, it still required a lot of thinking because of the way such a sentence was put together. and then that goes into overdrive for sentences like "ほら あなたの居場所なんて、この世のどこにも無いじゃない ” without breaking it down in the same way, this is a simple sentence which doesn't use complex grammar and means "see, you have no place in this world", basically but it's expressed in a way super unfamiliar to english speakers, something like: "well, something like a place for you, this world has nothing like that" (this is an intuitive translation which stilll makes the sentence easier to understand, unsure how to translate this in a way that doesn't simplify its difficulty significantly because it's just nothing like english) that is all to say, even very simple sentences which don't use complicated grammar points or unexpected syntax, are difficult to parse without a lot of thought. if you go to "r/learnjapanese" you'll see people struggle with this: even though they know all the words and the basic grammar, the meaning doesn't come to them instantly. in this commenter's opinion, this is why japanese is "hard" while spanish and french are "easy" they all have sentences/paragraphs/phrases which are difficult to understand on first glance ("le temps qu'il te reste" was difficult to understand when first reading it) but of these, only japanese has this problem for like 90% of sentences all the time,, once you immerse in japanese beyond grammar and such you realise that it's a lot less simple than the "rules" would suggest sorry for the wall of text, again, just thought that it would be interesting to talk about this and really do appreciate this video and find it cool, but want to suggest disagreements! would love to hear thoughts from anyone who read this far...
Everytime I hear someone say "Japanese grammar is so easy and simple!" I instantly know that they are a beginner. There are so many nuances and intricacies of Japanese grammar that you cannot even hope to gain an intuition of before you've reached an advanced level.
Thank you for your time to shine some light on such important topics that are usually ignored. The videos like this one make me furious because after a few points I can understand that the person explaining has never learned the Japanese enough to be saying how "easy" it is.
Couldnt agree more. While the video was good in general, it also didnt cover a lot of really important topics in verbs, verb conjugations and grammar structure, which to me, kinda understated the difficulty of using correct japanese.
soft disagree with pitch accent, after a long while (year or two) of hearing spoken japanese fairly often, i got an intuitive knowledge of how pitch accent works. could i tell you how it works? no. could i read something and say it right? yeah. it's complicated but doesn't need to be actively focused on if you're around spoken japanese a lot.
@@dizzydaisy909 this may be the case for you, but it doesn't seem like the case for most people. there are tonnes of people who live in japan and such , and who hear pitch accent all the time, who never pick it up. tonnes of people who hear japanese daily and never speak, and don't even know pitch accent is contrastive! so while it can, perhaps, be picked up (like any other phonetic aspect) there are lots of people who can't and won't pick it up , and as such will constantly say every japanese word wrong. and, well, it's also perhaps difficult to assess yourself in this regard: are you around lots of japanese people who are wont to correct you on something like this? not to specifically say that you're wrong, but just to say, in general, that most people who don't grow up in a language with pitch accent won't pick up on this.
I have been immersing in Japanese for years, and while at this point I have been quite competent in the language for some time (~4000 kanji, can comfortably read and understand just about all media, etc) the biggest challenge for me remains the massive vocabulary size of the language. If you are trying to tackle it all the way through, it is truly enormous!
Aren't all modern languages like that to some extent? Like, there are so many english words we barely use but are more common in literature, etc. You always only need a small subset of these to express anything you'd really want to
@@tanizakiI spent a little too much time on kanji that aren’t particularly useful. I certainly learned quite a few that I don’t see practically ever. But yet I still run into new kanji from time to time!
@@hsrocha2479most definitely! I certainly don’t expect nor even need to use many of those words in conversation. With Japanese, the vast majority of the time I see new words they are a combination of kanji I already know, and generally the meaning can be inferred from context somewhat.
I would say that even though Japanese structure is very simple, the fact of how different it is from English makes it very difficult. I think you underestimated the part of semantics/pragmatics here. You can mispronounce something, you can use incorrect grammar, but if you use wrong words in the wrong context it may come out as rude (which is probably understandable if the person you're talking to knows that you're a foreigner) but it can also come out as something that doesn't make sense to a Japanese speaker. Japanese language describes reality in a very different way than English. First of all the subject in Japanese sentences is usually not a person (like in English) but an object. This also manifests in how many verbs work, like 分からない which does not mean understand and has no good translation in English (maybe does the action of being understandable). This is also the case with potential form of verbs, so in sentences: 私は猫が好きだ。- When it comes to me, cats are likable (I like cats.) 私は数学が分からない。When it comes to me, math does not do the action of being understandable. (I don't understand math.) 私は日本語が話せる。- When it comes to me, Japanese language does the action of being possible to speak. (I can speak Japanese.) The subject isn't 私 (I), but the words before が. This may not seem like a big deal and may seem as something you might just not think about, forcing the Japanese sentence structure into the English sentence structure, but in more complex sentences, sooner or later, you will get confused by this. The "simple structure" of Japanese falls apart if you deny the true meaning of Japanese words forcing you to memorise hundreds of so-called "grammar-points". I guess if you only want to learn basic Japanese, it's ok, but I wouldn't measure the difficulty of learning a language by how hard it is to learn the basics. There are also many other words which are untranslatable into English (もう, 掛ける, 所, 込む). Of course you will find their translations in the dictionary, sometimes it would be a long list of definitions which you can study, but actually learning their true meaning in Japanese and knowing how to use them require a lot of work. And almost every word in Japanese has something like this to it. Because they are not related to English words, their meaning spectra are guaranteed to be somewhat different. Additionally, keep in mind that Japanese has much more words than English. Last thing that I will mention are complex sentences in Japanese. Figuring out what they mean is kind of like solving a puzzle, because this language relies heavily on modification (there are no words like "that", "which" etc. If you want an example, below is a sentence from Alice in Wonderland. Even if you check the meaning of every word there, I highly doubt it would be an easy task to get the actual meaning of the sentence. そこでアリスは、頭のなかで、ひなぎくのくさりをつくったら楽しいだろうけれど、起きあがってひなぎくをつむのもめんどくさいし、どうしようかと考えていました（といっても、昼間で暑いし、とってもねむくて頭もまわらなかったので、これもたいへんだったのですが）。 Now think of reading to a whole book like this (or listening to an audiobook or something if we want to ignore the writing system). Then think about learning to actually build your own complex sentences in Japanese that sound natural and convey the meaning that you want. All of that, in my opinion, makes Japanese language one of the hardest to learn.
@@oyasumisuteneko Yeah, I wouldn't really started understanding Japanese if not for her channel. Although I have to say I don't agree with everything she says. Her approach encouraged me to look deeper into the Japanese linguistics which opened my eyes even more. It is a big loss that she passee away, I wish we could have more of her videos. I also want to add something to my original comment, because after some time I realised that it may not sound like I wanted it to. It's not that I want to gatekeep and tell everyone that Japanese is hard, because from the perspective of not knowing any language I think it is easier than English for example. But we already are familiar with English (or other western languages) and western culture, so from this perspective it is very hard to switch the way we think. Japanese structure is not the difficulty, but the overall way of looking at and describing the world around us. I highly encourage anyone who thinks about starting to learn Japanese, because it's a beautiful language, but it's important to realise that it requires a lot of time and effort (although I find studying it very fun and even things that may look overwhelming like kanji give a lot of satisfaction) and videos like this may give people false perception of how the learning process is going to be.
@@danielblumowski34 Cure Dolly sensei was also a big reason why I became able to understand Japanese structure more deeply, and became interested in linguistics. I even ended up majoring in it for college! I noticed she stopped posting videos, but is it true that she passed away? That would be very tragic. I appreciate your perspective about learning Japanese. I feel the same way.
@@oyasumisuteneko This is great that you pursued learning this topic in college! I appreciate that you feel the same way about it. As for Cure Dolly though, it was unfortunately confirmed by people she worked with on her website. You can find information in a pinned comment under her last video if I remember correctly.
I enjoy learning it! Japanese is memorable. If you put the kanji for “gather” and “center” together you get concentrating, like focusing on something. It makes more sense than English to me.
In learning to speak any language, learning the first few categories is like 1% of the work. Practically every five-year-old has almost a nearly adult-level understanding of phonology, syntax, and morphology. The vocabulary and the social context (the thing you rated 1 star) is like 99% of the learning. This is like "writing papers isn't that hard! it's easy to double-space, use 12-point times new roman, and put your name on it. sure writing the content is pretty hard but that's only one part of it." Also, in the phonology, you didn't mention that Japanese is a tone language. Japanese has pitch accent. There are 4 tone melodies depending on which syllable is stressed: no stress, first syllable stressed, middle syllable stressed, last syllable stressed. This also comes into play in the morphology. The noun and particle are one phonological unit. Pronounced in isolation, nouns with no stress sound identical to nouns stressed on the last syllable. For there to be any difference, you have to attach the particle. The particle has a high tone if there's no stress and a low tone if the last syllable is stressed. Also you're overstating how hard the irregular verbs are in English and Spanish. Most of those are compound words (bid, overbid, underbid, forbid). There are lots of patterns and nice little categories of irregularities. There's a reason basically no one over the age of 4 says "bited" or whatever.
Nuh, saying that morphology is just 1% of the work is absurd. For example turkish and most slavic languages besides macedonian and bulgarian have robust systems of affixes and inflections. I would even say that a good amount of at least native russian/ukrainian speakers make slight mistakes in the usage of the case system. Also the pitch accent isn't as hard as people make it to be, even swedish and norwegian have it. Also, as a person whose native language isn't english, irregular verbs are the pain in the ass
Japanese is _not_ a tonal language. People will understand you if you use the wrong pitch, even if it sounds weird to them. To contrast, Chinese is a tonal language, and if you use the wrong tone, you end up saying a completely different word.
@@Csaboka3 Japanese is indeed a tone language. For there to be a "wrong pitch" at all, it *must* be a tone language. You use the wrong tone and you end up saying a completely different word. That is what tone is.
@@user-mx5kt2bo7x I mean do you *speak* Turkish or most Slavic languages? Or are you just assuming that the hardest part of understanding and being understood is the morphology? If you're saying that learning the irregular verbs was harder than learning how to listen to a random English speaker talking about whatever, then I'm very surprised.
@@violet_broregarde That's simply not true. Let me quote Wikipedia at you: "Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others." Just like messing up stress accent in English, you can get away with messing up pitch accent in Japanese and be understood nevertheless.
Something I think this video didn't mention is precisely that: Japanese is LITERALLY the fastest spoken language in the entire world, with Spanish being 2nd, and we all know how blazing fast Spanish is. To make matters worse, there are an ocean of accents and dialects that when you compare it to English ones, they seem like completely different languages.
I tried to learn Japanese in the past. I'm not learning it now because of other priorities I currently have. However, I still remember my biggest struggles when learning the language which are: _Writing System. Especially Kanji because Hiragana and Katakana are just different but around a week, you can get used to them. _The honorifics: many different words for one simple word in other languages and when to use them is the biggest struggle. _Vocabulary: you don't have many loanwords to rely on. So, learning new vocabulary will take much longer to remember. _Word order: this isn't that difficult. You just have to get used to it. However being used to SVO makes learning SOV harder at the beginning. Pronunciation is the easiest part for me, as a native Spanish speaker. Apart from a few exceptions with the consonants, reading japanese in romaji is a cake-walk. Singing in Japanese is so easy when the lyrics are written in romaji
@@SethRoganSeth apparently, when it comes to pronunciation there is no other way out but to apply what you can basically apply to every single language: theatre techniques or basically diction exercises. Explore that section of the culture as well! :D As a non-english speaker, I basically got fed up of how I pronounced "r" in my pseudo-american bakan, eastern european accent I tried to encapsulate in my youth, so I basically switched out entirely to an UK English accent. So I basically learned the English Phonetic alphabet and followed a few BBC RP pronounciation lectures from youtube. Prolonging the vowels, carefully listening, replicating the sounds and even occasionally recording myself. Then I proceeded to "train my tongue" with tongue twisters to find out what sounds scarr me if I used them together. I remember I had issues pronouncing "th" and combining two or three words ending with "th". Pronouncing the "L" and "R"... gosh I cannot remember how many times I rehearsed "red lorries, yellow lorries" and the "Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers, Peter Piper a pack of picked peppers picked". The goal was to strain my tongue until it got used to it. Years later, one of my professors at uni asked me if I had ever been to the UK or anywhere else abroad. "Uhm, no, I was just too fond of learning the phonetics of the tongue and I immersed myself in it lol." Of course, I am nowhere close to someone who had been to an actual Theatre college in UK, I had met someone later on that tore me apart with his college-professed Queen's English.
