母国語というのはなんとなくで話されているものだからこそ、体系的に学習することは大事である。 私は日本語のネイティブだが、あなたの動画は普段用いている言語を理論的に解説しており、日本語ネイティブからみても素晴らしいものですね👏 It is important to learn a language systematically because a mother tongue is something that is spoken somewhat. I am a native Japanese speaker, and your video is a great theoretical explanation of the language I usually use, even from a native Japanese speaker's point of view 👏
I feel like the tricky part isn’t remembering to put the verb at the end of the sentence. That’s a consistent rule, which makes it easy to remember. The real tricky part is knowing what to do with everything in the middle of the sentence.
100%. Speaking Japanese at a beginner or intermediate level is like doing a flawless jump off of a diving board, desperately flailing around in the air for a bit, but then still somehow managing to land on your feet most of the time.
A japanese sentence can only end with either a verb, adjective or noun, as for the order of the sentence, it does not matter so long as the particles are correct.
I was learning German for a couple of months and I remember thinking at times that it was going to take me longer than I thought in order to get a good grasp of it. I decided to jump into Japanese for a couple of months too but when I went back to reading German it felt like a breeze after going through Japanese. The progress that I had made in German was so much more compared to what had achieved in Japanese in the same amount of time. It’s not so much that it’s hard, but that it is so extremely different from western languages. With Germanic and Latin languages there’s a huge overlap of vocabulary and concepts that help a ton when learning a new language. With Japanese, Arabic, or Korean you have to reprogram the way you think in order to learn them properly.
Exactly. Like if you take a generic sentence like, 「私は猫が好きです」from Japanese and translate it into English, you'll most likely come up with a sentence like "I like cats". But that's not actually what this sentence means at all. Not even close. In reality, this sentence translates more accurately to something like "As for me, cats are likeable" with cats actually being the subject of sentence, not you. Japanese is my absolute favorite language because of ways you have to change your thinking like this, but as a English native, it can be a struggle.
I am a native Korean speaker. Even after studying English for over ten years, Koreans struggle to communicate in English. Because the English and Korean languages are so dissimilar. Japanese, on the other hand, is the closest language to Korean, so even children in Korea can quickly learn it.
@@NightfallStation I don't know where you did read it, but in 「私は猫が好きです」, the subject is indeed 私, the verb is 好き and 猫 is the object (of the verb). Infact, japanese is a sov (subject-object-verb) language. It may seem a bit strange maybe because japanese subjects are often omitted in a sentence.
im a native english speaker and i decided to learn Japanese because I have a huge passion for Japanese culture. Learning hiragana + katana, no problem. But when it came to the grammar, I almost gave up 3 times it was so confusing and frustrating. What helped me finally understand it was by looking at sentence after sentence using that grammar structure and I finally saw a pattern and understood. About a year or so later, now I can understand a quite a bit when listening to Japanese. and its SO MUCH FUN. I'm not here to brag or anything, I'm just trying to give someone some hope. Just get over the grammar obstacle, learn about 1000 or so words, immerse immerse immerse and you will enjoy it so much. God bless
@@ibrahimsahin8003 so ive learned maybe almost 200 kanji now, but not actually studied them. The more and more times I saw them, I began to start acquiring them naturally. but right now, I'm not speaking. Im just focusing on listening and reading.
How do I find a community of Japanese learners that isn't full of cartoon fans? So far that's been the biggest obstacle for me, any help is appreciated.
As someone who has studied 450+ hours of Japanese, although grammar is different, you get used to it. Some funny literal examples of Japanese language. 私は魚と肉が大好きです。 Watashi wa sakana to niku ga dai suki desu. me fish and meat big like is. I really like fish and meat. Youll notice the particles 'wa, to, and ga' used in this sentence. Also, when translated without changing word order, it really does look strange! Some more funny things 一月, 二月, 三月, 四月, 五月 ect 1 moon, 2 moon, 3 moon, 5 moon... Can you guess the meaning? January, Febuary, March, April, May! So straightforward and easy to remember... though I do prefer the deeper mythos behind the month names in European languages. And finally some fun words; 積ん読 Tsundoku - buying books, and not reading them The famous 口寂しい Kuchisabishii - Eating out of boredom instead of hunger And the chillingly deep 物の哀れ Mono no Aware - "appreciating the bittersweet impermanence of something’s fleeting beauty since nothing lasts forever" (not my words.)
I’ve been learning Japanese for 8 years and I still learn something new about the language everyday, be it a new slang word or a fixed phrase or a new kanji. I feel like I’ll never really be done learning Japanese, but that’s also kind of the beauty of it.
The same goes for native languages too. The most comprehensive dictionary of my native language has 300k words. There's no way I can learn them all in my lifetime.
I am Japanese and I have one thing to say to the people watching this video. That is that most grammar is ignored in everyday Japanese conversation. When talking with friends, etc., Japanese people omit the subject (this is true even if it is not in everyday conversation) or put verbs in places other than at the end. (Various other grammatical rules are also ignored.) Therefore, Japanese language learners should not be overawed and should study hard with an easy mind. We are rooting for you!
As someone who has studied this language off and on since high school, I finally feel like I’ve reached a point where I can finally partake in it and understand it in games and RUclips videos. It really is an insane experience after all this time! The hardest part for me has always been the grammar. There are a ton of ambiguous grammar words in Japanese which can have different meanings depending on where it is in a sentence, I recommend watching RUclips videos of people playing games in Japanese and translating them as they go. Fantastic content for learning!
Out of curiosity, how long have you been studying Japanese? I've been waiting for the day I could play games in Japanese for so long now. Whenever I try to, I end up being blown away by how many words I still don't know
@@dethswurl117 About ten years now. I’d recommend watching some of the channels I mentioned to get you started. Since everything gets explained to you meticulously, there’s no feeling of being overwhelmed. Eventually you’ll just pick up on the patterns. The trick really is to figure out a word and then move on to the next word. If a word is super important it will turn up again eventually.
@@Maymaysmaymays Thanks man, it's reassuring as I'm ~1.5 years in and I keep assuming that I'm doing something wrong. Over time it's becoming more apparent how much of a commitment it is. Just glad it's a fun one lol Already gave game gengo a look and that channel is pure gold, appreciate the recommendation and the tips
Props for including a link to Japanese Calligrapher Takumi! I think even if people aren't learning Japanese, a lot of his videos are just really neat (and relaxing) to watch, and for those who are learning, they're a great way to inspire you to practice your kanji more! I also appreciate that you mentioned that English actually has two different alphabets too (uppercase and lowercase). Lots of people seem to get intimidated by "Japanese has two different phonetic alphabets!" without even realizing that English actually has two different alphabets that everyone has to learn too, we just sorta sweep that all under the rug because we don't usually think about it that way. A bit of a clarification (so people don't get unnecessarily intimidated): The reason that Japanese has 188 particles is actually because the vast majority of those particles actually serve the same functions that we use prepositions for in English (and English has somewhere around 150 prepositions, depending on how you count, plus a number of multi-word phrases that people often use that have similar functions, so when you tally it all up there's really not that much of a difference between English and Japanese in this respect). My personal opinion: Some aspects of Japanese are harder than many other languages to learn, but a lot of aspects of Japanese are actually much easier in many ways, and I really think these often don't get enough credit. If you're a fairly logical person, Japanese grammar is very regular and predictable (once you learn the rules, they _always_ apply. "special cases" and "exceptions" are very rare). If you see a word spelled out (in hiragana or katakana) you know exactly how to pronounce it (none of that "which of the 5 possible ways is "ough" being pronounced in _this_ word?" stuff). There are basically 2.5 irregular verbs in the entire language, and the rest all fall into really just two straightforward categories for conjugation rules. You don't have to worry about tedious things like matching gender, plurality, case, or often even verb tense between different parts of the sentence (it's just not an issue), and so on... Yes, there are some parts that are obviously harder than most other languages. Keigo (polite/honorific speech, etc) does make some things more complicated, but to be honest a lot of it actually becomes kinda automatic (in my experience) remarkably quickly once you start using it. Kanji is obviously more complicated than most other writing systems, but if you start really learning and practicing them, you start to pick up a lot of common elements and details to them which end up making them not nearly as complicated or hard to remember as they look on the surface. Many of these aspects really look worse than they are too. I still wouldn't call it an "easy language" by any stretch, and it is going to be harder for English speakers to learn than something much more similar like a romance or germanic language, but it's still nowhere near as bad as most people seem to think, in my opinion, and a lot of it can actually be pretty fun in some ways too.
Japanese was the first language I acquired as a child who grew up in Japan with a Japanese mother. It however never became my primary language as our family moved to the Philippines when I was still around 5. Thankfully, my parents still continues to speak to me in Japanese up to the moment, so it never left my life. However, without any formal education, I still talk like a child. I struggle with kanji as well. Working for a Japanese company has helped develop my skills (I still have tons of vocabulary to learn though) and I can carry a Japanese conversation without trouble. However, my pitch is certainly off which screams "I am a gaijin" whenever I talk to native Japanese speakers
Just started learning Japanese today. I started out by just writing the entire hiragana script in a table. I find the physical writing something deepens your memory of it. Then I spent hours just studying them and what they sound like. I think a good place to start is just to feel comfortable with a script, and to separate あ from what I would equate it to, "a" and to start to see the character for what it is. I also learned a small amount of vocabulary, chief among them being able to write and say "ton kotsu" correctly because ton kotsu ramen is objectively the best food. I know I have a ridiculously long path ahead of me, but I'm super motivated to learning this language right now, and I look forward to struggling with Kanji, tones, and honorific. Another puzzle to be solved along the way to my goal: to be the first American to learn Japanese without being an anime fan in over 40 years
Listen to the this person, learn the kana, and then start watching cure dolly japanese for scratch videos and then start immersing once you have the basic structure. Don't worry about studying isolated kanji it is a waste of time and you will pick them up as you learn vocab within an actual japanese sentence in context and lastly forget about the tone stuff, it's literally just accents and it differs depending on what area of japan you are from and frankly trying to sound like a native from Tokyo or osaka is the last of your problems.
