I speak English(C1-C2) French(Native), and Tamil (Native) at a native or near native level and i am pretty advanced in German too(B1). The main thing that seems overwhelming to me is kanji. Sentence structure seems similar to my mother tongue tamil too. Grammar seems to be easier than German. Feel free to point it out if i am wrong.
I was wandering how i should approach learning the Japanese language. How should i approach Grammar? Sentence structures? Does my knowledge in other languages aid me in any way?
5 comments
Unfortunately for the most part Japanese is it’s own language family. It’s unique. I really recommend choosing a grammar textbook. Japanese grammar is a trip.
Japanese isn’t related to many other languages (Ryukyuan ~~and possibly Korean~~), so it’s hard to make comparisons. Many learners find the grammar hard.
None of the European languages on your list will help you, but your background in Tamil might help a little; they both use subject-object-verb sentence order. I don’t know enough about Tamil to know if there are other similarities, though.
Kanji isn’t an issue, I think any leaner of Japanese that’s made it to intermediate would be able to assure of that. It’s a scary hurdle to the beginner but that’s really it, it just looks scary and in my opinion scares beginners into learning Japanese in ways that are really not fun and slow by trying to specific learn Kanji first. The way an intermediate learner learns can be done by a beginner also, see a word you don’t know, add it into your Anki deck and you’ll learn to recognise it whether it’s written in Kanji or not. As for grammar, I’d recommend learning it primarily through experience, you’ll get lost, find the solution and become intimate with it. I would recommend watching like the first 30 of cure dolly’s videos for a start but that’s about it. [https://learnjapanese.moe/](https://learnjapanese.moe/) This site’s guide is great, the only thing I’d change is I don’t recommend starting from their suggested decks, just jump straight into it yourself, it’s faster and will be far more fun.
The grammar wasn’t hard at all for me(though I’m still a beginner, I just took the N4 test). I think the main difficulty for you may be kanji.
The grammar is no cake-walk but as far as I know, it’s not considered the hardest part. Japanese has an “unusually large” vocabulary as well as a challenging writing system.
Still you should have some advantage anyway due to you having language experience.