@@SethRoganSeth i can agree; maybe easier to express yourself rather and it works in most cases as it is monotonous due to its syllable structures. Then you also need to know how the pitch lands as it could mean a different word. It is nowhere near Chinese-like, but you have exceptions such as "hashi" which means either "bridge" or "chopsticks" depending on how you place the tone/pitch. Slight imperfections will also exist as you can not 100% emulate a language if it's not your native tongue.
I really love how you broke down the method for learning "pure" vowels as an English speaker. I've never seen it done that way, and it really clicked for me
As a German speaker, I wasn't even aware that pure vowels were a problem to English speakers. It's just so natural to me that pure vowels are the "base" of the language. Like, you just assume that somebody learns pure vowels before they learn diphthongs.
Some corrections (others have pointed some of these): 1. Pronunciation is simple... If you disregard pitch accent 2. Japanese isnt an SOV language, this is a myth. It simply requires the verb to be at the end bc it is a head-last language (the head of the sentence is the verb, so it must be last). It's just more common that objects come after subjects.
1. Pitch accent makes it harder, but tbh it is still simple, even if it feels unnatural at first. 2. Japanese is a SOV language by definition, since SOV just describes the default anyways. In your sense German would'nt be SVO either, since word order can change, but the classification just kinda looks at the "most standard sentence structure", even if Japanese basically has free word order.
Pitch accent will barely, if ever, get in the way of communication, even if you completely blow it. So it may be an obstacle to perfecting your pronunciation, but not to learning and successfully using the language. Getting vowels right (including length) is a million times more important.
@@niwa_s As someone who have worked with Japanese people, I agree. I have had way more misunderstandings by having saying the wrong vowel length or omitting the glotal stop, than saying the wrong pitch accent.
Funny, because Japanese speakers itself say that Japanese is the hardest language in the world, like me as a Pole hear a lot from polish people, like for eg. my mom that Polish is the hardest language in the world/second hardest language in the world after Chinese/one of the most difficult language in the world.
@@rya12i Because bro is trying to refute what the video says by saying Japanese isn't easy. Are you illiterate? You can't be, since you typed a comment.
Why did you discuss the verb morphology in the syntax section? Also I would argue that there are actually more irregular verbs than just 4, since there are a fair number of verbs that "meet the requirements" to be conjugated as ichidan verbs yet are conjugated regularly, like 走る which without hearing it conjugated before one would assume to conjugate it as 走ます .
First, it's a godan verb and conjugated regularly according exactly to the conjugation rules of godan verbs. Just because you can't tell at a glance which class of verb it is doesn't mean it isn't a regular verb. Second, you actually can tell that it can't be an ichidan verb since (1) the "i" sound (し) is part of the kanji reading and not in the okurigana, and (2) the kanji reading is more than one sound. If (1) and (2) are true at the same time, it's not an ichidan verb. There do exist some very rare exceptions such as 出来る (which in a way still follows the rule, and it's ateji), 真似る (derived from a noun), 巫山戯る (rare ateji), 洒落る (derived from a noun which itself is ateji)
I would say there are only 2 irregular verbs, 2 exceptions (いく→いって／ある→ない) and the little change with the 5 honorific verbs when going from dictionary form to formal form (ござる→ございます), and that's it. However, what you are talking about is not about irregularities but actually identifying when and -eる and -iる ending verb is an ichidan verb or godan verb. @ketchup901 already explained the basic rules, but that's actually a little bit trickier. I once made a document for my students about the rules and few exceptions for identifying ichidan and godan verbs ending in -eる and -iる, I researched the verbs in jisho.org _con el mayor cuidado posible_ (don't know how to say this in English), and I think it resulted quite accurate. I will write them in another comment, but they are in my native Spanish.
NOTAS: A) No existen verbos terminados en -ぢる ni en -ぺる. B) Cuando un verbo es derivado de otro ya existente, pertenece al mismo grupo de su originador. Ejemplos: 言い切る(decirlo todo) y 裏切る (traicionar) son del grupo 1 porque son derivados de 切る(cortar), que también es del grupo 1. Grupo 1 (Godan) / 一グループの動詞（五段 動詞） REGLAS GENERALES PARA IDENTIFICAR VERBOS TERMINADOS EN -iRU y -eRU: 1) Si después del kanji de un verbo en su forma diccionario sigue de inmediato el る como okurigana, es un verbo del grupo 1. Ejemplos: 入る (entrar)、帰る (regresar)、切る (cortar)、知る (conocer)、走る (correr)、 減る (reducirse)、茶目る (jugar una broma, hacer una travesura)、愚痴る (quejarse, refunfuñar), etc. 2) Si un verbo está escrito en katakana parcialmente, es un verbo del grupo 1. Ejemplos: ウィキる (buscar/leer en Wikipedia)、ジェラシる (estar celoso)、プロってる (ser tan bueno en algo como un profesional, ser un “pro” en algo), etc. Curiosidades útiles: A) Todos los verbos terminados en -ピる son del grupo 1 (sigue la regla 2). Ejemplos: リピる (repetir)、タピる (tomar té de tapioca)、 etc. B) Todos los verbos terminados en -ニる del grupo 1 se escriben por fuerza en katakana (siguen la regla 2). Ejemplos: デニる (comer en Denny’s)、ビニる (ir a un コンビニ), etc. C) Sólo ラリる (“estar drogado, andar disperso”) es el único verbo del grupo 1 terminado en -りる (va acorde con la regla 2). Algunos verbos comunes del grupo 1 que son excepciones a estas reglas: 臥せる Estar en cama 混じる Mezclarse (con) 交じる Asociarse con 寝そべる Tumbarse, echarse (relajado y de lado) しくじる Fracasar, meter la pata, cometer una torpeza びびる Ponerse nervioso, estar asustadísimo. Grupo 2 (Ichidan) / ニグループの動詞（一段 動詞） REGLAS GENERALES PARA IDENTIFICAR VERBOS TERMINADOS EN -iRU y -eRU: 3) Si entre el kanji de un verbo y la terminación る hay uno o más hiragana actuando como okurigana, es un verbo del grupo 2. Ejemplos: 起きる (levantarse)、開ける (abrir)、教える (enseñar)、食べる(comer), etc. 4) Si un verbo está escrito en su totalidad en hiragana, es un verbo del grupo 2. Ejemplos: だらける (aperezarse, volverse flojo)、ずっこける (caerse de, quedar como tonto), etc. 5) Todos los verbos terminados en -れる, -ぜる y -でる son automáticamente del grupo 2, independientemente de si siguen o no las reglas anteriores. Ejemplos: 混ぜる (mezclar)、忘れる (olvidar)、入れる (meter, echar)、撫でる (acariciar, frotar algo suavemente)、照れる (darle pena o vergüenza a uno por un elogio o parecido)、バレる (ser descubierto, ser atrapado en el acto)、出る (salir, partir, aparecerse, participar), etc. Curiosidades útiles: D) Todos los verbos terminados en -りる son del grupo 2 (siguen las reglas 3 ó 4), excepto ラリる, que al estar escrito en katakana, pertenece al grupo 1 (va acorde con la regla 2). Ejemplos: 借りる (pedir prestado o en alquiler)、降りる (bajarse de)、足りる (bastar), etc. E) Ninguno de los verbos terminados en -にる del grupo 2 tiene más hiragana entre su kanji y la terminación る (constituyen una excepción a las reglas 1, 3 y 4, ver en la siguiente sección cuáles son). Verbos del grupo 2 que son excepciones a estas reglas: 居る Estar, haber, tener (cosas móviles), quedarse en 射る Disparar una flecha, dardo o parecido 得る Obtener, conseguir, adquirir, ganar, poder 着る Vestirse (de arriba abajo) 出来る Poder hacer 巫山戯る Bromear, burlarse, tomarle el pelo a uno 似る Parecerse, asemejarse [Curiosidad E] 煮る Cocer, guisar, hervir [Curiosidad E] 寝る Acostarse, irse a la cama 真似る Imitar, copiar, remedar, parodiar, copiar 経る Pasar, transcurrir, experimentar 見る Ver, mirar 観る Mirar, observar, examinar バテる Estar terriblemente exhausto [Coloquial, se puede escribir en hiragana] モテる Ser popular o tener éxito con el sexo opuesto イケてる Ser cool, chulo, bien parecido, tener estilo [Jerga] 湿気る Humedecerse *Este es el único verbo que es tanto del grupo 1 como del grupo 2 indistintamente y como así lo desee el que lo use.
new art style :3 5:14 dzu sound is actually rare not so many japanese words use this sound most words are actually easy to pronounce and ふ yes it's like h ~ f 8:31 you forgot example on reflexive
That's because the reflexive pronoun 自分 "Jibun" is an entirely different word that would replace 私 watashi, and his point was that 私 does not change in different contexts, only the grammatical particle afterwards changes.
You summarized it so well! As a native Spanish speaker, I didn't struggled with the pronunciation; the syntactic though 😢. I struggled a lot to translate and understand japanese. It became easier when I saw a guy translating japanese backwards and it worked so well for me! (Pd.I love your videos 🤍)
Honestly, this whole video 'cept phono and writing parts, is pretty much applicable to all languages and language learning experiences. The only hard part about other languages is their differentiating semantics and pragmatics with implied differentiating sociohistorical context of their speaker base. And the cure is immersion. Speak with the lads, consume their media. Take'll some time 'till your brain'll adapts obviously, but that's the thing, it's only a matter of time
I'd also argue that if a language contains more irregularities in grammar, that would be difficult, as you not only have to memorize a pattern, but also individual exceptions. During my Speech Development class, we learned that there were some studies that suggested that languages with less exceptions and irregularities could be learned quicker by babies
@@TheLingOtter , yet, again, just quicker! Irregularities are like infections within an organism; and letting them get you infected, putting that initial guard down, is what makes them easier to deal with I'd argue. After that, your immune system will be dealing with them naturally (by immune system I mean one's communication with other speakers, which habits begin to work in mutually intelligible tandem); be it ignoring them and then occasionally letting expand on "regular vocab" too, or deleting them fully, usually the action is basically a rollercoaster between the two extremes
@@TheLingOtter but this ignores the fact that , unlike babies, adults are capable of pattern recognition most irregularities in english are consistent with certain patterns which can be learned in large swathes, and the same is true of romance languages and such too
As a Spanish speaker learning Japanese and having quite a good understanding of the difficulty of my language, the grammar aspect of Japanese is something that you can learn without any problem, the real issue for me is studying all the vocabulary which sometimes is so discouragin because you know how to gramatically form a sentence but you can´t form it since you don´t know how to say the words (I've learned 3 languages without including spanish and for now is the only language in which I found myself in this situation).
I have quite experience with learning japanese, the most difficult things ive encountered are homophones and just knowing how things are said, and easy examle could be "I am thirsty" in japanese is "のどが渇いた" wich litteraly translates to "throat got dry" I know that it may see easy to remember this but think in the future when you wanted to make a complex scentence that you will have to know how a lot of actions that are not said "litteraly" or maybe you dont know wich words pair with the action you are trying to describe, if any advanced learner has felt this sensation please let me know
Great vid ^^ I haven't studied Japanese in 5 years, but I still find that I can speak it with my co-workers because of the easy agglutination. I'm now living in Korea, and studying the language, which has made me appreciate how simple Japanese pronunciation is.
You did not mention the pitch accent, which is very different to English dynamic stress. And you did not touch much on the difference between long and short vowels, and long and short consonants.
English has pitch accent too, you just never knew it as a native speaker. Think of the many different meanings of ‘you good’ depending on the pitch accent.
@@shakenbacon-vm4eu That is not pitch accent in this sense of the word. English uses pitch syntactically and it varies weight on sentences and subtext , but not lexically, in Japanese pitch patterns on words change meaning to them. The closest you have in English is words where the stress is placed differently. I should know I speak Swedish a Germanic language with both stress and pitch accent. That is the pitch on the stressed syllables defines the melody for the rest of the word. :)
All of you are still wrong. English has a pitch accent, it’s just native English speakers refuse to believe we have one. We describe it as ‘intonation,’ which is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression. Different regional and cultural accents in the US (yes, every single English speaker in the US has an accent, especially YOU), have different pitch ranges and meanings. Black Americans use a much wider range of pitch than white Americans. Just think of how the meaning of the phrase ‘you good’ changes depending on the pitch you use for the phrase. Genders in English (just like Japanese) use different pitches, although Japanese exaggerates it much more than English. And you can tell if a sentence in English is a question based on….you guessed it….the pitch (or intonation). Stop using basic RUclips creators to inform yourself on linguistics.