It's so easy for turkish people when it comes to sentence order and logics like it has so many similarities i don't feel very complicated things as a person that is learing this language currently
The hard part about Japanese for me as an English speaker is learning the vocabulary and Kanji. The grammar in general is actually pretty forgiving and doesn't have a ton of stuff to remember like irregular forms, declensions, conjugations, etc. Once people pick up on the vocabulary, it's not hard to learn to speak the language from there.
Bro, the Conjugations are the Hardest parts, Imo. Cuz unless you know the rules like Godan and Ichidan, you're never gonna be able to conjugate verbs with accuracy cuz they have around 30 ways of conjugation. Whoever says Russian has hard conjugations, hasn't seen Japanese. Like, look at 行く. It has: 行く(iku) 行かない(ikanai) 行った(itta) 行かなかった(ikanakatta) 行って(itte) 行ってなくて(ittenakute) 行こう(ikou) 行け(ike) 行けば(ikeba) 行かなければ(ikanakereba) 行かなきゃ(ならない)(ikanakya(naranai) 行ったり(ittari) 行ける(ikeru) 行けない(ikenai) 行けた(iketa) 行けなかった(ikenakatta) 行けて(ikete) 行けなくて(ikenakute) 行かれる(ikareru) 行かれない(ikarenai) 行かれた(ikareta) 行かれなかった(ikarenakatta) 行かれて(ikarete) 行かれなくて(ikarenakute) 行かせる(ikaseru) 行かせない(ikasenai) 行かせた(ikaseta) 行かせなかった(ikasenakatta) 行かせて(ikasete) 行かせなくて(ikasenakute) 行きたい(ikitai) 行きたくない(ikitakunai) 行きたかった(ikitakatta) 行きたくなかった(ikitakunakatta) 行きた(ikita) 行きたくて(ikitakute) 行きたくなくて(ikitakunakute) 行きたく(ikitaku) 行きたければ(ikitakereba 行きたくなければ(ikitakunakereba) 行きたかったら(ikitakattara) 行きたくなかったら(ikitakunakattara) 行きたさ(ikitasa) Ok, there's way too many. I'm getting tired of typing them out. I only showed you 25% of every conjugation 行く has. So whoever tells you Grammar or Kanji is difficult, I call complete BS on those clowns! Conjugations are by far the hardest.
@Mordraug Yeah, I completely understand that it's consistent. It's just that it's hard to guess some of them if you don't know them beforehand. Like... Tai, and Nakatta are always easy because it's the same but the potential form changes depending on the word. With Hanasu it's Hanaseru, Iku is Ikeru, and so on and so forth. Like... The potential form doesn't have one way to formulate it. There's different forms of them. Unless they're based on the 段 or something?
@Mordraug I feel like the potential form of Ru verbs wasn't only Rareru but I could be confusing some things. I guess I'll learn them with practice. All that's left is the other helper words. Stuff like the causitive form and so on.
I've only been learning Japanese since mid-August but it's slowly progressing. I've pretty much got Hiragana embedded in my brain, working on Katakana now and doing some online lessons.
@@3lmodfzI know two other people that did it the same way, it's not about retaining information since you're not codifying it as "data", with Realkana in a computer (rote memorization), it's more akin to "learning by reflex", it's like brute forcing it into your memory and it takes several times along a few weeks
What do you use? I have been learning Japanese too since last year August but I've recently lost my 50 day streak on duolingo and got sad and didn't want to continue So please tell me what app do ubuse
@@Sylphvine I use the Kana book by Japanese From zero, but they do others which look good. Sometimes I use lingodeer (better than Duolingo) and I signed up for JapanesePod101.
You are really an expert in this field！！ I'm so impressed as a Japanese. Tell you the truth, recently I've found out that Katagana is originally came from Kanji !😅
What really stumps me with Japanese Kanji is that each has multiple possible pronunciation. Yes that happens too in Mandarin, yes I get the vocalization rule, but when do we use Chinese pronunciation (on'yomi) and when do we use the native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi), and sometimes some syllables are dropped when combined with other words, and from which sound do we start writing the trailing hiragana (okurigana)?
10:52 I´m a speaker/learner of French (I), Czech (III) and Japanese (IV) and the estimates pretty much match my experiences^^ I think the differences become smaller when you go beyond the hours in the table. Like, if two people studied French and Japanese for 6,000 hours...the difference would be much smaller than after 600 hours. PS: What´s happening to German? It used to be 600 hours, then it was changed to 750, now your table is saying 900 hours.
For me, the hardest part of Japanese is the lack of mutual intelligibility. Even though the grammar is pretty straight forward once you get it down, almost every word you'll learn in Japanese is going to be a completely new idea to you. I.e. If you're reading a Spanish article somewhere and you see the word "importante" as an English speaker, you're gonna have a fairly good idea on what that word means. In Japanese, this almost never happens :\
@@timbounds7190 yes and no. Yes, there are a ton of english words in japanese. No, they don't have the same meaning in japanese as their english counterpart unless it names something. A great example is "maipeisu" that comes from english "my pace". "maipeisu" means a person that does things in their own rhythm, maybe even ignoring the urgency of external situations. This can make some weird sounding sentences in japanese, like "何だ、このマイペースの男、めんどくさい"meaning "what a maipeisu guy, he's getting on my nerves". And I not even talked about new "english" words that japanese people create, like "skinship", "OL" and "salaryman". english made in japan.
i am from poland and tbh the words aren’t really that similar to english words but it really isnt difficult to learn english, just need to memorise them
This video really helped me to learn how the different writing systems of Japanese work, as well as more information about Japanese that I didn’t know before. At first, learning Japanese seemed near impossible, but I knew it was possible. I just knew I’d have to take it one step at a time. So, thank you for this video. It made it feel less intimidating and more achievable. 😊🇯🇵
As with many languages they such as Arabic and, Chinese, are simply learned best when you are young. German was my 1st language. I came to America and like a sponge learned English BUT i went back to Germany and forgot much of my German BUT i returned here again and learned English ....again, all before the age of 8.
Very difficult is 音読み and 訓読み (On yomi and kun yomi) . Especially if there are more than two. Like for example the Kanji for day is 日. It can be read as にち、じつ、ひ or か. But ひ sometimes turns to び and にち turns to にっ. It’s very confusing.
@Mordraug Yeah you are right. I always learn Kanji in contexts and in words. I don’t just memorize the on yomi and kun yomi , without context. But still it’s not easy.
I've been learning japanese for 7 months now, everyday, i have around 4k mature cards on anki, half of them from a pre-made deck and the other half from a self-made deck, i probably have around 400-500 hours between anki and inmersion, and as long as i can occasionally look up words I can read without big problems, japanese is not a hard language, it just takes time, it can be *really* overwhelming at times but if you take it easy, a few hours a day will get you very far As for kanji, the same way it can make reading difficult, once you know them, it makes it easier, for example, the word 恋人, it's made of the kanji 恋 and 人, love and person respectively, once you know what each kanji mean, guessing the meaning of the word and how it's read becomes much much easier
May I ask what Anki pre made deck you used? I'm trying to find a good N5 Anki deck because I don't have a textbook to work off and I'm mainly learning from RUclips and some language apps
And if you have problem reading, is it because of the Vocabulary or grammar? If its vocabulary, i honestly envy you lol, japanese grammar is in my opinion the hardest thing on japanese, its ridiculously ridiculously difficult. (by that i dont mean basic grammar, i mean the pretty advanced one, that you sadly, need to know in order understand at least a gist of any native for native material)
@@カピバラ可愛いよなぁ difficulties with reading stem from mainly kanji. Since kanji is used so much, particles can be easily spotted but the sheer amount of kanji out there, that's the hardest thing to literacy. The grammar is fairly difficult but in time you get used to it.
If you want to improve Japanese you should start the words like separately, not connecting the letters like we do when we use English. I see most of the foreigners saying the word connecting or leaving a seconds after saying each words which make you sound like a beginner. So, like: While in English people say “what” people go wat. But in Japanese we say wa downward pitch and t in the upward pitch. This is very confusing but I hope you all understand..!