@@shakenbacon-vm4eu Pitch accent is not the same as intonation. Lexical pitch accent exist in word level and can distinguish phonemic minimal pairs like English vowels and consonants Ike the phonemic lexical stress accent in English. Which is different from stress in phrase level. My primary native language Swedish has pitch accent and because of that les use of the syntactic use of pitch as in English. Pitch accent works in lexical level on individual words. Not phrase or sentence level. English does not have phonemic pitch. Touch some grass will you, no single minimal pair exist that distinguish words on pitch in English as English has a stress accent and phonemic STRESS. In Swedish we have technically both stress and pitch accent. The stressed syllable can get different tones that distinguishes minimal pairs, the pitch on the stressed syllable will determine the pitch for the rest of the word . Typically not written with accents but to demonstrate. Ánden means the duck but ânden means the spirit. All based in the pitch of the first and stressed syllable. Búren means the cage and bûren means “was carried” . These in lexical levels, not in phrase syntactical level. In Japanese the pitch patterns will lexically distinguish words like chopsticks or bridge. Go read up on what lexical pitch accent means. I have not learnt in you tube btw. Cause your entire comment is one bag of misunderstanding.
the hardest part of learning japanese for me has been memorizing kanji and learning all of the particles and social aspects of what words to use and when
6:06 Japanese CAN end with all the voiceless consonant except "t" such as です with final "s" where "u" is silent although almost all Japanese words end with vowel or "n".
imo its pretty annoying when people go "omg i hate kanji i wish it didnt exist!" or any kind of kanji hating advocate cuz as soon as you remove kanji alot of text becomes harder to read even if you added spaces. one time i took a mock JPLT5 test and since it didnt have kanji i struggled with trying to understand what alot of the text meant (i got 58/100)
Very nice explanation! Im learning Japanese 4 years now, and i can say, honorifics (敬語) is by far the hardest part for me. With Kanji, you can still just remember it by seeing it around, and also PC will automatically write it for you, BUT with the Keigo, you just have to know and understand whole new set of vocab, rules, and have a great social awareness.
When people say Kanji are so complicated I just tell them it's like when they first got to know the % sign, they know it's read as "percent" it means per 100 or "per cent (hundred)" so you have the meaning in there and in Japanese you just have to do that about 12000 times
There is this thing called conditionals in English that can be very challenging for learners. That's where we get sentences that start with "if I will go..." from. I still haven't cracked conditionals in french after a couple years of learning it...
I'm very slowly learning Japanese, and my favorite thing is definetely all the particles that let you be quite lenient with things like word order and some conjugation/declination. The hardest thing is probably kanji, but I have a weakness for writing systems, so while it's a lot (and I barely know any), I find it somewhat fun to learn them. I'm not overly fond of the way words can sound completely different. I actually don't have a good example (my Japanese is bad!), but I'm not a fan of learning a word, and then barely recognizing it in a sentence, due to it only being the stem, and then like 4 or more other syllables tagged on. To be fair, it's very consistent, and probably something you get used to rather quickly, but I'm not quite there, yet. It's usually not too bad when the stem consists of multiple syllables, but when you have to recognize the no from nomu in something like nomimashita, it can be difficult to catch, both in spoken and in written Japanese, at least for me.
Bit of a correction. The English /dd/ is not an alveolar tap/flap. It might sound vaguely similar, but for an alveolar tap you need to be pushing air through the gap between your alveolar ridge and the tip of your tongue, causing your tongue to curve downwards and then swing back upwards hitting the alveolar ridge, exactly like it happens during trills, the difference being that it only happens a single time.
I don't want to be rude but I just wanna bring up that single-contact trills are very much a common occurrence and I don't think it's fair to necessarily call them taps yes the english does use the same phonological symbol [ɾ] but yes it does actually sound different like you mentioned, that is because it is the symbol for alveolar tap/flaps, and the sound in english is actually a flap, but not a tap like you'd see in many other languages like spanish however spanish is a bit of different case because what you said is very accurate to it actually despite it having both a supposed "tap" /ɾ/ and trill /r/, but just keep in mind the /r/ in all other languages is not always like that, for spanish some linguists have actually argued that it's not really two separate phonemes, but the which people say is the one that is always a trill, may just be an instance of that r being geminated (doubled, pronounced for a longer period, it is actually seemingly very rare in spanish apart from this but it miight happen in the word "connotación"), so if rr is just a long version, then r might just be called a single-contact trill
I love your analysis. You have a lot of excellent points that I hadn't considered and I appreciate the take. That said, one thing that I don't think really makes any sense is not including reading/writing as a criteria for your overall rating. I say this because writing, and especially reading, is a huge part of learning a language, and I feel that you can't really get anywhere near fluency without it. There are so many plateaus that I overcame by reading something and putting the pieces together. I could definitely be wrong as a general statement. I'm not a linguist. In my experience so far though (about a year total of Japanese), the more kanji I acquire, the easier it is to understand the language as a whole. That's my two cents. I hope it's well-received.
As a Spanish speaker passively learning Japanese via duolingo, I feel so identified with the first section, I love that Japanese has a consistent vocals sounds like Spanish and not a bunch of exceptions like English. The only obstacle in my way to learn Japanese is that duolingo Japanese course is only in English XD so double translations are on the table
Singers learn pure vowels for classical voice! The times we don’t use them are for songs that are in particular genres or non-foreign language. That’s also why singers that are non-English sound almost perfect in pronunciation due to the same classical voice training.
I love math, so I also love grammar. Japanese Grammar is super consistent and I'm loving that. Pronunciation is something I'm struggling with. I'm self teaching and haven't really started emersion, so I'm sure that will help, but I'm trying really hard not to build bad habits. I'm also not super fast at reading hira/kata yet. Kanji is kind of fun with wanikani, at least at the early levels I'm at.
As an spanish speaker, I got absolutely surprised and excited when I learned that Japanese sounded exactly like Spanish when pronouncing it, instead of saying NIppon like english is pronounced, I would naturally think about it as nipPON
This was an awesome video. I just started learning bits and pieces over the last month because traveling to Japan for 3 weeks in October. I’ve honestly spent a lot of time spamming GPT with questions about language structure and conjugation to at least develop a formula in my head - it’s really fun. What I could really use is a massive dictionary. I don’t really have a great source to learn grammar
PLEASE for the love of god don't use chat gpt, it gets so many things wrong without you noticing. Learn the structure/conjugation/vocab/grammar from a textbook, or from reading in japanese.
The trick I always used for the Japanese R was to try and move it as far as I can to the front of my mouth. The English R almost starts in the back of the throat so moving it forward was a quit way for me to soften it up without really thinking about it
It's funny, I've spent most of my time learning Japanese with input/immersion. Because of this, I actually find written Japanese easier to understand than spoken Japanese sometimes. I wouldn't lie to someone and say kanji are outright easy, but, its not as hard as people make it out to be. For a few reasons based on personal experience: 1. Yes kanji have multiple readings. There's no way around this. But once you get used to it, it makes a _certain_ amount of sense. Take 語 for example. In the verb 語る its read as かた. But when its in a noun it is read ご in every example that comes to mind (日本語、英語、語彙、言語、語学). 生 can be read like 20 different ways, 生意気、生きる、一生、性格、生まれる. But this is less of a problem than you'd think because... 2. I never learned kanji with their readings and I don't suggest you do this. Learn vocabulary and eventually this meta-skill of guessing the right reading in new words comes with immersion. If you learn words, rather than kanji, then reading is easier because a given _vocabulary word_ only has one reading (with exceedingly rare exceptions). In my experience learning kanji with multiple readings is the wrong approach and doesn't really convey how the language is used. 3. Kanji by themselves convey a lot of meaning. Even if you don't know the word, or guess the reading incorrectly, if you know what the kanji means you can get some meaning from an otherwise unfamiliar word. Recently I read 盗撮 which registered in my brain as (stealthy photography). And sure enough, that's exactly what it means. In fact I don't know what an English equivalent would be. So really, kanji convey a lot of semantic meaning by themselves. Yes the reading changes, but this can easily be solved by learning _vocabulary_ instead of isolated kanji. You also develop a meta-skill for predicting the reading if you immerse and get enough input. The intuition will come.
10:51 This is wrong. WO does not indicate the subject. Also Japanese usually omits the subject and uses context to let the listener assume who or what is carrying out the action.
Thank you for the great video and explanation :D I guess I can call myself lucky to speak Swiss German natively. We have pretty much all the sounds already in our language since it's a mix of German, French and Italian (plus something unique).
For those who are discouraged by kanji, in my opinion, don't learn kanji, learn vocabulary (at least at first). I've been practicing this since I started 2+ years ago and it has saved me a lot of greif. What I would study about kanji is the meaning behind each character and it's stroke order. Once you've drawn N5 and N4 kanji a few thousand times, you'll sort of be able to look at a new kanji and automatically know how to write it. By learning vocab you passively learn character readings too. At one point, if you want to get intimate with the language, you'll have to learn learn kanji just like every Japanese person but if your goal is reading manga or whatever, just learning vocabulary will get you extraordinarily far. P.s. Don't be afraid of doing a million dictionary lookups while reading. People don't like to admit it, but it's part of the learning process and there's no shame in doing it.
13:58 I'm a native Spanish speaker and we also do this with the you pronoun, we use "tú" and "usted", being usted the formal "you". And listening to your worries about when exactly use one of the forms... it happens to me as well as I'm talking to a person where I'm not sure how is my status with him or her. In fact it happened to me today... with my aunt
Written Japanese is definitely the hardest. As an English speaker learning Japanese for the first time, I see a bunch of Japanese characters smushed together with the only spaces after a comma or period.
The high vowels in english are actually pronounced as slight diphthongs, /i/ as [ij] and /u/ as [uw] source: ruclips.net/video/gtnlGH055TA/видео.htmlsi=KmLZA_nWFSLh5qKJ&t=421
It’s difficult once you get to native speaking in terms of grammar for me. What you learn on websites or in texts books is not how native speakers talk, as they often drop particles and use the dictionary form of verbs instead of the “masu” form, which means those conjugation rules you learn in textbooks are useless if you’re not used to hearing dictionary form used. That sort of comes down to you memorizing a lot of vocabulary so that you can pick apart what you do understand and go from there, but I definitely struggle most with semantics and grammar because I learn in a classroom setting, which means honorifics and polite form are used for communication with teachers, but casual form is used with fellow students. It gets hard to keep up with it all 😢
I agree with you lol Also, I like the otter art featured ! Makes the video more fun to watch. Sadly, I learned the character meanings through Kirby Volcaloid MVs and no proper tutor. I really need Duolingo.
I'm incredibly grateful that I found a native speaking tutor that brings me joy to learn with. Not only does she give me the nuance understanding of how to engage with the language, but she also as someone living in japan with her wife allows me to explore the queer perspective of learning and living in the culture and engaging with the culture from an LGBT perspective my favorite thing is learning new words because we always get a laugh out of it when she translates back what I said and how it was interpreted hilarity ensues
After studying japanese for a year, the parts I struggle with the most are kanji and the particles. I am surprised you barely mentioned them. There's a couple I still don't know how to use.
The calligraphy in the background is sooooo good. But there’s too much water, that’s why the strokes are so bumpy!! 墨をいっぱい入れて、そこから少しずつ水入れたった you’ll get a perfect consistency that doesn’t bleed but isn’t TOO thick
OMG, I've seen you on tiktok so much! RUclips recommended this video! (I've been studying Japanese for about a year now.) SO STOKED TO KNOW YOU HAVE A RUclips! EASY SUB!
For me the hardest part of self-studying Japanese is that I cannot find a proper textbook for beginners. I already own a couple dozens of them, and the only one I could complete is "I'm Learning Japanese!" for kids. (Unfortunately, they never wrote a second volume.) All the rest never give enough reading material and examples of use for a flood of new words to memorize, practically without context. Corporate words and greetings that every textbook starts with are never included into any cohesive story that can be read and memorized and developed by adding new words little by little. I always could find such materials for other languages, but not for Japanese. I already know hundreds of "standard" beginner words but I still cannot read any children books!
2:01 we have those sounds in Minnesota 😅 specifically each of them long, though. It’s harder to pronounce them short Edit: specifically /aː/ /o̞ː/ /eː/ (last one’s pretty rare but you do hear it)
i've been thinking of learning japanese just out of spite and to do my part in translating media unreleased outside of Japan, and this video is only encouraging me edit: i forgot about kanji.
3:38 The problem with the tip is exactly that, it's not rhotic. How one percieves a sound affects its reproducibility. A famous example is arabs speaking french. Arabic has two letters "ra" which is more of the spanish "r", and "ghain" which produces the french "r", but when an arabic speaker speaks french, they don't pronounce the french "r", even though it's part of their phonology, because "it's not r, it's gh, and in french you need an r sound"...