Learning japanese is like learning go, with a few life hack you can master it enough to get help if needed but you could spend 2 lifetimes trying to understand all the subtlety. The most complex and interresting I've tried
So, I’m ten years old and I’m trying to learn some Japanese. When I was seven or eight, I wanted to visit Japan so bad, and now, since it’ll probably be a while before I do actually get to visit. So, I really wanted to learn Japanese. So if you’re wondering, “okay so what,” I know why, I’m telling you this for a reason. I need FREE app recommendations, please, don’t recommend apps that cost money. Arigatō 😊
I lived in Japan 3 1/3 years. I also lived away from the American neighborhood. I learned enough Japanese to survive, including some 漢字 (kanzi). In my experience, there were two difficulties: (1) the writing system because it consists of 漢字, ひらがな (hiragana), and カタカナ (katakana); and some Latin spellings, on occasion; and (2) 敬語 (keigo), the respect language. Mr. Richards has explained in brief 敬語. After a while I added the extralinguistic features (body language, gestures, and the like) so that I would be better understood. As with other languages, I wasn’t learning just the language. I was learning the communication system.
Having the verb at the end of the sentence isn't new to me, since this linguistic feature occurs in my second language. However, once again, it's the Japanese writing system that intimidates me the most.
The CIA has put out a document that classifies languages based on how many intensive weeks it takes an undercover operative to become passable in the language. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I don't think I'm off-base by saying Spanish is level 1 and Japanese is level 5 (the hardest). I have learned both and it took me about 7 years to really get comfortable in Japanese, and only 1.5 to get to a similar level in Spanish. In other words, yes, Japanese is very hard for native English speakers. Much easier for native Korean speakers, though.
@youknowkbbaby There are plug-ins which automatically add furigana to kanji on websites so you know how to read them, that should speed up the process of learning them.
Depends on what you mean by "hard". All languages have something hard about them. Even languages that are said to be easy have some hard parts to them.
Hard as in a complex writing system that requires a minimum of 2000 kanji to read a newspaper. I've lived in Japan for 30 years and can count on one hand the number of foreigners who can read and write at a high school level.
Something you didn't mention is that there is also an informal way of speaking, you don't necessarily use "ます", with a friend you wouldn't use it since they would think their friendship is a bit distant, for example "わかりません" would be "わからない" , it also applies to questions, for example, it doesn't necessarily have to end in "か", it can end in "の", for example "もう食べましたか" would be "もう食べたの", I clarify again, this is for informal language only. 🙃
As a Japanese person, I would like you to first try to convey the words you want to say. If they are Japanese, they will understand what you mean, and the conversation will be fun!
It's been 8 years now since I started learning this language and the most difficult parts are vocabulary and kanji. When speaking, there are a lot of omophones which makes the sentence very very difficult to catch immediately. When reading, kanjis are the hardest part because you need to learn all the basic kanjis which are more than 2000 and at the end, your level will be barely the one of a Japanese high school student. But learning this language makes you feel invincible ahahah. Have fun learning Japanese :)
I have been learning Japanese on Duolingo. I wish I knew a native or fluent speaker to teach me as I struggle with remembering things like the writing systems. Why must Japan the place where things like most video games come from, have one of the most difficult languages to learn? Because I sometimes feel like I will never learn it and sometimes I feel like giving up.
To be honest, beginner level Japanese is not that difficult. You can learn hiragana, katakana, grammar, etc. in a few weeks, but advanced level Japanese is endless. Sometimes people say Japanese is easy, but most of those people only know basic Japanese.
Been studying japanese by myself, 6-7 hours a day, for the past 2 months through the Busuu web site, and İ've found it actually shockingly friendly to learn. İ am now at a level equivalent to B1 and have managed to learn some 600 kanji. Regarding the degree of difficulty of it, like with everything else, İ'd say it all gets down to the level of motivation, focus, and dedication (which is proportional to free time and the way of using it) one is able to consecrate. Naturally familiarity plays a big role, but nevertheless, with enough motivation, concentration and fun (which are all inerrelated mechanically), zero familiarity becomes no problem at all after a couple of weeks, or even less
I am a native English speaker... Kanji has a meaning and a pronunciation part? At times, I'm sure. But, maybe, for me, it seems at times like it is all meaning. LOL! For example: Sand = 砂 = 石 (rock) + 少 (few; small)
As someone trying to study Japanese in secret for a while now I will say yes it does have its difficulties and it’s not the easiest language. But it’s not impossible. I’d say mixing comprehensive input with Olly’s story learning method works fantastically. It definitely has made the journey enjoyable.
I am also interested in why you study in secret. When I told my father about me studying Japanese, he called it useless and to just focus on my academics. I'm still studying it tho in secret from him.
I'm a Chinese speaker, and I dont get the fact that in Mandarin we dont write wither spaces and we also dont have particles, but there is no problem reading it.
If you happen to know another language with a flexible word order like Polish it helps to arrange your translation in the Japanese word order. A Japanese lady I used to date learned Polish by this way. The things you learn from unexpected places.
I think Olie missed out some of the hardest bits not to put people off. At least for me. Sentence structure is very different to English and other European languages. A big problem is that they they don’t use subordinate clauses nor have similar conjunctions. Of course you can convey the same meaning but in a very different way and I find that incredibly difficult. He also didn’t mention that almost all Kanji have more than one pronunciation (unlike Chinese) and sometimes a handful. I’ve been learning Japanese for four years and Danish for four months. It took me months to get through a Japanese novel and I was using a dictionary all the time. I still can’t read a newspaper and although I knew the 2200 kanji…because I haven’t been practicing recently I’ve forgotten most of them again! By contrast after 4 months of Danish I don’t really have a problem with the written language and I’m far better at speaking and understanding too. Sharing the same alphabet, having similar words and almost identical sentence structures and grammar just makes it sooo much easier. I still love Japanese much more than Danish though! Most fascinating language I’ve come across by far.
I feel like this must be a question of us using terms differently or something, but Japanese very definitely does use subordinate clauses (a lot, possibly more often than English does, in my experience). Pretty much any verb clause can be turned into an adjectival subordinate clause by just sticking it in front of a noun, or turned into a noun itself (using の or こと) to become a nominal subordinate clause, or sometimes just embedded directly in larger sentences using certain particles like と or かどうか, etc. The main difference is that in English, subordinate clauses usually come _after_ the thing they are attached to, while Japanese usually puts them in front, which is admittedly another situation of having to "think backwards" to be able to really work easily with Japanese sentence structure... (Japanese does also have a number of conjunctions which are pretty similar to English, though it's true that there are some types of things we use conjunctions for in English which Japanese represents in different ways too.) Regarding the kanji issue, I kinda feel that you may actually have been trying to learn them the wrong way. In my personal experience, memorizing individual kanji characters one by one in isolation is really not actually that useful, (and is easily forgotten afterward). Instead, I usually recommend that people focus on just learning actual vocabulary words instead, and in the process of learning the words, also practice reading and writing the kanji forms of each word. This way, you actually learn the kanji and their pronunciations in a context where they have meaning and are immediately useful, and you get used to reading and writing them the ways that they are actually used in the language (with the other kanji they often go with, or with their corresponding okurigana (hiragana parts of the words), etc). This approach has been far more useful and effective for me, at least...
Learning over 2000 kanji in 4 years is insane. I've been taking Japanese though school for 7 years and I've lived in Japan off an on, I probably know round about 300 kanji if I'm lucky. It's quite easy to learn kanji for words that you know and there's only one real reading, but once you have to memorize 2, 3 readings for a kanji, and it's already a word you have never seen before, you are just doubling or trippleing the amount you need to learn.
I'd rather learn a language that's nothing like English, like Japanese than an Indo-European language because I'd be more likely to fall into the trap of approaching French or German with an English lens (due to similarities mixed with differences) and be frustrated that it doesn't transfer over, wherewith Japanese I'm more likely to acknowledge that it's a completely blank slate and there will be little interference with my own language, loanwords aside.
Hey Olly! Great video! Do you think already knowing Mandarin Chinese will give me a leg up when it comes to kanji? Perhaps not for the pronunciation, but are the meanings relatively the same?
Learned both, high school level Mandarin and uni level Japanese. Some are relatively the same meanings, but obvious differences in pronunciations. If you learn one before the other, it will help you understand the context of the character. Easy examples, 家 in Japanese (Ie) means house; it also means the same in Chinese (could mean family) but it's pronounced as jiā. 学校 means School, in Japanese read as "Gakkou"; in Chinese read as "Xuéxiào". I think these similarities are found in many languages that root from Latin as well. After all, Japanese and Korean did take many influences from Chinese. In Japanese itself, there are two ways to read Kanji, Kunyomi and Onyomi. Kunyomi is the Japanese reading, and Onyomi is the Chinese reading. That said, it doesn't mean Onyomi will be pronounced like Chinese (x-, zh-, z-, c-, ch-.) It's just a way to categorize way of readings for each kanji. P.S. I might be wrong in some parts because it's been a while since I studied both languages, but I hope this gave you the gist of it. Have fun learning, friend.
@@jessicaw_ Japanese and chinese is different language group.only character is from china.80% of modern chinese words and Western conception words in Chinese are imported from Japan 中華人民共和国 is means china '人民' '共和国' is japanese made words
depends on your definition of "learn": you can learn it for simple everyday communication / being able to read newspapers (with a dictionary) in a couple of years of determined and committed effort. but then, there are other things which may require many more years if not decades if you are willing to go for really hardcore stuff
I’ve learned Japanese for about 10 years. I don’t think writing or repeating words again and again is efficient, for me I found giving meaning is better. For example: 日本語 kanji could be broken down to 木 (tree) and therefore 本 (book), 五 (ご) gives pronunciation for 語 and 言 is speak and 口 is mouth. This way you are using logic rather than just mere memory.
Strangely, as a speaker of Dravidian (Tamil, Kannada), I feel comfortable with the word other, hence once the vocabulary is expanded, it sounds natural to my ear. The existential verb iru, itta, and inclusive with -mo, is pure Dravidian. There are also similarities with Hindi (Sanskrit) in many forms, such as -ta for perfective, to for 'that', -masu (-mas in first plural in Sanskrit) for verbs, and some words like namae for name, kusa for grass, etc. Of course kanji is a challenge, but that's part of the appeal.
one thing i think that makes japanese hard especially for english speakers is the abundance of words with 99.999% the same meaning, but they imply different things which took many years to wrap my head around. ive been studying japanese for 13 years now and i still dont fully understand the difference between some words!! this does make japanese very interesting though because you can communicate much subtle detail with a single word
One thing I’m surprised no one mentions about this topic is the amount of vocabulary Japanese people know. According to research, the average 20 year old American knows 20,000 words in English. But the average 20 year old Japanese person knows 50,000 words in Japanese. Of course Olly mentioned the various Keigo vs. informal speech, and also the many onomatopoeia that Japanese has, but there’s also the separation of words of Chinese origin, words of (primarily) English origin, and words that were originally Japanese. If you want to take it further, then there’s things like slang, dialectal differences, 役割語, 専門用語 (I have no idea how to translate these), and archaic Japanese, which is still prevalent in modern day pop culture. And then there’s things like double-verbs (e.g. 聞き取る), 四字熟語(lit. 4 letter compound words), and proverbs. Overall a fun language to learn though! Don’t let the hard stuff stop you from learning it yourself!
Problem is not start or end of sentence, problem is what to put in middle of sentence. Japanese is hard, for me harder than Chinese due to very complicated grammar system.
I describe the difference between Hiragana and Katakana to people as "script vs cursive". Also not a perfect analogy, but I feel like upper- and lowercase have distinct functionality while script and cursive do not.
After this vid, I almost believed Japanese was not that difficult, but then i was brought back to reality when i remembered i tried learning it once...
I don't think it is hard, just like anything it takes time and patience. Though, a big determining factor of difficulty would be how you approach educating yourself in Japanese. It's easy to fall into the trap of focusing too heavily on learning grammar from txt books which will hurt your ability to form sentences in the beginning if you're afraid of making mistakes, whilst the Japanese barely stick to any grammatical structure when casually speaking anyway. I've always shilled for satori reader premium, it is the best resource for learning to read Japanese out there. If you struggle to find Japanese people to talk to in a natural environment, there are online games out there that have good Japanese communities that you can approach. Phasmophobia is an awesome example just try not to shit your pants when hunting ghosts but you'll learn alot and hopefully make some Japanese friends along the way!
I've been to Japan 7 times (almost losing count!) two or three weeks at a time, and it was NEVER enough to get comfortable with the language much beyond knowing enough to get around. I came to the conclusion, for me, anyway, that I need a longer period of immersion to improve my fluency. So, in that context, yes, I would say it is hard. And of course this is just the spoken part, never mind the writing. Again, know enough basic Kanji in common situations to get around.
4 years here in Japan and still having problems at work due to language barrier. I learned basic Japanese letters and words about a month but learned ancient Hebrew around a week😅😅😅
I think other major difficulties have been left out here : most kanji have 2 different pronunciations, if not 3 or 4, sometimes more. Then vocabulary. This is a really tough one. Tons of words. Never seen that. For instance in any language you're already familiar with, you'd get a word like "northeast" instantly, because you already know "north" and "east" which are really basic ones. In Japanese, you have to learn "kita" (north) "higashi" (east) and "hokutou" (northeast). And it's the same nonsense for so many words! Best friend, big tree, egg white, hot water... That and the fact Japanese is really poor phonetically speaking creates a great number of homophones. So I find easier to read a novel than to understand an anime.
This is why kanji are great for foreign learners: you can clearly see how words are related. English vocabulary is similar in this regard, but one is expected to learn it by rote.
@@АлександрАлександров-щ7к8т No, not really: 彼 and 波, 猫 and 描く are not remotely related to each other. And knowing 描く does not help you know 絵 deals with the same concept, for example. Hear *hajimeru* and *hajimete* and you'll know they're related. 始める and 初めて? Not so much.
@@Komatik_ they look similar because their on-yomi is similar, not because of meaning. And you can clearly see their meanings are different from the left part. You couldn't come up with a worse example if you tried.
@@novrinkov0053 Yeah, and you have to get enough words to understand the content of the sentence, that's the point. If it's easy not to confuse bridge with chopsticks ("hashi" for both), it's not when it comes to more uncommon and abstract words.
I'm not sure about the elephant (difficulty) being revealed at the very end with the Foreign Service Institute rankings. The thing about east Asian languages is that they have a structure that is totally different from a CTL, Commonly Taught Language, i.e. a European language, which is what many G7 second language learners have as their mother tongue. For example, as Olly pointed out, once the subject is known in Japanese, you can get away with just saying, "big" or "delicious". Otherwise, you might need to use a "copula" which has the same root as "copulate". That said, I describe the difference between Japanese and a European language as similar to MacOS and Windows. They both perform similar tasks, in this case, to describe the human condition, but one of them is more user friendly. Story Learning is a brilliant strategy since it places language in a continuous context rather than in isolated units.
I grew up with Japanese imported games so im fluent in reading and making sentence order. But I'm not good with speaking the language. Cause well videogames have alot of text and listening practice. But speaking is a whole different thing.
As a Finnish speaker, I find all agglutinative languages fairly straightforward. This includes Japanese. The hardest part is learning enough characters to read and of course vocabulary.
I think the strangest Japanese word is くノ一 (kunoichi). It consists of a hiragana, a katakana, and a kanji, in that order, which is the opposite of the usual order. It was formed by decomposing the kanji 女.
As a joke I usually hear that Japanese and Arabic are polar opposites. Japanese grammar isn't the most difficult thing in the world, whereas Japanese writing is quite a nightmare. In Arabic, a person can get the hang of the writing system with a bit of moderate practice, however Arabic grammar is preeeetty hellishly difficult.
🇯🇵 Uncover Japanese through the power of story 👉🏼 bit.ly/sljpcourses
母国語というのはなんとなくで話されているものだからこそ、体系的に学習することは大事である。
私は日本語のネイティブだが、あなたの動画は普段用いている言語を理論的に解説しており、日本語ネイティブからみても素晴らしいものですね👏
It is important to learn a language systematically because a mother tongue is something that is spoken somewhat.
I am a native Japanese speaker, and your video is a great theoretical explanation of the language I usually use, even from a native Japanese speaker's point of view 👏
I feel like the tricky part isn’t remembering to put the verb at the end of the sentence. That’s a consistent rule, which makes it easy to remember. The real tricky part is knowing what to do with everything in the middle of the sentence.
100%. i can get my S O V down but anything else is kinda hard 😂
Yeah that's grammar. It's the hardest part of the language if you're an English native.
Yup same experience w Korean! Took some time before I got used to the grammar (more than a year of consistent studying)
100%. Speaking Japanese at a beginner or intermediate level is like doing a flawless jump off of a diving board, desperately flailing around in the air for a bit, but then still somehow managing to land on your feet most of the time.
A japanese sentence can only end with either a verb, adjective or noun, as for the order of the sentence, it does not matter so long as the particles are correct.
I was learning German for a couple of months and I remember thinking at times that it was going to take me longer than I thought in order to get a good grasp of it. I decided to jump into Japanese for a couple of months too but when I went back to reading German it felt like a breeze after going through Japanese. The progress that I had made in German was so much more compared to what had achieved in Japanese in the same amount of time. It’s not so much that it’s hard, but that it is so extremely different from western languages. With Germanic and Latin languages there’s a huge overlap of vocabulary and concepts that help a ton when learning a new language. With Japanese, Arabic, or Korean you have to reprogram the way you think in order to learn them properly.
Ah, nice. I also learn German and Japanese.
After all, German and Latin languages both come from a supposed proto-indoeuropean progenitor.
Exactly. Like if you take a generic sentence like, 「私は猫が好きです」from Japanese and translate it into English, you'll most likely come up with a sentence like "I like cats". But that's not actually what this sentence means at all. Not even close. In reality, this sentence translates more accurately to something like "As for me, cats are likeable" with cats actually being the subject of sentence, not you. Japanese is my absolute favorite language because of ways you have to change your thinking like this, but as a English native, it can be a struggle.
I am a native Korean speaker. Even after studying English for over ten years, Koreans struggle to communicate in English. Because the English and Korean languages are so dissimilar. Japanese, on the other hand, is the closest language to Korean, so even children in Korea can quickly learn it.
@@NightfallStation
I don't know where you did read it, but in 「私は猫が好きです」, the subject is indeed 私, the verb is 好き and 猫 is the object (of the verb).
Infact, japanese is a sov (subject-object-verb) language.
It may seem a bit strange maybe because japanese subjects are often omitted in a sentence.