Yeeeeah as someone who wants to read japanese aloud kanji is extremely difficult. Funnily enough though kanji is actually really useful in identifying the meaning of a sentence directly into English without actually knowing how to pronounce it. While it's not always the case you can piece words together using kanji logically and it's actually something I really enjoy about Japanese.
really enjoyed this video, thank you for the great intro to the language! I was just looking for an intro / about, and there are so many discussion that are so full of big opinions , really appreciated how practical and straightforward this approach was. thanks!
Thank you for this. Kanji is hard and Japanese people know it. But the 4 different "ifs" are hard and Japanese people don't seem to see that. To them asking when to use which "if" might as well be like asking when to use past vs future tense, so obvious that it's actually hard to explain in words.
Spoken japanese: 😊✅❤️
Written japanese: 😢🔥🆘
That is if you master it. The language is so context sensitive and there are so many words that are untranslatable it will take a while before you get to understand or have a functional conversation.
@@philswiftreligioussect9619 tbh that's all languages like English mineral lead and the verb lead, or Spanish where "sobre" can mean about, over, envelope, following...
On the other hand you can read/unsderstand a word even though you completely forgot how its spoken...
is it though? natural speech is fast and not very clear, not to mention that a lot of stuff is implied instead of said so you just have to develop an intuition for it. some common words and expressions can sometimes be shortened to basically just grunts. there's a variety of dialects and accents within japan which can add difficulty in communication and understanding. if you really get into it there's also pitch accent.
and with writing you just have to memorize some cool looking squiggles 😂
(I'm not seriously suggesting that written Japanese is easier, just saying that there are difficulties to both)
Strongly disagree. Grammer is absolutely alien to native English speakers, and I have a much easier time with kanji than conversation. Grammer is far more logical and consistent than English, but that doesn't make it easier to learn imo.
I've been learning Japanese for a few months now. I definitely agree that it's more time consuming than "difficult."
Agree! The grammatical concepts can be a little bit confusing at first just because they’re different, but really simple once you realize what’s going on. For me the hardest part has just been memorizing words, but that’s an issue you get with any language lol
@@yeetbigly5827 Yeah, I find myself occasionally failing to recall the reading of a word during immersion that I've already reviewed in Anki. When I get reminded, the word tends to sticks better in my mind though. Overtime we'll keep improving.
頑張れ！
but that's what difficulty is isn't it,
is any language truly more difficult than time consuming? learning languages is easy, that's what you find out when you study them.
@@bahaman19901 Are some languages not simpler to learn than others? I don't have enough experience to know for sure if there are languages particularly more difficult, but I presume there is some variation.
@@shade0636
no, it's probably not the case that any language is more simple to learn than another (if by simple you are using the same definition as used in the original post).
irregularities are easily learned through memorisation, the same way one learns vocabulary and conjugations in the first place. grammar is learned simply over time by engaging with the language. even a language like Modern Standard Arabic (known for complication) can be spoken comfortably with enough practice.
in the end , the personal "difficulty" of a language is what one finds more 'hard', or 'tedious': learning complicated grammatical differences and very different words and structures from their first language, or memorising conjugation tables and learning how cases work in a language more similar to their own.
Japanese would have been a very simple language if they didn't write it whatsoever.
kanji is inevitable when writing chinese words so the only possible way japanese couldve been written without it is if it didnt get influenced by chinese
however i think that kanji is what made japanese a rich language with complex vocabulary
also if u look at korean which had a significant chinese influence and has been using hanja for centuries until recently when they completely abolished it for the use of hangul, there are a lot of homonyms that are indistinguishable without context and can cause confusion
kanji is one of the easiest parts of the language but y'all aren't ready for that conversation
No it wouldn't. It would still have really complex grammar and vocabulary mostly unfamiliar to English speakers
@@honghongkohan i think they're doing just fine tho, no need to emphasize the magic of Han characters all that much
@@honghongkohanNo it isn't. Koreans and Vietnamese use chinese words all the time without using chinese characters.
I've been learning for about 2 years now. The language itself is easy, the hardest part is consistently studying for long enough since it's so time consuming 😅
I've been learning for five years. The hardest part isn't even studying but rather being immersed enough.
The hardest part is that it isn't Indo-European. I didn't know what that word was or anything about the evolution of language until I looked up why Japanese is 100+ times more time consuming than Romance, Germanick, and Slavic languages (which I have experience with). Japanese seems like genuine Martian when you try to learn it after building confidence by learning various European languages to differing degrees. I thought I was getting good at language learning, but Japanese showed me I was only getting good at learning Indo-European languages lol
To clarify, most of Japanese is, thankfully, very simple which makes the differences so much more fascinating. Some of the grammar structures that make up for having no verb tenses are... illogical to say the least, but those are fine. My long winded complaint is more so about learning so much new vocab with almost no link to other known languages (obviously this excludes all of the ingurishi and Chinesel oanwords).
@@GrizikYugno-ku2zs Japanese was the first language I chose to learn, so when I started Spanish in school I was like “wait this is actually kinda hard” (native language is 🇬🇧) so i guess it works the opposite way around too 😅
@@kumoricI'm lucky, I'm Chinese and I learned English, so I'm familiar with both kinds of languages and grammar rules! (Greek grammar is pretty weird for me tho, with the order of the words and everything)
As a japanese learner, I think the trickiest part (specially when reading) are the constant pronunciation changes that kanji have, they have no phonetic cues and even if you know all the listed readings, you are not guaranteed to be able to read a word at all (一本 ippon 心強い kokorozuyoi 七夕 tanabata 発展 hatten 今朝 kesa, etc). Even IF you are able to memorize the most common exceptions, a vast majority of kanji gain two or more unique readings if they are used in names, so yeah, learn how to speak and how to read japanese are basically two completely unrelated things (Btw I love the new renders he's so fcking cute :3)
中 being pronounced as either Chuu or Juu kills me 😭
@@TheLingOtter don't forget naka
@@TheLingOtter The few times I've seen Juu so far it's been because it's the 2nd or later kanji in a word although I'm only about N5 idk when I'm gonna come across more complicated pronunciation changes
As you touch on at the end of the comment, I do think it's a mistake to expect pronunciation to be tied to the Kanji. You mentioned people memorising all readings of Kanji and yeah I'm gonna be completely real, that is 100% the most backwards horrible misuse of the language I've ever heard...
The Kanji _is_ _not_ the language. It's simply an _extension_ to it, slapped "on top of" the _real_ Hiragana words to make sentences look nice. Study the _actual_ Japanese first by learning a *word* (not a Kanji, a WORD, in Hiragana), _then_ assign Kanji to that word after, either when you learn it or way down the line when you learn how to write that Kanji and wanna see where it's used. And don't expect that Kanji to always be that word, they can indeed be reused for lots of different words.
What's funny is we have exactly the same thing in English with digits. "1" is "one", "11" magically becomes "eleven", "111" becomes "one hundred and one" (where'd the "and" come from?) etc. etc. Learn the words, the letters, then later down the line you can assign pictures to them like this
No phonetic cues? If it's an all-kanji compound, on+on is a safe bet more often than not, which phonetic components are actually fairly reliable for. 一本, 心強い and 発展 aren't examples of irregular readings but rendaku and gemination. Very straightforward ほん→ぽん, つよい→づよい, and はつ→はっ. Rndaku has its own tricky parts of course (さんぼん but よんほん etc.), but that's not an issue with the kanji reading itself.
The otter on the thumbnail is lovely ああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああああ
あ
WingoWizawd
Thank you!!! ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ
あ
As a RUclipsr I really need to transition my content to being a Linguist channel featuring a cute mascot
Hearing the vowels in the order あえいおう (a e i o u) sounds surprisingly jarring and weird after getting used to the usual japanese order あいうえお (a i u e o). Even though I would also order the vowels (barring äöü) of my native language, german (which are at least kind of close to japanese) a e i o u.
That's so true, I'm rarely confronted with aeiou these days, but with Japanese phone virtual keyboards, they are based on the あいうえお order. So now the German order of vowels just feels off.
Lo bueno es que la pronunciación es muy fácil si hablas Español
Well the AEIOU order is comon to see in Spanish maybe is similar in other languages?
@@gartore in german there is a rhyme type thing (not sure what to call it) refering to how the mouth or rather the lips close and round more and more. So at least in that sense the order makes sense, and of course alphabetically (totally didn't just realize that now).
@@SMCwasTaken Or French
You're one of my favourite channels but I'm not gonna just SIT here and have you invalidate my struggles in Japanese Kanji class😭
Meanwhile 当て字 and reverse 当て字:
to be fair, he did say the writing system was the hardest part
85% of views are the otter the other 15% are here for the knowledge and I'm here for otter
What is otter?
@@feliche2292 the character on the right
I rewatched this video just to watch the calligraphist in the background
This perfectly describes what it was like learning japanese for me, the beginner parts are just so comfortable because of the relative simplicity of the phonetic and consistency of grammar rules, but the deeper I got though the more I realised just how much time it would take to actually become proficient in the language. The hardest part of the language is the fact that it is so different from english that you basically have to learn an entirely new culture, but that is also its biggest strength in my opinion. I had so much more success learning a language far away from english because everything felt new and fresh, and I was forced to change the way I think giving me a whole new perspective.
Amazing video, x2 points for otter which totally didn't distract me the whole time by being too cute...
As a person that studies Japanese on and off for the last ten years or so, here's a few comments.
Regarding phonology: Standard Japanese, as well as most dialects have merged /z/ and /dz/, as well as /ʑ/ and /dʑ/ and the orthography doesn't distinguish them either. So, it's fine if you can't distinguish those, only few dialects in southern Kyuushuu still do. A weird thing not reflected in orthography is "bidakuon", the nasalization of /g/ to /ŋ/ in some contexts.
I think Japanese phonotacts are also easier to get accustomed to than Polynesian ones. For one, Japanese doesn't have phonemic glottal stops. And also, it might just be me, but with Polynesian phonologies being so small, some legitimate words end up sounding like tongue twisters. This occasionally happens in Japanese, too, such as with あたたかくなかった.
Regarding morphology: -tachi isn't really a plural marker. The best translation that I can think of for it is "and the rest". It doesn't imply that the additional objects/people are of the same kind as the explicitly named one. For example, just saying 猫たち, doesn't imply that that the rest are cats, too. Of course, in the absence of context it's most reasonable assumption, but if you have a pet cat and a pet dog, you could use 猫たち to talk about them collectively just fine.
Regarding syntax/semantics, while Japanese does have a pretty free word order, because the particles scope over entire phrases, you have to be careful not to create what my friends called "parsing errors". This is whenever the sentence you've created can have two different grammatically valid interpretations and the one that the person you're talking to interprets isn't the one you meant. For a funny example, Google the phrase 頭が赤い魚を食べる猫. The biggest challenge with syntax is to learn how Japanese people interpret syntax by default, so that you can create sentences that will be interpreted the same way you intend them to be interpreted.
Oh that is a funny example hahaha
The fact that "parsing errors" can happen shows what a mess the language is. particles are a stupid way of parsing information.
@@spiritsplice To be fair "parsing errors" of various kinds can happen in basically every language all the time, and context is needed in basically all circumstances to prevent them from happening. In English, for instance, the example that's always brought up is the difference between something like "Let's eat mom" and "Let's eat, mom," which can easily be distinguished in written language (assuming the writer correctly uses commas) but is harder to parse in spoken language. There's also the lack of a distinction between the inclusive and exclusive first person plural in English, so using the word "we" in any circumstance can leave a large amount of ambiguity as to whether the speaker is including the listener in the statement or not, as well as the lack of a distinction between the singular and plural uses of "they" creating ambiguity in a number of contexts (with many people deliberately misusing or ignoring the singular "they" for political reasons in recent years)
I teach japanese to spanish speakers and i love telling them that we have the upper hand when it comes to pronunciation given how similar our vowels are. I especially like comparing it to english vowels since most people here in Argentina have a general grasp of how they work, but alas, they call me a nerd and don't pay it much mind... Some day they'll understand just how interesting this can be!!😈
Super interesting video! you've got my sub big guy!
As a fellow native Spanish speaker that also teaches Japanese to Spanish speakers, I agree! Greetings from Costa Rica :3
As a Chinese person, I find it easier to read Japanese with kanji than without it.
Same, as someone who’s not Chinese, but studied Chinese for many years.
Even as someone who only otherwise knows english, I've gotten used to kanji so fast that my reading is significantly better with kanji than without. Sure the language would be easier for people who aren't used to characters if it never had any, but it's amazing how fast the brain adapts to things.
As a japanese learner I agree with this. In the very beginning it was harder with the kanji, but the more vocabular appears, the more I need the kanji. Otherwise I have sometimes to guess what it written.