As a Japanese, i feel honored you explained my language perfectly. ありがとうございました！
君日本语本当上手
Arigato ugozai ma shite
@@TK-my7jg 正确应该是 君の日本語は本当に上手です。把助词去掉就是伪日本语了🤣
@@victorhwang7656 無所謂啦，反正他們能看懂~ 懶得學日語助詞了 好囉嗦
@@mobzgamingml so relatable
im a native english speaker and i decided to learn Japanese because I have a huge passion for Japanese culture. Learning hiragana + katana, no problem. But when it came to the grammar, I almost gave up 3 times it was so confusing and frustrating. What helped me finally understand it was by looking at sentence after sentence using that grammar structure and I finally saw a pattern and understood. About a year or so later, now I can understand a quite a bit when listening to Japanese. and its SO MUCH FUN. I'm not here to brag or anything, I'm just trying to give someone some hope. Just get over the grammar obstacle, learn about 1000 or so words, immerse immerse immerse and you will enjoy it so much. God bless
@Mordraug yeah i totally agree!
Did you alse learn reading the japanese characters or only speaking and listening?
@@ibrahimsahin8003 so ive learned maybe almost 200 kanji now, but not actually studied them. The more and more times I saw them, I began to start acquiring them naturally. but right now, I'm not speaking. Im just focusing on listening and reading.
How do I find a community of Japanese learners that isn't full of cartoon fans? So far that's been the biggest obstacle for me, any help is appreciated.
@@Power_uP_86 Join a karate club, learn how to make sushi, take a japanese calligraphy class, there's plenty of japanese activities beyond cartoons.
As someone who has studied 450+ hours of Japanese, although grammar is different, you get used to it.
Some funny literal examples of Japanese language.
私は魚と肉が大好きです。
Watashi wa sakana to niku ga dai suki desu.
me fish and meat big like is.
I really like fish and meat.
Youll notice the particles 'wa, to, and ga' used in this sentence. Also, when translated without changing word order, it really does look strange!
Some more funny things
一月, 二月, 三月, 四月, 五月 ect
1 moon, 2 moon, 3 moon, 5 moon...
Can you guess the meaning?
January, Febuary, March, April, May! So straightforward and easy to remember... though I do prefer the deeper mythos behind the month names in European languages.
And finally some fun words;
積ん読 Tsundoku - buying books, and not reading them
The famous 口寂しい Kuchisabishii - Eating out of boredom instead of hunger
And the chillingly deep 物の哀れ Mono no Aware - "appreciating the bittersweet impermanence of something’s fleeting beauty since nothing lasts forever" (not my words.)
I’ve been learning Japanese for 8 years and I still learn something new about the language everyday, be it a new slang word or a fixed phrase or a new kanji. I feel like I’ll never really be done learning Japanese, but that’s also kind of the beauty of it.
Agreed. I think that -- after fluency, it's more like... "Have you achieved *literacy* in Japanese?"
no it has no beauty.
That goes for all foreign languages, I'd say.
The same goes for native languages too. The most comprehensive dictionary of my native language has 300k words. There's no way I can learn them all in my lifetime.
I am Japanese and I have one thing to say to the people watching this video.
That is that most grammar is ignored in everyday Japanese conversation.
When talking with friends, etc., Japanese people omit the subject (this is true even if it is not in everyday conversation) or put verbs in places other than at the end. (Various other grammatical rules are also ignored.)
Therefore, Japanese language learners should not be overawed and should study hard with an easy mind. We are rooting for you!
Japanese is so hard it makes Spanish feel like a dialect of English.
But it is
Really? That's interesting!
Hey, keep Spanish out of this. What are you? A Trump supporter?
Funny thing, spanish's phonetics sound the most similar to japanese's phonetics
*reconsiders learning Japanese*
As someone who has studied this language off and on since high school, I finally feel like I’ve reached a point where I can finally partake in it and understand it in games and RUclips videos. It really is an insane experience after all this time!
The hardest part for me has always been the grammar. There are a ton of ambiguous grammar words in Japanese which can have different meanings depending on where it is in a sentence, I recommend watching RUclips videos of people playing games in Japanese and translating them as they go. Fantastic content for learning!
Any channel you recomend to watch?
@@AlfredoCampuzano GameGengo and GameGrammar, the fact that these two channels only have around 20.000 subs is a crime
Out of curiosity, how long have you been studying Japanese?
I've been waiting for the day I could play games in Japanese for so long now. Whenever I try to, I end up being blown away by how many words I still don't know
@@dethswurl117 About ten years now. I’d recommend watching some of the channels I mentioned to get you started. Since everything gets explained to you meticulously, there’s no feeling of being overwhelmed. Eventually you’ll just pick up on the patterns. The trick really is to figure out a word and then move on to the next word. If a word is super important it will turn up again eventually.
@@Maymaysmaymays Thanks man, it's reassuring as I'm ~1.5 years in and I keep assuming that I'm doing something wrong. Over time it's becoming more apparent how much of a commitment it is. Just glad it's a fun one lol
Already gave game gengo a look and that channel is pure gold, appreciate the recommendation and the tips
Props for including a link to Japanese Calligrapher Takumi! I think even if people aren't learning Japanese, a lot of his videos are just really neat (and relaxing) to watch, and for those who are learning, they're a great way to inspire you to practice your kanji more!
I also appreciate that you mentioned that English actually has two different alphabets too (uppercase and lowercase). Lots of people seem to get intimidated by "Japanese has two different phonetic alphabets!" without even realizing that English actually has two different alphabets that everyone has to learn too, we just sorta sweep that all under the rug because we don't usually think about it that way.
A bit of a clarification (so people don't get unnecessarily intimidated): The reason that Japanese has 188 particles is actually because the vast majority of those particles actually serve the same functions that we use prepositions for in English (and English has somewhere around 150 prepositions, depending on how you count, plus a number of multi-word phrases that people often use that have similar functions, so when you tally it all up there's really not that much of a difference between English and Japanese in this respect).
My personal opinion: Some aspects of Japanese are harder than many other languages to learn, but a lot of aspects of Japanese are actually much easier in many ways, and I really think these often don't get enough credit. If you're a fairly logical person, Japanese grammar is very regular and predictable (once you learn the rules, they _always_ apply. "special cases" and "exceptions" are very rare). If you see a word spelled out (in hiragana or katakana) you know exactly how to pronounce it (none of that "which of the 5 possible ways is "ough" being pronounced in _this_ word?" stuff). There are basically 2.5 irregular verbs in the entire language, and the rest all fall into really just two straightforward categories for conjugation rules. You don't have to worry about tedious things like matching gender, plurality, case, or often even verb tense between different parts of the sentence (it's just not an issue), and so on...
Yes, there are some parts that are obviously harder than most other languages. Keigo (polite/honorific speech, etc) does make some things more complicated, but to be honest a lot of it actually becomes kinda automatic (in my experience) remarkably quickly once you start using it. Kanji is obviously more complicated than most other writing systems, but if you start really learning and practicing them, you start to pick up a lot of common elements and details to them which end up making them not nearly as complicated or hard to remember as they look on the surface. Many of these aspects really look worse than they are too. I still wouldn't call it an "easy language" by any stretch, and it is going to be harder for English speakers to learn than something much more similar like a romance or germanic language, but it's still nowhere near as bad as most people seem to think, in my opinion, and a lot of it can actually be pretty fun in some ways too.
Japanese was the first language I acquired as a child who grew up in Japan with a Japanese mother. It however never became my primary language as our family moved to the Philippines when I was still around 5. Thankfully, my parents still continues to speak to me in Japanese up to the moment, so it never left my life. However, without any formal education, I still talk like a child. I struggle with kanji as well.
Working for a Japanese company has helped develop my skills (I still have tons of vocabulary to learn though) and I can carry a Japanese conversation without trouble. However, my pitch is certainly off which screams "I am a gaijin" whenever I talk to native Japanese speakers
I love how you used 平仮名 and 片仮名 in their Kanji form lol.
Japanese is so hard it made me return to learning German
lol
Just started learning Japanese today. I started out by just writing the entire hiragana script in a table. I find the physical writing something deepens your memory of it. Then I spent hours just studying them and what they sound like. I think a good place to start is just to feel comfortable with a script, and to separate あ from what I would equate it to, "a" and to start to see the character for what it is. I also learned a small amount of vocabulary, chief among them being able to write and say "ton kotsu" correctly because ton kotsu ramen is objectively the best food.
I know I have a ridiculously long path ahead of me, but I'm super motivated to learning this language right now, and I look forward to struggling with Kanji, tones, and honorific. Another puzzle to be solved along the way to my goal: to be the first American to learn Japanese without being an anime fan in over 40 years
Listen to the this person, learn the kana, and then start watching cure dolly japanese for scratch videos and then start immersing once you have the basic structure. Don't worry about studying isolated kanji it is a waste of time and you will pick them up as you learn vocab within an actual japanese sentence in context and lastly forget about the tone stuff, it's literally just accents and it differs depending on what area of japan you are from and frankly trying to sound like a native from Tokyo or osaka is the last of your problems.
So how you doing now?
It's so easy for turkish people when it comes to sentence order and logics like it has so many similarities i don't feel very complicated things as a person that is learing this language currently
As a newly Japanese studen, it's very interesting to learn all of that! Thanks Olly!
The hard part about Japanese for me as an English speaker is learning the vocabulary and Kanji. The grammar in general is actually pretty forgiving and doesn't have a ton of stuff to remember like irregular forms, declensions, conjugations, etc. Once people pick up on the vocabulary, it's not hard to learn to speak the language from there.
Bro, the Conjugations are the Hardest parts, Imo. Cuz unless you know the rules like Godan and Ichidan, you're never gonna be able to conjugate verbs with accuracy cuz they have around 30 ways of conjugation. Whoever says Russian has hard conjugations, hasn't seen Japanese.
Like, look at 行く. It has:
行く(iku)
行かない(ikanai)
行った(itta)
行かなかった(ikanakatta)
行って(itte)
行ってなくて(ittenakute)
行こう(ikou)
行け(ike)
行けば(ikeba)
行かなければ(ikanakereba)
行かなきゃ(ならない)(ikanakya(naranai)
行ったり(ittari)
行ける(ikeru)
行けない(ikenai)
行けた(iketa)
行けなかった(ikenakatta)
行けて(ikete)
行けなくて(ikenakute)
行かれる(ikareru)
行かれない(ikarenai)
行かれた(ikareta)
行かれなかった(ikarenakatta)
行かれて(ikarete)
行かれなくて(ikarenakute)
行かせる(ikaseru)
行かせない(ikasenai)
行かせた(ikaseta)
行かせなかった(ikasenakatta)
行かせて(ikasete)
行かせなくて(ikasenakute)
行きたい(ikitai)
行きたくない(ikitakunai)
行きたかった(ikitakatta)
行きたくなかった(ikitakunakatta)
行きた(ikita)
行きたくて(ikitakute)
行きたくなくて(ikitakunakute)
行きたく(ikitaku)
行きたければ(ikitakereba
行きたくなければ(ikitakunakereba)
行きたかったら(ikitakattara)
行きたくなかったら(ikitakunakattara)
行きたさ(ikitasa)
Ok, there's way too many. I'm getting tired of typing them out. I only showed you 25% of every conjugation 行く has. So whoever tells you Grammar or Kanji is difficult, I call complete BS on those clowns! Conjugations are by far the hardest.
@Mordraug Yeah, I completely understand that it's consistent. It's just that it's hard to guess some of them if you don't know them beforehand. Like... Tai, and Nakatta are always easy because it's the same but the potential form changes depending on the word. With Hanasu it's Hanaseru, Iku is Ikeru, and so on and so forth. Like... The potential form doesn't have one way to formulate it. There's different forms of them. Unless they're based on the 段 or something?
@Mordraug I feel like the potential form of Ru verbs wasn't only Rareru but I could be confusing some things. I guess I'll learn them with practice. All that's left is the other helper words. Stuff like the causitive form and so on.
The R in Japanese and Spanish are extremely similar to each other. I’m a native speaker of Spanish so I don’t have trouble pronouncing らりるれろ
Great explanation. Thanks so much!
TELL YOUR EDITOR TO SLOW THE ROLL ON THE TRANSITIONS FFS
GIVE US LIKE A QUARTER SECOND LONGER TO READ THE DAMN WORDS LOL 😂
Great job on this explanation!
I've only been learning Japanese since mid-August but it's slowly progressing. I've pretty much got Hiragana embedded in my brain, working on Katakana now and doing some online lessons.
Check Realkana, it takes an hour
@@VersusThem might take an hour for you but not everyone can retain that much information in one go...especially those of us with adhd.
@@3lmodfzI know two other people that did it the same way, it's not about retaining information since you're not codifying it as "data", with Realkana in a computer (rote memorization), it's more akin to "learning by reflex", it's like brute forcing it into your memory and it takes several times along a few weeks
What do you use?
I have been learning Japanese too since last year August but I've recently lost my 50 day streak on duolingo and got sad and didn't want to continue
So please tell me what app do ubuse
@@Sylphvine I use the Kana book by Japanese From zero, but they do others which look good. Sometimes I use lingodeer (better than Duolingo) and I signed up for JapanesePod101.
Great video and insight into learning Japanese! I would love to see you do this video about Mandarin!!
You are really an expert in this field！！ I'm so impressed as a Japanese.
Tell you the truth, recently I've found out that Katagana is originally came from Kanji !😅
This video is good to understand the differences between Japanese and English.
To look for exceptions don't end in all languages similary.
What really stumps me with Japanese Kanji is that each has multiple possible pronunciation. Yes that happens too in Mandarin, yes I get the vocalization rule, but when do we use Chinese pronunciation (on'yomi) and when do we use the native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi), and sometimes some syllables are dropped when combined with other words, and from which sound do we start writing the trailing hiragana (okurigana)?
Aaand that's why you learn kanji alongside vocabulary, not kanji on its own.
Thank you so much! I appreciate this
10:52 I´m a speaker/learner of French (I), Czech (III) and Japanese (IV) and the estimates pretty much match my experiences^^ I think the differences become smaller when you go beyond the hours in the table. Like, if two people studied French and Japanese for 6,000 hours...the difference would be much smaller than after 600 hours.
PS: What´s happening to German? It used to be 600 hours, then it was changed to 750, now your table is saying 900 hours.
For me, the hardest part of Japanese is the lack of mutual intelligibility. Even though the grammar is pretty straight forward once you get it down, almost every word you'll learn in Japanese is going to be a completely new idea to you. I.e. If you're reading a Spanish article somewhere and you see the word "importante" as an English speaker, you're gonna have a fairly good idea on what that word means. In Japanese, this almost never happens :\
If you are successful in learning Japanese, you will be able to learn Korean quickly. These two languages are nearly identical.
But there are quite a few words in Japanese that have been borrowed from English I think - though maybe not very useful or common ones!
@@timbounds7190 yes and no. Yes, there are a ton of english words in japanese. No, they don't have the same meaning in japanese as their english counterpart unless it names something. A great example is "maipeisu" that comes from english "my pace". "maipeisu" means a person that does things in their own rhythm, maybe even ignoring the urgency of external situations. This can make some weird sounding sentences in japanese, like "何だ、このマイペースの男、めんどくさい"meaning "what a maipeisu guy, he's getting on my nerves". And I not even talked about new "english" words that japanese people create, like "skinship", "OL" and "salaryman". english made in japan.
i am from poland and tbh the words aren’t really that similar to english words but it really isnt difficult to learn english, just need to memorise them
Cognate is the linguistic term for this idea of mutual intelligibility. Just for your Googling purposes 😊
As a Korean, Japanese is very easy. It is one-third of my English study
This video really helped me to learn how the different writing systems of Japanese work, as well as more information about Japanese that I didn’t know before. At first, learning Japanese seemed near impossible, but I knew it was possible. I just knew I’d have to take it one step at a time. So, thank you for this video. It made it feel less intimidating and more achievable. 😊🇯🇵
As with many languages they such as Arabic and, Chinese, are simply learned best when you are young. German was my 1st language. I came to America and like a sponge learned English BUT i went back to Germany and forgot much of my German BUT i returned here again and learned English ....again, all before the age of 8.
Très intéressant !
Very difficult is 音読み and 訓読み (On yomi and kun yomi) . Especially if there are more than two. Like for example the Kanji for day is 日. It can be read as にち、じつ、ひ or か. But ひ sometimes turns to び and にち turns to にっ. It’s very confusing.
@Mordraug Yeah you are right. I always learn Kanji in contexts and in words. I don’t just memorize the on yomi and kun yomi , without context.
But still it’s not easy.
Are you gonna do more Norwegian videos? I'm currently trying to learn it
I loved learning the writing scripts
I've been learning japanese for 7 months now, everyday, i have around 4k mature cards on anki, half of them from a pre-made deck and the other half from a self-made deck, i probably have around 400-500 hours between anki and inmersion, and as long as i can occasionally look up words I can read without big problems, japanese is not a hard language, it just takes time, it can be *really* overwhelming at times but if you take it easy, a few hours a day will get you very far
As for kanji, the same way it can make reading difficult, once you know them, it makes it easier, for example, the word 恋人, it's made of the kanji 恋 and 人, love and person respectively, once you know what each kanji mean, guessing the meaning of the word and how it's read becomes much much easier
May I ask what Anki pre made deck you used? I'm trying to find a good N5 Anki deck because I don't have a textbook to work off and I'm mainly learning from RUclips and some language apps
僕は一年に日本語を倣っていますけど、まだ下手ですはははは
@@nojerama788 i recommend you using yhe 2k/6k deck, it's widely population
And if you have problem reading, is it because of the Vocabulary or grammar? If its vocabulary, i honestly envy you lol, japanese grammar is in my opinion the hardest thing on japanese, its ridiculously ridiculously difficult. (by that i dont mean basic grammar, i mean the pretty advanced one, that you sadly, need to know in order understand at least a gist of any native for native material)
@@カピバラ可愛いよなぁ difficulties with reading stem from mainly kanji. Since kanji is used so much, particles can be easily spotted but the sheer amount of kanji out there, that's the hardest thing to literacy. The grammar is fairly difficult but in time you get used to it.
If you want to improve Japanese you should start the words like separately, not connecting the letters like we do when we use English. I see most of the foreigners saying the word connecting or leaving a seconds after saying each words which make you sound like a beginner. So, like:
While in English people say “what” people go wat. But in Japanese we say wa downward pitch and t in the upward pitch.
This is very confusing but I hope you all understand..!
Learning japanese is like learning go, with a few life hack you can master it enough to get help if needed but you could spend 2 lifetimes trying to understand all the subtlety.
The most complex and interresting I've tried
So, I’m ten years old and I’m trying to learn some Japanese.