你这话说了跟没说一样。。
That makes sense. Japanese Kanji is heavily taken from Chinese. Even to the point that some pronunciations are close to the original Chinese word
The Japanese R sound can also be heard in some accents of Scotland I believe
Yes they roll/tap their R’s by default. I believe Welsh does too
That side project of trying to learn tapped r for a scottish accent helped both in spanish and japanese... great sound 10/10 would learn again
I believe that would be from contact with Gaelic
@@Locho17 I don't think that's exactly right. Most germanic languages that haven't been in contact with the gluttural R sprachbund in mainland europe such as most of central and eastern norwegian, swedish, icelandic, faroese etc. use a tapped r just like in scottish english. Even in the mainland, many many german dialects (and yiddish) use a a tapped r. Dutch traditionally uses a tapped r though that's in a process of change into something like the standard english r. English of high society in southern london such as that of the royal family also typically has a tapped r as a sign of refined speech in some words(a remnant of early 20th century recieved pronunciation which uses a tapped r). Most older extinct germanic languages have a tapped or trilled r and most indoeuropean languages outside of the germanic family also have a tapped r such as latin, sanskrit, avestan, persian, albanian, the slavic languages etc.
It's a pretty widely known phenomenon that highlands and in general countryside dialects of english in england are a lot more conservative in phonology. Some kentish dialects of english still use the Old English "y" in words where standard english uses g (borrowed from norse) such as yive for give and eye (said like "ey!") for egg. highland dialects preserve monophthong pronunciation of standard english diphthongs (as in middle english) such as cu for cow (ger. Kuh), hoos for house etc. Middle and Old english are almost certain to have had the tapped r. There's grammars of latin in Old english and there's a distinct lack of mention of the Latin r (a tap) being any different from that of the english r. The change of english r to the modern form might be a relatively recent urban innovation that's spread out from there. English dialects from england that have it likely have it as a remnant of older english, though dialects like south african or indian english have it since the local languages all have a tapped or trilled r. Even still there's uses of the tapped r in RV and also in american english especially from utah in cases like the r in thread.
Is the preservation of taps and trills in irish, scottish english and high country english due to the influence of gaelic? Probably but it could also be highland conservatism. But i don't think it's likely that the tap present in English dialects is due to contact with scottish or irish gaelic.
@@kadalavan4589 Thank you for the insight this is incredibly informative.
I love your content. Made me very interested in linguistics and languages as a whole. Keep up the amazing work!
Glad to hear that my videos got you interested in language! It's such a fun topic (although I'm a bit bias lol)
Hardest is not just learning kanji, but learning a language's ENTIRE vocabulary, or close enough - I already know maybe(??) 10,000 English words, but I really need to know about 10,000 Japanese words to be as fluent. Also, all of the words that sound alike but have different meanings is also pretty damned tough.
"It just makes sense."
Famous last words when trying to convince anyone that something is easy.
i dunno that i agree that there are no consonant clusters in japanese beyond きゃ or にゃ, because in words like 失礼します or 疲れ, they are effectively pronounced as clusters, and even the "u" sound is left off at the end of ます. native japanese speakers tend to reduce these sounds, if not delete them entirely. part of this comes down to the japanese timing system, but i think for an english speaker it's easier just to call it a cluster
Ahh yes! I forgot to mention this. This is actually called vowel devoicing, which occurs when /i/ and /u/ occur between two voiceless consonants within a low-pitched syllable. This completely flew over my head so thanks for bringing it up! This devoicing, in practice, basically creates new consonant clusters as you mentioned. I still believe these consonant clusters would be easy for an English speaker, but it slightly increases the difficulty of the phonology by a bit!
I don't even fully agree with the palatized consonants being clusters since like I just said they're palatalized.
Also the /u/ and /i/ aren't left out they're just whispered.
The worst consonant cluster in Japanese is when the word ます ends in ssssssssssssss
One that trips me up is べんり - is it more natural to kinda skip over the n and nasalise the adjacent sounds instead?
I am currently learnig japanese, mostly using anki and reading books. I found that after getting a certain amount of words in, kanji actually helps me remember the meaning of words better. Even if you have never seen a word, if you know the kanji, chances are that you can 1. guess the approximate meaning of a word and 2. guess the reading, which (i think) makes it possible to learn more words faster.
At least that's what it feels like to me :)
Definitely! Kanji is daunting at first, but it actually does help a lot with memorizing vocab in the long run. I found learning words much easier in Japanese than Korean because I had the visual aid of Kanji
@@TheLingOtterit's eerily similar experience to how East Asian people learn English.
Despite being a spelled language, English is irregular enough for young age students to have difficulty grasping the underlying phonology rules, the majority of us just blindly remember how every single word should be pronounced and spelled, just like how we learn how to write a character and it's pronunciations.
One day, the student clicks and finds there is actually a vague rule to how a word/character should be spelled/wrote, and it's components (roots, prefixes, post fixes, and radicals) indicates or reference another meaning.
Stick with reading. I abandoned it early on because I'm so much more comfortable listening than reading (in English as well), and it's been about 2 years and I only really struggle with vocabulary. Seeing the character, even if it's nonsense scribbles, makes such an impact on remembering words. Vocabulary is the only thing holding me back, and the more I get used to reading, the more I can accelerate my learning. Oh, and the fact that words change pronunciation and not meaning... WOW is that useful stuff. Seeing the character and knowing it has a bunch of pronunciations is so much more useful than wondering why that have 30 words for "big"
0:25 I once came across an American who was learning/spoke Japanese who used this scale to try and dunk on people learning 'easy' languages like Spanish, and had seemingly no conception of the nuances of language difficulty discussed in this video.
THE ART OF THE OTTER IS SO CUTE I-
sorry for the wall of text, but have some disagreements with the video
the phonology section does happen to ignore pitch accent, which is a relatively complicated system, and quite important to one's accent (if you're going to emphasise the different realisations of /n/, pitch accent is more important to japanese people since it's contrastive and not allophonic, unlike /n/ realisations.
it also doesn't mention vowel devoicing, something which many people learning japanese get wrong (they delete vowels instead of devoicing, which is only done in certain situations in natural japanese, and they devoice at times when conditions are not natural) and which is necessary for sounding like a speaker of tokyo japanese.
also when talking about morphology you didn't mention verbs, which is strange, nor did you mention adjective inflection. both of these involve memorising tables of conjugation and bases, some of which change depending on the style of speaking or whether or not you are writing, and irregular forms.
and well you can't talk about japanese grammar being difficult until you actually get into the details, like when are you supposed to use は or が, when can you use the て form to connect things and in which cases must you use the "conjunctive form", what are the differences in use case between へ and に and へに and にも &c., even basic sentences like "X は Y じゃないです。" are based on underlying grammar which is actually relatively complex for an english speaker, ex. the decision to use じゃない instead of でない is a complicated choice which one doesn't even begin to unpack until much later in their japanese journey. So much of japanese grammar is secretly complicated that it doesn't even get discussed until much later in so many japanese resources (and there's a whole industry which revolves around deciding how much of the complication a japanese instructor should teach)
if you compare this to french , "X n'est pas Y" is an incredibly simple construction, requiring only the principles of syntax (SVO) and negation. it's even simpler than "X is not Y"
and then we get to the biggest thing that you didn't mention, which seem really important to how difficult japanese is (at least in this one's experience):
**Listening**
listening to japanese is really hard in comparison to french, spanish, or any other language similar to english.
this has a lot to do with grammar of course, while romance/germanic conjugations and constructions line up almost perfectly with english, and therefore require little mental effort to understand at speed for english speakers, japanese expresses certain concepts completely differently, (to be able to do something is represented either by using dekiru (relatively intuitive and easy to pick up for english speakers), or by using a conjugation to do the same (which can be much more hard to immediately pick up on, since it requires that you catch that the vowel "u" changes to "e", a very small change for so much semantic information, which is never conjugated for in languages similar to english).
syntax is another big contributor, for the very same reasons.
but it also has to do with japanese phonology itself: japanese is spoken at an incredibly fast rate, vowels can be devoiced unexpectedly, consonants can be expressed in forms which are not clear, the intonation/accenting of japan is so so much different than any lagnuage similar to english which means one will have to learn new ways to separate words based on stress. and
**most crucially**, japanese words just sound really similar *all the time*. japanese has about 100 possible syllables, which they use to generate tens of thousands of words, so it is very easy to become confused which word is being used, which meaning of a word (which is considered the same despite being very different in implication) is being used.
all of these things make listening to japanese really really difficult (and it's a very similar problem in chinese and other "simple but hard" langauges)
and well, you can add production and comprehension onto the list of things not talked about
while basic japanese grammar is simple, even very normal sentences (for a native japanese speaker) can be impenetrable without a lot of thought
recently, hearing "変な名前。でもぴったりよねあなたに” really stumped this one, and caused it to be forced to pause and go back and read over the line with subtitles.
now, this sentence is really simple, ぴったり means "precisely", よね are used to emphasise something, and あなたに means, basically, "to you"
the sentence comes together to say "strange name, but it fits you perfectly"
but despite this sentence not involving any complicated grammar at all, it still required a lot of thinking because of the way such a sentence was put together.
and then that goes into overdrive for sentences like
"ほら あなたの居場所なんて、この世のどこにも無いじゃない ”
without breaking it down in the same way, this is a simple sentence which doesn't use complex grammar and means
"see, you have no place in this world", basically
but it's expressed in a way super unfamiliar to english speakers, something like: "well, something like a place for you, this world has nothing like that" (this is an intuitive translation which stilll makes the sentence easier to understand, unsure how to translate this in a way that doesn't simplify its difficulty significantly because it's just nothing like english)
that is all to say, even very simple sentences which don't use complicated grammar points or unexpected syntax, are difficult to parse without a lot of thought. if you go to "r/learnjapanese" you'll see people struggle with this: even though they know all the words and the basic grammar, the meaning doesn't come to them instantly.
in this commenter's opinion, this is why japanese is "hard" while spanish and french are "easy"
they all have sentences/paragraphs/phrases which are difficult to understand on first glance ("le temps qu'il te reste" was difficult to understand when first reading it) but of these, only japanese has this problem for like 90% of sentences all the time,,
once you immerse in japanese beyond grammar and such you realise that it's a lot less simple than the "rules" would suggest
sorry for the wall of text, again, just thought that it would be interesting to talk about this and really do appreciate this video and find it cool, but want to suggest disagreements! would love to hear thoughts from anyone who read this far...
Everytime I hear someone say "Japanese grammar is so easy and simple!" I instantly know that they are a beginner. There are so many nuances and intricacies of Japanese grammar that you cannot even hope to gain an intuition of before you've reached an advanced level.
Thank you for your time to shine some light on such important topics that are usually ignored. The videos like this one make me furious because after a few points I can understand that the person explaining has never learned the Japanese enough to be saying how "easy" it is.
Couldnt agree more. While the video was good in general, it also didnt cover a lot of really important topics in verbs, verb conjugations and grammar structure, which to me, kinda understated the difficulty of using correct japanese.
soft disagree with pitch accent, after a long while (year or two) of hearing spoken japanese fairly often, i got an intuitive knowledge of how pitch accent works. could i tell you how it works? no. could i read something and say it right? yeah. it's complicated but doesn't need to be actively focused on if you're around spoken japanese a lot.
@@dizzydaisy909 this may be the case for you, but it doesn't seem like the case for most people. there are tonnes of people who live in japan and such , and who hear pitch accent all the time, who never pick it up. tonnes of people who hear japanese daily and never speak, and don't even know pitch accent is contrastive!
so while it can, perhaps, be picked up (like any other phonetic aspect) there are lots of people who can't and won't pick it up , and as such will constantly say every japanese word wrong.
and, well, it's also perhaps difficult to assess yourself in this regard: are you around lots of japanese people who are wont to correct you on something like this? not to specifically say that you're wrong, but just to say, in general, that most people who don't grow up in a language with pitch accent won't pick up on this.
BRO, new otter look is incredibly hype!
I love the new Otter art! on the thumbnail and in the video.
Great video!
I have been immersing in Japanese for years, and while at this point I have been quite competent in the language for some time (~4000 kanji, can comfortably read and understand just about all media, etc) the biggest challenge for me remains the massive vocabulary size of the language. If you are trying to tackle it all the way through, it is truly enormous!
Aren't all modern languages like that to some extent? Like, there are so many english words we barely use but are more common in literature, etc. You always only need a small subset of these to express anything you'd really want to
@@jakecozza5586 You do not know 4,000 kanji.
@@tanizakihe probably does and its not even that difficult
@@tanizakiI spent a little too much time on kanji that aren’t particularly useful. I certainly learned quite a few that I don’t see practically ever. But yet I still run into new kanji from time to time!
@@hsrocha2479most definitely! I certainly don’t expect nor even need to use many of those words in conversation. With Japanese, the vast majority of the time I see new words they are a combination of kanji I already know, and generally the meaning can be inferred from context somewhat.
I would say that even though Japanese structure is very simple, the fact of how different it is from English makes it very difficult. I think you underestimated the part of semantics/pragmatics here. You can mispronounce something, you can use incorrect grammar, but if you use wrong words in the wrong context it may come out as rude (which is probably understandable if the person you're talking to knows that you're a foreigner) but it can also come out as something that doesn't make sense to a Japanese speaker.
Japanese language describes reality in a very different way than English. First of all the subject in Japanese sentences is usually not a person (like in English) but an object. This also manifests in how many verbs work, like 分からない which does not mean understand and has no good translation in English (maybe does the action of being understandable). This is also the case with potential form of verbs, so in sentences:
私は猫が好きだ。- When it comes to me, cats are likable (I like cats.)
私は数学が分からない。When it comes to me, math does not do the action of being understandable. (I don't understand math.)
私は日本語が話せる。- When it comes to me, Japanese language does the action of being possible to speak. (I can speak Japanese.)
The subject isn't 私 (I), but the words before が. This may not seem like a big deal and may seem as something you might just not think about, forcing the Japanese sentence structure into the English sentence structure, but in more complex sentences, sooner or later, you will get confused by this. The "simple structure" of Japanese falls apart if you deny the true meaning of Japanese words forcing you to memorise hundreds of so-called "grammar-points". I guess if you only want to learn basic Japanese, it's ok, but I wouldn't measure the difficulty of learning a language by how hard it is to learn the basics.
There are also many other words which are untranslatable into English (もう, 掛ける, 所, 込む). Of course you will find their translations in the dictionary, sometimes it would be a long list of definitions which you can study, but actually learning their true meaning in Japanese and knowing how to use them require a lot of work. And almost every word in Japanese has something like this to it. Because they are not related to English words, their meaning spectra are guaranteed to be somewhat different. Additionally, keep in mind that Japanese has much more words than English.
Last thing that I will mention are complex sentences in Japanese. Figuring out what they mean is kind of like solving a puzzle, because this language relies heavily on modification (there are no words like "that", "which" etc. If you want an example, below is a sentence from Alice in Wonderland. Even if you check the meaning of every word there, I highly doubt it would be an easy task to get the actual meaning of the sentence.
そこでアリスは、頭のなかで、ひなぎくのくさりをつくったら楽しいだろうけれど、起きあがってひなぎくをつむのもめんどくさいし、どうしようかと考えていました（といっても、昼間で暑いし、とってもねむくて頭もまわらなかったので、これもたいへんだったのですが）。
Now think of reading to a whole book like this (or listening to an audiobook or something if we want to ignore the writing system). Then think about learning to actually build your own complex sentences in Japanese that sound natural and convey the meaning that you want.
All of that, in my opinion, makes Japanese language one of the hardest to learn.
I found the fellow student of Cure Dolly sensei 🤣
@@oyasumisuteneko Yeah, I wouldn't really started understanding Japanese if not for her channel. Although I have to say I don't agree with everything she says. Her approach encouraged me to look deeper into the Japanese linguistics which opened my eyes even more. It is a big loss that she passee away, I wish we could have more of her videos.
I also want to add something to my original comment, because after some time I realised that it may not sound like I wanted it to. It's not that I want to gatekeep and tell everyone that Japanese is hard, because from the perspective of not knowing any language I think it is easier than English for example. But we already are familiar with English (or other western languages) and western culture, so from this perspective it is very hard to switch the way we think. Japanese structure is not the difficulty, but the overall way of looking at and describing the world around us. I highly encourage anyone who thinks about starting to learn Japanese, because it's a beautiful language, but it's important to realise that it requires a lot of time and effort (although I find studying it very fun and even things that may look overwhelming like kanji give a lot of satisfaction) and videos like this may give people false perception of how the learning process is going to be.
@@danielblumowski34 Cure Dolly sensei was also a big reason why I became able to understand Japanese structure more deeply, and became interested in linguistics. I even ended up majoring in it for college! I noticed she stopped posting videos, but is it true that she passed away? That would be very tragic.
I appreciate your perspective about learning Japanese. I feel the same way.
@@oyasumisuteneko This is great that you pursued learning this topic in college! I appreciate that you feel the same way about it.
As for Cure Dolly though, it was unfortunately confirmed by people she worked with on her website. You can find information in a pinned comment under her last video if I remember correctly.
TheLingOtterは人気になる気がする
ショート動画ではまあまあ閲覧数あるから個人的には時間の問題な希ガス
I enjoy learning it! Japanese is memorable. If you put the kanji for “gather” and “center” together you get concentrating, like focusing on something. It makes more sense than English to me.
In learning to speak any language, learning the first few categories is like 1% of the work. Practically every five-year-old has almost a nearly adult-level understanding of phonology, syntax, and morphology. The vocabulary and the social context (the thing you rated 1 star) is like 99% of the learning. This is like "writing papers isn't that hard! it's easy to double-space, use 12-point times new roman, and put your name on it. sure writing the content is pretty hard but that's only one part of it."
Also, in the phonology, you didn't mention that Japanese is a tone language. Japanese has pitch accent. There are 4 tone melodies depending on which syllable is stressed: no stress, first syllable stressed, middle syllable stressed, last syllable stressed.
This also comes into play in the morphology. The noun and particle are one phonological unit. Pronounced in isolation, nouns with no stress sound identical to nouns stressed on the last syllable. For there to be any difference, you have to attach the particle. The particle has a high tone if there's no stress and a low tone if the last syllable is stressed.
Also you're overstating how hard the irregular verbs are in English and Spanish. Most of those are compound words (bid, overbid, underbid, forbid). There are lots of patterns and nice little categories of irregularities. There's a reason basically no one over the age of 4 says "bited" or whatever.
Nuh, saying that morphology is just 1% of the work is absurd. For example turkish and most slavic languages besides macedonian and bulgarian have robust systems of affixes and inflections. I would even say that a good amount of at least native russian/ukrainian speakers make slight mistakes in the usage of the case system. Also the pitch accent isn't as hard as people make it to be, even swedish and norwegian have it. Also, as a person whose native language isn't english, irregular verbs are the pain in the ass
Japanese is _not_ a tonal language. People will understand you if you use the wrong pitch, even if it sounds weird to them. To contrast, Chinese is a tonal language, and if you use the wrong tone, you end up saying a completely different word.
@@Csaboka3 Japanese is indeed a tone language. For there to be a "wrong pitch" at all, it *must* be a tone language. You use the wrong tone and you end up saying a completely different word. That is what tone is.
@@user-mx5kt2bo7x I mean do you *speak* Turkish or most Slavic languages? Or are you just assuming that the hardest part of understanding and being understood is the morphology?
If you're saying that learning the irregular verbs was harder than learning how to listen to a random English speaker talking about whatever, then I'm very surprised.
@@violet_broregarde That's simply not true. Let me quote Wikipedia at you:
"Tonal languages are different from pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others."
Just like messing up stress accent in English, you can get away with messing up pitch accent in Japanese and be understood nevertheless.
Only reason japanese is currently difficult for me is the listening. They speak so DANG fast!
Something I think this video didn't mention is precisely that: Japanese is LITERALLY the fastest spoken language in the entire world, with Spanish being 2nd, and we all know how blazing fast Spanish is. To make matters worse, there are an ocean of accents and dialects that when you compare it to English ones, they seem like completely different languages.
Perfect timing, started learning japanese a few weeks ago and love otters!
I tried to learn Japanese in the past. I'm not learning it now because of other priorities I currently have. However, I still remember my biggest struggles when learning the language which are:
_Writing System. Especially Kanji because Hiragana and Katakana are just different but around a week, you can get used to them.
_The honorifics: many different words for one simple word in other languages and when to use them is the biggest struggle.
_Vocabulary: you don't have many loanwords to rely on. So, learning new vocabulary will take much longer to remember.
_Word order: this isn't that difficult. You just have to get used to it. However being used to SVO makes learning SOV harder at the beginning.
Pronunciation is the easiest part for me, as a native Spanish speaker. Apart from a few exceptions with the consonants, reading japanese in romaji is a cake-walk. Singing in Japanese is so easy when the lyrics are written in romaji
you're 100% not pronouncing correctly tho it's really hard
@@SethRoganSeth apparently, when it comes to pronunciation there is no other way out but to apply what you can basically apply to every single language: theatre techniques or basically diction exercises. Explore that section of the culture as well! :D
As a non-english speaker, I basically got fed up of how I pronounced "r" in my pseudo-american bakan, eastern european accent I tried to encapsulate in my youth, so I basically switched out entirely to an UK English accent. So I basically learned the English Phonetic alphabet and followed a few BBC RP pronounciation lectures from youtube. Prolonging the vowels, carefully listening, replicating the sounds and even occasionally recording myself. Then I proceeded to "train my tongue" with tongue twisters to find out what sounds scarr me if I used them together.
I remember I had issues pronouncing "th" and combining two or three words ending with "th". Pronouncing the "L" and "R"... gosh I cannot remember how many times I rehearsed "red lorries, yellow lorries" and the "Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers, Peter Piper a pack of picked peppers picked". The goal was to strain my tongue until it got used to it.
Years later, one of my professors at uni asked me if I had ever been to the UK or anywhere else abroad. "Uhm, no, I was just too fond of learning the phonetics of the tongue and I immersed myself in it lol." Of course, I am nowhere close to someone who had been to an actual Theatre college in UK, I had met someone later on that tore me apart with his college-professed Queen's English.
@@Kestrel0907 he's saying it's the "easiest part' which is definitely not the case
@@SethRoganSeth i can agree; maybe easier to express yourself rather and it works in most cases as it is monotonous due to its syllable structures. Then you also need to know how the pitch lands as it could mean a different word. It is nowhere near Chinese-like, but you have exceptions such as "hashi" which means either "bridge" or "chopsticks" depending on how you place the tone/pitch. Slight imperfections will also exist as you can not 100% emulate a language if it's not your native tongue.
Me who sings Pepoyo songs using Japanese-written off vocals that I can still understand:
I'd kill for more long-form content from you! it's amazing
I really love how you broke down the method for learning "pure" vowels as an English speaker. I've never seen it done that way, and it really clicked for me
As a German speaker, I wasn't even aware that pure vowels were a problem to English speakers. It's just so natural to me that pure vowels are the "base" of the language. Like, you just assume that somebody learns pure vowels before they learn diphthongs.
Some corrections (others have pointed some of these):
1. Pronunciation is simple... If you disregard pitch accent
2. Japanese isnt an SOV language, this is a myth. It simply requires the verb to be at the end bc it is a head-last language (the head of the sentence is the verb, so it must be last). It's just more common that objects come after subjects.
1. Pitch accent makes it harder, but tbh it is still simple, even if it feels unnatural at first.
2. Japanese is a SOV language by definition, since SOV just describes the default anyways. In your sense German would'nt be SVO either, since word order can change, but the classification just kinda looks at the "most standard sentence structure", even if Japanese basically has free word order.
Pitch accent will barely, if ever, get in the way of communication, even if you completely blow it. So it may be an obstacle to perfecting your pronunciation, but not to learning and successfully using the language. Getting vowels right (including length) is a million times more important.
@@wolf7husky885 german isn't svo because it's SOV with a V2 function, and it is always described as such
11:11 the way he butchered the pronounciating of わからなかった is proof why Japanese pronunciation isn't as easy as he make it out to be
@@niwa_s As someone who have worked with Japanese people, I agree. I have had way more misunderstandings by having saying the wrong vowel length or omitting the glotal stop, than saying the wrong pitch accent.
I followed you because of the cute otter. But great content throughout in the video.
Same.
Funny, because Japanese speakers itself say that Japanese is the hardest language in the world, like me as a Pole hear a lot from polish people, like for eg. my mom that Polish is the hardest language in the world/second hardest language in the world after Chinese/one of the most difficult language in the world.
Title says "easy", not "easIEST".
@@farkasmactavish yea, but how does that relate to the comment?
@@rya12i Because bro is trying to refute what the video says by saying Japanese isn't easy. Are you illiterate? You can't be, since you typed a comment.
Everyone thinks their language is the hardest.
@@AristizabalixGrimm I think we can all agree that German is the silliest, though.
Why did you discuss the verb morphology in the syntax section?
Also I would argue that there are actually more irregular verbs than just 4, since there are a fair number of verbs that "meet the requirements" to be conjugated as ichidan verbs yet are conjugated regularly, like 走る which without hearing it conjugated before one would assume to conjugate it as 走ます .
First, it's a godan verb and conjugated regularly according exactly to the conjugation rules of godan verbs. Just because you can't tell at a glance which class of verb it is doesn't mean it isn't a regular verb.