When I was seven or eight, I wanted to visit Japan so bad, and now, since it’ll probably be a while before I do actually get to visit. So, I really wanted to learn Japanese.
So if you’re wondering, “okay so what,” I know why, I’m telling you this for a reason.
I need FREE app recommendations, please, don’t recommend apps that cost money.
Arigatō 😊
Thank You Olly for this Interesting Video about Japanese language!
Could You make a Video about Quechuan? Thank You!
I lived in Japan 3 1/3 years. I also lived away from the American neighborhood. I learned enough Japanese to survive, including some 漢字 (kanzi).
In my experience, there were two difficulties: (1) the writing system because it consists of 漢字, ひらがな (hiragana), and カタカナ (katakana); and some Latin spellings, on occasion; and (2) 敬語 (keigo), the respect language. Mr. Richards has explained in brief 敬語.
After a while I added the extralinguistic features (body language, gestures, and the like) so that I would be better understood.
As with other languages, I wasn’t learning just the language. I was learning the communication system.
漢字 = Chinese🤣
Having the verb at the end of the sentence isn't new to me, since this linguistic feature occurs in my second language. However, once again, it's the Japanese writing system that intimidates me the most.
5:21 There's more than just two irregular verbs, but I guess there's only two main ones.
The CIA has put out a document that classifies languages based on how many intensive weeks it takes an undercover operative to become passable in the language. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I don't think I'm off-base by saying Spanish is level 1 and Japanese is level 5 (the hardest). I have learned both and it took me about 7 years to really get comfortable in Japanese, and only 1.5 to get to a similar level in Spanish. In other words, yes, Japanese is very hard for native English speakers. Much easier for native Korean speakers, though.
Muchas gracias, justo ahora estaba aprendiendo algunos kanjis
I don't know how to say it in Spanish but I like the Mago De Oz pfp
While learning Kanji is hard, giving meaning to words and names is beautiful
Been self studying Japanese for about 2.5 years. I’m still years away from being at the level I want. Small daily steps, trust the process.
Olly, There is soething wrong with your website. I can't get in to sign up. A loop keeps bringing me bsck to te opening screen.
I've studied Japanese for four years. The more I learn, the less I know. It is absolutely impossible. 😢
@youknowkbbaby There are plug-ins which automatically add furigana to kanji on websites so you know how to read them, that should speed up the process of learning them.
わからないことあったらきいてね
Depends on what you mean by "hard". All languages have something hard about them. Even languages that are said to be easy have some hard parts to them.
Hard as in a complex writing system that requires a minimum of 2000 kanji to read a newspaper. I've lived in Japan for 30 years and can count on one hand the number of foreigners who can read and write at a high school level.
It's hard.
Different level of hard
Something you didn't mention is that there is also an informal way of speaking, you don't necessarily use "ます", with a friend you wouldn't use it since they would think their friendship is a bit distant, for example "わかりません" would be "わからない" , it also applies to questions, for example, it doesn't necessarily have to end in "か", it can end in "の", for example "もう食べましたか" would be "もう食べたの", I clarify again, this is for informal language only. 🙃
日本人としてだけど、まず伝えたい内容の単語を伝えて見てほしい。相手が日本人なら意味を汲み取ってくれるし、会話も繋がるから楽しいと思うよ！
As a Japanese person, I would like you to first try to convey the words you want to say. If they are Japanese, they will understand what you mean, and the conversation will be fun!
It's been 8 years now since I started learning this language and the most difficult parts are vocabulary and kanji. When speaking, there are a lot of omophones which makes the sentence very very difficult to catch immediately. When reading, kanjis are the hardest part because you need to learn all the basic kanjis which are more than 2000 and at the end, your level will be barely the one of a Japanese high school student. But learning this language makes you feel invincible ahahah.
Have fun learning Japanese :)
the funniest thing about being a japanese student is that we will never stop studying this language, we will always come across new kanji
I have been learning Japanese on Duolingo. I wish I knew a native or fluent speaker to teach me as I struggle with remembering things like the writing systems. Why must Japan the place where things like most video games come from, have one of the most difficult languages to learn? Because I sometimes feel like I will never learn it and sometimes I feel like giving up.
To be honest, beginner level Japanese is not that difficult. You can learn hiragana, katakana, grammar, etc. in a few weeks, but advanced level Japanese is endless. Sometimes people say Japanese is easy, but most of those people only know basic Japanese.
I know advanced Japanese but i dont know the basical hiragana, katakana
I can read 古事記/こじき and 万葉集 with out any trouble
because I'm Chinese🤣
@@TK-my7jg Actually, 古事記 & 万葉集 will make no sense if you don't know Japanese.
@@TK-my7jg
Old 漢文 There is useless in modern Japanese daily life.
Been studying japanese by myself, 6-7 hours a day, for the past 2 months through the Busuu web site, and İ've found it actually shockingly friendly to learn. İ am now at a level equivalent to B1 and have managed to learn some 600 kanji. Regarding the degree of difficulty of it, like with everything else, İ'd say it all gets down to the level of motivation, focus, and dedication (which is proportional to free time and the way of using it) one is able to consecrate. Naturally familiarity plays a big role, but nevertheless, with enough motivation, concentration and fun (which are all inerrelated mechanically), zero familiarity becomes no problem at all after a couple of weeks, or even less
I am a native English speaker... Kanji has a meaning and a pronunciation part? At times, I'm sure. But, maybe, for me, it seems at times like it is all meaning. LOL!
For example: Sand = 砂 = 石 (rock) + 少 (few; small)
I did Japanese on Rosetta Stone for a few lessons as a lark … it was like .. OMG
This was a very insightful video.
Have you ever considered doing a video on Arabic or Turkish ?
As someone trying to study Japanese in secret for a while now I will say yes it does have its difficulties and it’s not the easiest language. But it’s not impossible. I’d say mixing comprehensive input with Olly’s story learning method works fantastically. It definitely has made the journey enjoyable.
Why you learning it in secret?
I am also interested in why you study in secret. When I told my father about me studying Japanese, he called it useless and to just focus on my academics. I'm still studying it tho in secret from him.
@@sixjhontongalamar979 Learning Japanese is academics. It'll literally raise your IQ.
I'm a Chinese speaker, and I dont get the fact that in Mandarin we dont write wither spaces and we also dont have particles, but there is no problem reading it.
If you happen to know another language with a flexible word order like Polish it helps to arrange your translation in the Japanese word order. A Japanese lady I used to date learned Polish by this way. The things you learn from unexpected places.
I think Olie missed out some of the hardest bits not to put people off. At least for me. Sentence structure is very different to English and other European languages. A big problem is that they they don’t use subordinate clauses nor have similar conjunctions. Of course you can convey the same meaning but in a very different way and I find that incredibly difficult. He also didn’t mention that almost all Kanji have more than one pronunciation (unlike Chinese) and sometimes a handful. I’ve been learning Japanese for four years and Danish for four months. It took me months to get through a Japanese novel and I was using a dictionary all the time. I still can’t read a newspaper and although I knew the 2200 kanji…because I haven’t been practicing recently I’ve forgotten most of them again! By contrast after 4 months of Danish I don’t really have a problem with the written language and I’m far better at speaking and understanding too. Sharing the same alphabet, having similar words and almost identical sentence structures and grammar just makes it sooo much easier.
I still love Japanese much more than Danish though! Most fascinating language I’ve come across by far.
I feel like this must be a question of us using terms differently or something, but Japanese very definitely does use subordinate clauses (a lot, possibly more often than English does, in my experience). Pretty much any verb clause can be turned into an adjectival subordinate clause by just sticking it in front of a noun, or turned into a noun itself (using の or こと) to become a nominal subordinate clause, or sometimes just embedded directly in larger sentences using certain particles like と or かどうか, etc. The main difference is that in English, subordinate clauses usually come _after_ the thing they are attached to, while Japanese usually puts them in front, which is admittedly another situation of having to "think backwards" to be able to really work easily with Japanese sentence structure...
(Japanese does also have a number of conjunctions which are pretty similar to English, though it's true that there are some types of things we use conjunctions for in English which Japanese represents in different ways too.)
Regarding the kanji issue, I kinda feel that you may actually have been trying to learn them the wrong way. In my personal experience, memorizing individual kanji characters one by one in isolation is really not actually that useful, (and is easily forgotten afterward). Instead, I usually recommend that people focus on just learning actual vocabulary words instead, and in the process of learning the words, also practice reading and writing the kanji forms of each word. This way, you actually learn the kanji and their pronunciations in a context where they have meaning and are immediately useful, and you get used to reading and writing them the ways that they are actually used in the language (with the other kanji they often go with, or with their corresponding okurigana (hiragana parts of the words), etc). This approach has been far more useful and effective for me, at least...
Learning over 2000 kanji in 4 years is insane. I've been taking Japanese though school for 7 years and I've lived in Japan off an on, I probably know round about 300 kanji if I'm lucky. It's quite easy to learn kanji for words that you know and there's only one real reading, but once you have to memorize 2, 3 readings for a kanji, and it's already a word you have never seen before, you are just doubling or trippleing the amount you need to learn.
I'd rather learn a language that's nothing like English, like Japanese than an Indo-European language because I'd be more likely to fall into the trap of approaching French or German with an English lens (due to similarities mixed with differences) and be frustrated that it doesn't transfer over, wherewith Japanese I'm more likely to acknowledge that it's a completely blank slate and there will be little interference with my own language, loanwords aside.