Second, you actually can tell that it can't be an ichidan verb since (1) the "i" sound (し) is part of the kanji reading and not in the okurigana, and (2) the kanji reading is more than one sound. If (1) and (2) are true at the same time, it's not an ichidan verb. There do exist some very rare exceptions such as 出来る (which in a way still follows the rule, and it's ateji), 真似る (derived from a noun), 巫山戯る (rare ateji), 洒落る (derived from a noun which itself is ateji)
I would say there are only 2 irregular verbs, 2 exceptions (いく→いって／ある→ない) and the little change with the 5 honorific verbs when going from dictionary form to formal form (ござる→ございます), and that's it.
However, what you are talking about is not about irregularities but actually identifying when and -eる and -iる ending verb is an ichidan verb or godan verb. @ketchup901 already explained the basic rules, but that's actually a little bit trickier. I once made a document for my students about the rules and few exceptions for identifying ichidan and godan verbs ending in -eる and -iる, I researched the verbs in jisho.org _con el mayor cuidado posible_ (don't know how to say this in English), and I think it resulted quite accurate. I will write them in another comment, but they are in my native Spanish.
NOTAS:
A) No existen verbos terminados en -ぢる ni en -ぺる.
B) Cuando un verbo es derivado de otro ya existente, pertenece al mismo grupo de su originador.
Ejemplos: 言い切る(decirlo todo) y 裏切る (traicionar) son del grupo 1 porque son derivados de 切る(cortar), que también es del grupo 1.
Grupo 1 (Godan) / 一グループの動詞（五段 動詞）
REGLAS GENERALES PARA IDENTIFICAR VERBOS TERMINADOS EN -iRU y -eRU:
1) Si después del kanji de un verbo en su forma diccionario sigue de inmediato el る como okurigana, es un verbo del grupo 1.
Ejemplos: 入る (entrar)、帰る (regresar)、切る (cortar)、知る (conocer)、走る (correr)、
減る (reducirse)、茶目る (jugar una broma, hacer una travesura)、愚痴る (quejarse, refunfuñar), etc.
2) Si un verbo está escrito en katakana parcialmente, es un verbo del grupo 1.
Ejemplos: ウィキる (buscar/leer en Wikipedia)、ジェラシる (estar celoso)、プロってる (ser tan bueno en algo como un profesional, ser un “pro” en algo), etc.
Curiosidades útiles:
A) Todos los verbos terminados en -ピる son del grupo 1 (sigue la regla 2).
Ejemplos: リピる (repetir)、タピる (tomar té de tapioca)、 etc.
B) Todos los verbos terminados en -ニる del grupo 1 se escriben por fuerza en katakana (siguen la regla 2).
Ejemplos: デニる (comer en Denny’s)、ビニる (ir a un コンビニ), etc.
C) Sólo ラリる (“estar drogado, andar disperso”) es el único verbo del grupo 1 terminado en -りる (va acorde con la regla 2).
Algunos verbos comunes del grupo 1 que son excepciones a estas reglas:
臥せる Estar en cama
混じる Mezclarse (con)
交じる Asociarse con
寝そべる Tumbarse, echarse (relajado y de lado)
しくじる Fracasar, meter la pata, cometer una torpeza
びびる Ponerse nervioso, estar asustadísimo.
Grupo 2 (Ichidan) / ニグループの動詞（一段 動詞）
REGLAS GENERALES PARA IDENTIFICAR VERBOS TERMINADOS EN -iRU y -eRU:
3) Si entre el kanji de un verbo y la terminación る hay uno o más hiragana actuando como okurigana, es un verbo del grupo 2.
Ejemplos: 起きる (levantarse)、開ける (abrir)、教える (enseñar)、食べる(comer), etc.
4) Si un verbo está escrito en su totalidad en hiragana, es un verbo del grupo 2.
Ejemplos: だらける (aperezarse, volverse flojo)、ずっこける (caerse de, quedar como tonto), etc.
5) Todos los verbos terminados en -れる, -ぜる y -でる son automáticamente del grupo 2, independientemente de si siguen o no las reglas anteriores.
Ejemplos: 混ぜる (mezclar)、忘れる (olvidar)、入れる (meter, echar)、撫でる (acariciar, frotar algo suavemente)、照れる (darle pena o vergüenza a uno por un elogio o parecido)、バレる (ser descubierto, ser atrapado en el acto)、出る (salir, partir, aparecerse, participar), etc.
Curiosidades útiles:
D) Todos los verbos terminados en -りる son del grupo 2 (siguen las reglas 3 ó 4), excepto ラリる, que al estar escrito en katakana, pertenece al grupo 1 (va acorde con la regla 2).
Ejemplos: 借りる (pedir prestado o en alquiler)、降りる (bajarse de)、足りる (bastar), etc.
E) Ninguno de los verbos terminados en -にる del grupo 2 tiene más hiragana entre su kanji y la terminación る (constituyen una excepción a las reglas 1, 3 y 4, ver en la siguiente sección cuáles son).
Verbos del grupo 2 que son excepciones a estas reglas:
居る Estar, haber, tener (cosas móviles), quedarse en
射る Disparar una flecha, dardo o parecido
得る Obtener, conseguir, adquirir, ganar, poder
着る Vestirse (de arriba abajo)
出来る Poder hacer
巫山戯る Bromear, burlarse, tomarle el pelo a uno
似る Parecerse, asemejarse [Curiosidad E]
煮る Cocer, guisar, hervir [Curiosidad E]
寝る Acostarse, irse a la cama
真似る Imitar, copiar, remedar, parodiar, copiar
経る Pasar, transcurrir, experimentar
見る Ver, mirar
観る Mirar, observar, examinar
バテる Estar terriblemente exhausto [Coloquial, se puede escribir en hiragana]
モテる Ser popular o tener éxito con el sexo opuesto
イケてる Ser cool, chulo, bien parecido, tener estilo [Jerga]
湿気る Humedecerse *Este es el único verbo que es tanto del grupo 1 como del grupo 2 indistintamente y como así lo desee el que lo use.
new art style :3
5:14 dzu sound is actually rare not so many japanese words use this sound most words are actually easy to pronounce
and ふ yes it's like h ~ f
8:31 you forgot example on reflexive
That's because the reflexive pronoun 自分 "Jibun" is an entirely different word that would replace 私 watashi, and his point was that 私 does not change in different contexts, only the grammatical particle afterwards changes.
dzu is an exceptionally common sound in jaapnese! zu and dzu are interchangeable and japanese speakers often say dzu instead of zu
You summarized it so well!
As a native Spanish speaker, I didn't struggled with the pronunciation; the syntactic though 😢.
I struggled a lot to translate and understand japanese. It became easier when I saw a guy translating japanese backwards and it worked so well for me!
(Pd.I love your videos 🤍)
May I ask for that video sounds very helpful. Ty!!
Honestly, this whole video 'cept phono and writing parts, is pretty much applicable to all languages and language learning experiences.
The only hard part about other languages is their differentiating semantics and pragmatics with implied differentiating sociohistorical context of their speaker base. And the cure is immersion. Speak with the lads, consume their media. Take'll some time 'till your brain'll adapts obviously, but that's the thing, it's only a matter of time
I'd also argue that if a language contains more irregularities in grammar, that would be difficult, as you not only have to memorize a pattern, but also individual exceptions. During my Speech Development class, we learned that there were some studies that suggested that languages with less exceptions and irregularities could be learned quicker by babies
@@TheLingOtter , yet, again, just quicker! Irregularities are like infections within an organism; and letting them get you infected, putting that initial guard down, is what makes them easier to deal with I'd argue. After that, your immune system will be dealing with them naturally (by immune system I mean one's communication with other speakers, which habits begin to work in mutually intelligible tandem); be it ignoring them and then occasionally letting expand on "regular vocab" too, or deleting them fully, usually the action is basically a rollercoaster between the two extremes
@@TheLingOtter but this ignores the fact that , unlike babies, adults are capable of pattern recognition
most irregularities in english are consistent with certain patterns which can be learned in large swathes, and the same is true of romance languages and such too
As a Spanish speaker learning Japanese and having quite a good understanding of the difficulty of my language, the grammar aspect of Japanese is something that you can learn without any problem, the real issue for me is studying all the vocabulary which sometimes is so discouragin because you know how to gramatically form a sentence but you can´t form it since you don´t know how to say the words (I've learned 3 languages without including spanish and for now is the only language in which I found myself in this situation).
I have quite experience with learning japanese, the most difficult things ive encountered are homophones and just knowing how things are said, and easy examle could be "I am thirsty" in japanese is "のどが渇いた" wich litteraly translates to "throat got dry" I know that it may see easy to remember this but think in the future when you wanted to make a complex scentence that you will have to know how a lot of actions that are not said "litteraly" or maybe you dont know wich words pair with the action you are trying to describe, if any advanced learner has felt this sensation please let me know
Great vid ^^ I haven't studied Japanese in 5 years, but I still find that I can speak it with my co-workers because of the easy agglutination. I'm now living in Korea, and studying the language, which has made me appreciate how simple Japanese pronunciation is.
You did not mention the pitch accent, which is very different to English dynamic stress. And you did not touch much on the difference between long and short vowels, and long and short consonants.
English has pitch accent too, you just never knew it as a native speaker.
Think of the many different meanings of ‘you good’ depending on the pitch accent.
@@shakenbacon-vm4eu That is not pitch accent in this sense of the word.
English uses pitch syntactically and it varies weight on sentences and subtext , but not lexically, in Japanese pitch patterns on words change meaning to them.
The closest you have in English is words where the stress is placed differently.
I should know I speak Swedish a Germanic language with both stress and pitch accent. That is the pitch on the stressed syllables defines the melody for the rest of the word. :)
English has Stress Accent, not Dynamic Stress.
All of you are still wrong. English has a pitch accent, it’s just native English speakers refuse to believe we have one.
We describe it as ‘intonation,’ which is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression. Different regional and cultural accents in the US (yes, every single English speaker in the US has an accent, especially YOU), have different pitch ranges and meanings. Black Americans use a much wider range of pitch than white Americans. Just think of how the meaning of the phrase ‘you good’ changes depending on the pitch you use for the phrase. Genders in English (just like Japanese) use different pitches, although Japanese exaggerates it much more than English. And you can tell if a sentence in English is a question based on….you guessed it….the pitch (or intonation).
Stop using basic RUclips creators to inform yourself on linguistics.
@@shakenbacon-vm4eu Pitch accent is not the same as intonation. Lexical pitch accent exist in word level and can distinguish phonemic minimal pairs like English vowels and consonants Ike the phonemic lexical stress accent in English.
Which is different from stress in phrase level.
My primary native language Swedish has pitch accent and because of that les use of the syntactic use of pitch as in English.
Pitch accent works in lexical level on individual words. Not phrase or sentence level.
English does not have phonemic pitch.
Touch some grass will you, no single minimal pair exist that distinguish words on pitch in English as English has a stress accent and phonemic STRESS.
In Swedish we have technically both stress and pitch accent. The stressed syllable can get different tones that distinguishes minimal pairs, the pitch on the stressed syllable will determine the pitch for the rest of the word . Typically not written with accents but to demonstrate.
Ánden means the duck but ânden means the spirit. All based in the pitch of the first and stressed syllable. Búren means the cage and bûren means “was carried” .
These in lexical levels, not in phrase syntactical level.
In Japanese the pitch patterns will lexically distinguish words like chopsticks or bridge.
Go read up on what lexical pitch accent means. I have not learnt in you tube btw.
Cause your entire comment is one bag of misunderstanding.
the hardest part of learning japanese for me has been memorizing kanji and learning all of the particles and social aspects of what words to use and when
6:06 Japanese CAN end with all the voiceless consonant except "t" such as です with final "s" where "u" is silent although almost all Japanese words end with vowel or "n".
Most of these apply for Turkish as well. Also, it uses the Latin alphabet with a couple new letters added, so it might be even easier.
imo its pretty annoying when people go "omg i hate kanji i wish it didnt exist!" or any kind of kanji hating advocate cuz as soon as you remove kanji alot of text becomes harder to read even if you added spaces. one time i took a mock JPLT5 test and since it didnt have kanji i struggled with trying to understand what alot of the text meant (i got 58/100)
Very nice explanation! Im learning Japanese 4 years now, and i can say, honorifics (敬語) is by far the hardest part for me. With Kanji, you can still just remember it by seeing it around, and also PC will automatically write it for you, BUT with the Keigo, you just have to know and understand whole new set of vocab, rules, and have a great social awareness.
When people say Kanji are so complicated I just tell them it's like when they first got to know the % sign, they know it's read as "percent" it means per 100 or "per cent (hundred)" so you have the meaning in there and in Japanese you just have to do that about 12000 times
13:35 Japanese tricks with the word "if" kind of remind me English first/second/third Conditionals
Couldn’t help but notice you said “a, e, i, o, u” but wrote “a, i, u, e, o” here 6:46
There is this thing called conditionals in English that can be very challenging for learners.
That's where we get sentences that start with "if I will go..." from.
I still haven't cracked conditionals in french after a couple years of learning it...
I'm very slowly learning Japanese, and my favorite thing is definetely all the particles that let you be quite lenient with things like word order and some conjugation/declination.
The hardest thing is probably kanji, but I have a weakness for writing systems, so while it's a lot (and I barely know any), I find it somewhat fun to learn them.
I'm not overly fond of the way words can sound completely different. I actually don't have a good example (my Japanese is bad!), but I'm not a fan of learning a word, and then barely recognizing it in a sentence, due to it only being the stem, and then like 4 or more other syllables tagged on.
To be fair, it's very consistent, and probably something you get used to rather quickly, but I'm not quite there, yet. It's usually not too bad when the stem consists of multiple syllables, but when you have to recognize the no from nomu in something like nomimashita, it can be difficult to catch, both in spoken and in written Japanese, at least for me.
Your mascot on the thumbnail is SOOOO cute
i love ur channel so much !!!!!!!!!!
This is a great video! Thanks for explaining so clearly and making it fun with good music and animations
Bit of a correction. The English /dd/ is not an alveolar tap/flap. It might sound vaguely similar, but for an alveolar tap you need to be pushing air through the gap between your alveolar ridge and the tip of your tongue, causing your tongue to curve downwards and then swing back upwards hitting the alveolar ridge, exactly like it happens during trills, the difference being that it only happens a single time.
I don't want to be rude but I just wanna bring up that single-contact trills are very much a common occurrence and I don't think it's fair to necessarily call them taps
yes the english does use the same phonological symbol [ɾ] but yes it does actually sound different like you mentioned, that is because it is the symbol for alveolar tap/flaps, and the sound in english is actually a flap, but not a tap like you'd see in many other languages like spanish
however spanish is a bit of different case because what you said is very accurate to it actually despite it having both a supposed "tap" /ɾ/ and trill /r/, but just keep in mind the /r/ in all other languages is not always like that, for spanish some linguists have actually argued that it's not really two separate phonemes, but the which people say is the one that is always a trill, may just be an instance of that r being geminated (doubled, pronounced for a longer period, it is actually seemingly very rare in spanish apart from this but it miight happen in the word "connotación"), so if rr is just a long version, then r might just be called a single-contact trill
I love your analysis. You have a lot of excellent points that I hadn't considered and I appreciate the take. That said, one thing that I don't think really makes any sense is not including reading/writing as a criteria for your overall rating. I say this because writing, and especially reading, is a huge part of learning a language, and I feel that you can't really get anywhere near fluency without it. There are so many plateaus that I overcame by reading something and putting the pieces together. I could definitely be wrong as a general statement. I'm not a linguist. In my experience so far though (about a year total of Japanese), the more kanji I acquire, the easier it is to understand the language as a whole.
That's my two cents. I hope it's well-received.
As a Spanish speaker passively learning Japanese via duolingo, I feel so identified with the first section, I love that Japanese has a consistent vocals sounds like Spanish and not a bunch of exceptions like English.
The only obstacle in my way to learn Japanese is that duolingo Japanese course is only in English XD so double translations are on the table
Singers learn pure vowels for classical voice! The times we don’t use them are for songs that are in particular genres or non-foreign language. That’s also why singers that are non-English sound almost perfect in pronunciation due to the same classical voice training.
I love math, so I also love grammar. Japanese Grammar is super consistent and I'm loving that. Pronunciation is something I'm struggling with. I'm self teaching and haven't really started emersion, so I'm sure that will help, but I'm trying really hard not to build bad habits. I'm also not super fast at reading hira/kata yet. Kanji is kind of fun with wanikani, at least at the early levels I'm at.
Written Japanese is so difficult, they consistently reference its difficulty as a relatable coming of age experience all throughout Japanese media.
As an spanish speaker, I got absolutely surprised and excited when I learned that Japanese sounded exactly like Spanish when pronouncing it, instead of saying NIppon like english is pronounced, I would naturally think about it as nipPON
These videos about Japanese never have Japanese in them.
Just people pretending to know it.
This was an awesome video. I just started learning bits and pieces over the last month because traveling to Japan for 3 weeks in October. I’ve honestly spent a lot of time spamming GPT with questions about language structure and conjugation to at least develop a formula in my head - it’s really fun. What I could really use is a massive dictionary. I don’t really have a great source to learn grammar
PLEASE for the love of god don't use chat gpt, it gets so many things wrong without you noticing. Learn the structure/conjugation/vocab/grammar from a textbook, or from reading in japanese.
The trick I always used for the Japanese R was to try and move it as far as I can to the front of my mouth. The English R almost starts in the back of the throat so moving it forward was a quit way for me to soften it up without really thinking about it
learning basic grammar and pronunciation took like a week, for me the hardest part is by far the writing and the sheer amount of vocabulary
Love how people say spoken Japanese is easy when most of the time they speak 日本語上手 type of Japanese
It's funny, I've spent most of my time learning Japanese with input/immersion. Because of this, I actually find written Japanese easier to understand than spoken Japanese sometimes.
I wouldn't lie to someone and say kanji are outright easy, but, its not as hard as people make it out to be. For a few reasons based on personal experience:
1. Yes kanji have multiple readings. There's no way around this. But once you get used to it, it makes a _certain_ amount of sense. Take 語 for example. In the verb 語る its read as かた. But when its in a noun it is read ご in every example that comes to mind (日本語、英語、語彙、言語、語学). 生 can be read like 20 different ways, 生意気、生きる、一生、性格、生まれる. But this is less of a problem than you'd think because...
2. I never learned kanji with their readings and I don't suggest you do this. Learn vocabulary and eventually this meta-skill of guessing the right reading in new words comes with immersion. If you learn words, rather than kanji, then reading is easier because a given _vocabulary word_ only has one reading (with exceedingly rare exceptions). In my experience learning kanji with multiple readings is the wrong approach and doesn't really convey how the language is used.
3. Kanji by themselves convey a lot of meaning. Even if you don't know the word, or guess the reading incorrectly, if you know what the kanji means you can get some meaning from an otherwise unfamiliar word. Recently I read 盗撮 which registered in my brain as (stealthy photography). And sure enough, that's exactly what it means. In fact I don't know what an English equivalent would be.
So really, kanji convey a lot of semantic meaning by themselves. Yes the reading changes, but this can easily be solved by learning _vocabulary_ instead of isolated kanji. You also develop a meta-skill for predicting the reading if you immerse and get enough input. The intuition will come.
10:51
This is wrong. WO does not indicate the subject. Also Japanese usually omits the subject and uses context to let the listener assume who or what is carrying out the action.
i dont think most japanese dialects differentiate between /z/ and /dz/ so for the phonology part you dont really have to worry about those
Thank you for the great video and explanation :D
I guess I can call myself lucky to speak Swiss German natively. We have pretty much all the sounds already in our language since it's a mix of German, French and Italian (plus something unique).
For those who are discouraged by kanji, in my opinion, don't learn kanji, learn vocabulary (at least at first). I've been practicing this since I started 2+ years ago and it has saved me a lot of greif. What I would study about kanji is the meaning behind each character and it's stroke order. Once you've drawn N5 and N4 kanji a few thousand times, you'll sort of be able to look at a new kanji and automatically know how to write it. By learning vocab you passively learn character readings too. At one point, if you want to get intimate with the language, you'll have to learn learn kanji just like every Japanese person but if your goal is reading manga or whatever, just learning vocabulary will get you extraordinarily far.
P.s. Don't be afraid of doing a million dictionary lookups while reading. People don't like to admit it, but it's part of the learning process and there's no shame in doing it.
13:58
I'm a native Spanish speaker and we also do this with the you pronoun, we use "tú" and "usted", being usted the formal "you".
And listening to your worries about when exactly use one of the forms... it happens to me as well as I'm talking to a person where I'm not sure how is my status with him or her. In fact it happened to me today... with my aunt
Ich liebe wie du allles Schwierige versuchst mit Deutsch zu erklären, dass erhöht mein Selbstwertgefühl voll.
Your channel is amazing! 😊
Written Japanese is definitely the hardest. As an English speaker learning Japanese for the first time, I see a bunch of Japanese characters smushed together with the only spaces after a comma or period.
Amazing video (as always)! Keep up the great work!
As a Polish person I see pronunciation as an absolute win
The high vowels in english are actually pronounced as slight diphthongs, /i/ as [ij] and /u/ as [uw]
source: ruclips.net/video/gtnlGH055TA/видео.htmlsi=KmLZA_nWFSLh5qKJ&t=421
I fricking love this videos :3
It’s difficult once you get to native speaking in terms of grammar for me. What you learn on websites or in texts books is not how native speakers talk, as they often drop particles and use the dictionary form of verbs instead of the “masu” form, which means those conjugation rules you learn in textbooks are useless if you’re not used to hearing dictionary form used. That sort of comes down to you memorizing a lot of vocabulary so that you can pick apart what you do understand and go from there, but I definitely struggle most with semantics and grammar because I learn in a classroom setting, which means honorifics and polite form are used for communication with teachers, but casual form is used with fellow students. It gets hard to keep up with it all 😢
I agree with you lol
Also, I like the otter art featured ! Makes the video more fun to watch.
Sadly, I learned the character meanings through Kirby Volcaloid MVs and no proper tutor. I really need Duolingo.
Generally reading and writing are the hardest parts. With writing being the hardest of the two.
I'm incredibly grateful that I found a native speaking tutor that brings me joy to learn with.
Not only does she give me the nuance understanding of how to engage with the language, but she also as someone living in japan with her wife allows me to explore the queer perspective of learning and living in the culture and engaging with the culture from an LGBT perspective
my favorite thing is learning new words because we always get a laugh out of it
when she translates back what I said and how it was interpreted
hilarity ensues
I was not expecting this to be so detailed
After studying japanese for a year, the parts I struggle with the most are kanji and the particles. I am surprised you barely mentioned them. There's a couple I still don't know how to use.
10:04 I just want to say that ASL is (taught as) an OSV language
A and E sounds are in English too, as in father and feather. They are a little shorter and more abrupt in Japanese and Spanish though.
The calligraphy in the background is sooooo good. But there’s too much water, that’s why the strokes are so bumpy!! 墨をいっぱい入れて、そこから少しずつ水入れたった you’ll get a perfect consistency that doesn’t bleed but isn’t TOO thick
OMG, I've seen you on tiktok so much! RUclips recommended this video! (I've been studying Japanese for about a year now.) SO STOKED TO KNOW YOU HAVE A RUclips! EASY SUB!
For me the hardest part of self-studying Japanese is that I cannot find a proper textbook for beginners. I already own a couple dozens of them, and the only one I could complete is "I'm Learning Japanese!" for kids. (Unfortunately, they never wrote a second volume.) All the rest never give enough reading material and examples of use for a flood of new words to memorize, practically without context. Corporate words and greetings that every textbook starts with are never included into any cohesive story that can be read and memorized and developed by adding new words little by little. I always could find such materials for other languages, but not for Japanese. I already know hundreds of "standard" beginner words but I still cannot read any children books!
2:01 we have those sounds in Minnesota 😅 specifically each of them long, though. It’s harder to pronounce them short
Edit: specifically /aː/ /o̞ː/ /eː/ (last one’s pretty rare but you do hear it)
i've been thinking of learning japanese just out of spite and to do my part in translating media unreleased outside of Japan, and this video is only encouraging me
edit: i forgot about kanji.
3:38 The problem with the tip is exactly that, it's not rhotic. How one percieves a sound affects its reproducibility. A famous example is arabs speaking french. Arabic has two letters "ra" which is more of the spanish "r", and "ghain" which produces the french "r", but when an arabic speaker speaks french, they don't pronounce the french "r", even though it's part of their phonology, because "it's not r, it's gh, and in french you need an r sound"...
Yeeeeah as someone who wants to read japanese aloud kanji is extremely difficult. Funnily enough though kanji is actually really useful in identifying the meaning of a sentence directly into English without actually knowing how to pronounce it.
While it's not always the case you can piece words together using kanji logically and it's actually something I really enjoy about Japanese.
really enjoyed this video, thank you for the great intro to the language! I was just looking for an intro / about, and there are so many discussion that are so full of big opinions , really appreciated how practical and straightforward this approach was. thanks!
Thank you for this. Kanji is hard and Japanese people know it. But the 4 different "ifs" are hard and Japanese people don't seem to see that. To them asking when to use which "if" might as well be like asking when to use past vs future tense, so obvious that it's actually hard to explain in words.