9:23 does every verb have three different forms? And is there any rule or is it all irregular?
Hey Olly! Great video! Do you think already knowing Mandarin Chinese will give me a leg up when it comes to kanji? Perhaps not for the pronunciation, but are the meanings relatively the same?
Learned both, high school level Mandarin and uni level Japanese. Some are relatively the same meanings, but obvious differences in pronunciations. If you learn one before the other, it will help you understand the context of the character.
Easy examples, 家 in Japanese (Ie) means house; it also means the same in Chinese (could mean family) but it's pronounced as jiā.
学校 means School, in Japanese read as "Gakkou"; in Chinese read as "Xuéxiào".
I think these similarities are found in many languages that root from Latin as well. After all, Japanese and Korean did take many influences from Chinese. In Japanese itself, there are two ways to read Kanji, Kunyomi and Onyomi. Kunyomi is the Japanese reading, and Onyomi is the Chinese reading. That said, it doesn't mean Onyomi will be pronounced like Chinese (x-, zh-, z-, c-, ch-.) It's just a way to categorize way of readings for each kanji.
P.S. I might be wrong in some parts because it's been a while since I studied both languages, but I hope this gave you the gist of it. Have fun learning, friend.
@@jessicaw_
Japanese and chinese is different language group.only character is from china.80% of modern chinese words and Western conception words in Chinese are imported from Japan
中華人民共和国 is means china
'人民' '共和国' is japanese made words
I'd like it if you would make a video like that about my native language German.
日本語は難しいけど楽しいですよ。you should learn it!
depends on your definition of "learn": you can learn it for simple everyday communication / being able to read newspapers (with a dictionary) in a couple of years of determined and committed effort. but then, there are other things which may require many more years if not decades if you are willing to go for really hardcore stuff
I’ve learned Japanese for about 10 years. I don’t think writing or repeating words again and again is efficient, for me I found giving meaning is better. For example: 日本語 kanji could be broken down to 木 (tree) and therefore 本 (book), 五 (ご) gives pronunciation for 語 and 言 is speak and 口 is mouth. This way you are using logic rather than just mere memory.
Strangely, as a speaker of Dravidian (Tamil, Kannada), I feel comfortable with the word other, hence once the vocabulary is expanded, it sounds natural to my ear. The existential verb iru, itta, and inclusive with -mo, is pure Dravidian. There are also similarities with Hindi (Sanskrit) in many forms, such as -ta for perfective, to for 'that', -masu (-mas in first plural in Sanskrit) for verbs, and some words like namae for name, kusa for grass, etc. Of course kanji is a challenge, but that's part of the appeal.
one thing i think that makes japanese hard especially for english speakers is the abundance of words with 99.999% the same meaning, but they imply different things which took many years to wrap my head around. ive been studying japanese for 13 years now and i still dont fully understand the difference between some words!! this does make japanese very interesting though because you can communicate much subtle detail with a single word
One thing I’m surprised no one mentions about this topic is the amount of vocabulary Japanese people know. According to research, the average 20 year old American knows 20,000 words in English. But the average 20 year old Japanese person knows 50,000 words in Japanese.
Of course Olly mentioned the various Keigo vs. informal speech, and also the many onomatopoeia that Japanese has, but there’s also the separation of words of Chinese origin, words of (primarily) English origin, and words that were originally Japanese. If you want to take it further, then there’s things like slang, dialectal differences, 役割語, 専門用語 (I have no idea how to translate these), and archaic Japanese, which is still prevalent in modern day pop culture. And then there’s things like double-verbs (e.g. 聞き取る), 四字熟語(lit. 4 letter compound words), and proverbs.
Overall a fun language to learn though! Don’t let the hard stuff stop you from learning it yourself!
Can you make a video about Icelandic?
Problem is not start or end of sentence, problem is what to put in middle of sentence. Japanese is hard, for me harder than Chinese due to very complicated grammar system.
Props for using Mi-Chan's cover of "What Does The Fox Say?" for this. Its a deep cut, but a good one nonetheless.
I describe the difference between Hiragana and Katakana to people as "script vs cursive". Also not a perfect analogy, but I feel like upper- and lowercase have distinct functionality while script and cursive do not.
Isn't ideophones the technical term for those "onomatopoeia" ?
After this vid, I almost believed Japanese was not that difficult, but then i was brought back to reality when i remembered i tried learning it once...
I don't think it is hard, just like anything it takes time and patience. Though, a big determining factor of difficulty would be how you approach educating yourself in Japanese. It's easy to fall into the trap of focusing too heavily on learning grammar from txt books which will hurt your ability to form sentences in the beginning if you're afraid of making mistakes, whilst the Japanese barely stick to any grammatical structure when casually speaking anyway. I've always shilled for satori reader premium, it is the best resource for learning to read Japanese out there. If you struggle to find Japanese people to talk to in a natural environment, there are online games out there that have good Japanese communities that you can approach. Phasmophobia is an awesome example just try not to shit your pants when hunting ghosts but you'll learn alot and hopefully make some Japanese friends along the way!
When to use Kanji rather than Kana is my current question in my Japanese learning journey.
I've been to Japan 7 times (almost losing count!) two or three weeks at a time, and it was NEVER enough to get comfortable with the language much beyond knowing enough to get around. I came to the conclusion, for me, anyway, that I need a longer period of immersion to improve my fluency. So, in that context, yes, I would say it is hard.
And of course this is just the spoken part, never mind the writing. Again, know enough basic Kanji in common situations to get around.
4 years here in Japan and still having problems at work due to language barrier. I learned basic Japanese letters and words about a month but learned ancient Hebrew around a week😅😅😅
I think other major difficulties have been left out here : most kanji have 2 different pronunciations, if not 3 or 4, sometimes more.
Then vocabulary. This is a really tough one. Tons of words. Never seen that. For instance in any language you're already familiar with, you'd get a word like "northeast" instantly, because you already know "north" and "east" which are really basic ones. In Japanese, you have to learn "kita" (north) "higashi" (east) and "hokutou" (northeast). And it's the same nonsense for so many words! Best friend, big tree, egg white, hot water...
That and the fact Japanese is really poor phonetically speaking creates a great number of homophones. So I find easier to read a novel than to understand an anime.
This is why kanji are great for foreign learners: you can clearly see how words are related. English vocabulary is similar in this regard, but one is expected to learn it by rote.
@@АлександрАлександров-щ7к8т No, not really: 彼 and 波, 猫 and 描く are not remotely related to each other. And knowing 描く does not help you know 絵 deals with the same concept, for example. Hear *hajimeru* and *hajimete* and you'll know they're related. 始める and 初めて? Not so much.
@@Komatik_ they look similar because their on-yomi is similar, not because of meaning. And you can clearly see their meanings are different from the left part. You couldn't come up with a worse example if you tried.
If you can understand the content of the sentence and the situation, it is stupid to make a mistake with the homonym
@@novrinkov0053 Yeah, and you have to get enough words to understand the content of the sentence, that's the point. If it's easy not to confuse bridge with chopsticks ("hashi" for both), it's not when it comes to more uncommon and abstract words.
As a Pakistani, learning Japanese is so much easier compared to Korean
I’ll try my best as an American to try an understand because i think the Japenes is cool.
Difficulty always depends
The word order part in contrary is the easier part for me (or those with my native language)
I thought the final bit of wisdom you get when you get the 9th tail was when to use は and when to use が. but I guess that's just a myth.
I'm not sure about the elephant (difficulty) being revealed at the very end with the Foreign Service Institute rankings. The thing about east Asian languages is that they have a structure that is totally different from a CTL, Commonly Taught Language, i.e. a European language, which is what many G7 second language learners have as their mother tongue. For example, as Olly pointed out, once the subject is known in Japanese, you can get away with just saying, "big" or "delicious". Otherwise, you might need to use a "copula" which has the same root as "copulate".
That said, I describe the difference between Japanese and a European language as similar to MacOS and Windows. They both perform similar tasks, in this case, to describe the human condition, but one of them is more user friendly. Story Learning is a brilliant strategy since it places language in a continuous context rather than in isolated units.
I grew up with Japanese imported games so im fluent in reading and making sentence order. But I'm not good with speaking the language. Cause well videogames have alot of text and listening practice. But speaking is a whole different thing.
As japanese you dont have to memorize respectful keigo and humble keigo. just polite one is fine cuz even some japanese people cant use them well.
As a Finnish speaker, I find all agglutinative languages fairly straightforward. This includes Japanese.
The hardest part is learning enough characters to read and of course vocabulary.
I think the strangest Japanese word is くノ一 (kunoichi). It consists of a hiragana, a katakana, and a kanji, in that order, which is the opposite of the usual order. It was formed by decomposing the kanji 女.
Holy moly, never met that one! Indeed, it's in the dictionary. Thanks for giving me my word of the day before breakfast 😂
As a joke I usually hear that Japanese and Arabic are polar opposites. Japanese grammar isn't the most difficult thing in the world, whereas Japanese writing is quite a nightmare.
In Arabic, a person can get the hang of the writing system with a bit of moderate practice, however Arabic grammar is preeeetty hellishly difficult.
Ive read otaku when the praising someone thing. So what does that word means indeed?
Do a video on icelandic please
We officially use katakana for animals’ and plants’ names too, not only foreign words.