As a native Japanese speaker, one thing that surprises me is how difficult Japanese can become at an advanced level.
A sentence can be grammatically correct and still sound unusual to native speakers.
Many learners think vocabulary and grammar are the hardest part.
But natural Japanese often depends on context, tone, and how people actually speak.
Even Japanese people sometimes explain things with:
"It just sounds more natural."
For people learning Japanese:
What part feels the most difficult or unexpected?
by ke———-i
19 comments
As a native English speaker I feel the same about English.
Appreciate the thought
Everything you said is true for all languages.
Going specifically between japanese and english I think the hardest thing is the fact english focuses on the subject and japanese on the context. This leads to a lot of word choice that will change from situation to situation with no set rules.
Give yourself credit where credit is due, english is just as difficult for japanese speakers as japanese is for english speakers. At the end of the day its not necessarily true difficulty in a scientific sense, but just extreme differences. We are all overcoming those differences like a bridge over a canyon.
Honestly, it’s already difficult at the beginner level. While learning English and Spanish I could map words, learn easy sentences. Yeah word order is a little different but nothing compared to the complete Yoda speak that is Japanese. Tack onto that having to learn not one but three writing systems and only having a good 100 syllables so everything kinda sounds “the same” at the beginning, not really saying “I” and “you” all that much (easiest beginner stuff when learning other languages), yeah… The learning curve is super steep and then it just is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of difficulty in later stages….
I like the challenge though.
Context is definitely the hardest thing. My partner is Japanese and we code-switch frequently, but if she starts a conversation in Japanese it often takes me a minute to figure out what she’s even talking about. I’m also prone to making errors that are _only_ errors because of context but are otherwise grammatically correct, eg. politeness levels, or which of two synonyms is the appropriate word.
And also kanji. Kanji is hard.
My biggest struggle is that almost all good online resources to learn Japanese are in English and my native language is German.
Sometimes, words or grammatical concepts that would be well translated between Japanese and German are made more difficult by having to transfer them through English as the middleman. E.g.: In German, you can say “das geht nicht” for “one mustn’t”, but it literally means “this doesn’t go”. Therefore, from the German perspective, 「～てはいけない」makes a lot more sense.
On the other hand, it makes my understanding of vocabulary more solid, because I have two points of reference.
Edit: I’m nowhere near advanced btw, but I really enjoy the journey. Japanese has been my favorite language to learn so far.
Depends on the learner ‘s native language. As chinese speaker, its easy for me to pick up kanji but grammar is totally different
English grammar is more similar to chinese so i learned it faster
The conjugations for verbs and adjectives. For example in regard to the verb taberu tabenai,tabenakatta tabenai,etc. Do I memorize all the conjugations of a verb or adjective or just assemble them as needed? (For example, taberu to tabenai. Drop the ru and add nai.)
Word order.
I know the words I’m going to use. I know the “rules”. Why does 来週 not go at the start of this sentence this time?
Japanese is difficult for me personally for a couple reasons:
– firstly, learning your first language works completely differently than learning a language as an adult. Because of that it’s incredibly difficult to really tell how one language compares to another unless you are intimately familiar with both. It also means that if a language is complex, it is much harder to pick up as an adult
– secondly, English is my first language, “Germanic” languages notoriously translate terribly and are basically alien to Japanese. Which is part of what makes it very difficult for English speakers to learn Japanese
– Thirdly and *MOST IMPORTANTLY*, Japanese is just systems on top of systems on top of systems. The level of complexity and sheer number of different systems that all interplay is really insane, whomever codified japanese must have been genuises. The amount of memorisation of systems and mechanics is basically just absurd, and I’m good at memorisation. To me English is comparatively infinitely simpler, but then again, I didn’t have to properly learn it as an adult.
Japanese being so incredibly dense and complicated(for example there are literally different words to count everything and in different contexts! fruit vs people for example, to me that is completely insane and a lot to remember) AND it being alien to an English speaker in syntax and such makes it ridiculously hard to learn with any real speed. I have been learning Japanese for about 20 years and I still only probably have grade 5 level or something(that’s mostly on me being lazy tho tbh lol)
So much of life in Japan js nonverbal, or expected exchanges. In situation x, say y. Fluency doesn’t come with just learning the language it’s how to act, what to say and what not to say in certain situations. It takes a certain amount of empathy and someone along the way to help course correct, along with a lot of studying.
Homophones in Japanese are particularly rough, due to the relatively simple phoneme set.
Every time I look up a word and see that there are a dozen other words with the same pronunciation, with context as the primary delineating factor it’s a little demoralizing.
Kanji is difficult. Very difficult.
I also have a hard time remembering certain less used hiragana and katakana at times
Just getting to the point of being able to read is so rough due to the Kanji and their various pronunciations. I’m German and I learned English before. It uses the exact same letters, actually even some less so I could more or less immediately start reading.
I’ve learned over 900 Kanji and with unknown words I still often don’t know how to pronounce them even if I know all the Kanji in them.
So what often happens is that I understand the meaning due to the Kanji but wouldn’t know how to pronounce a word.
Still like 1300 more to go…
the same how native japanese phrases in english can sometimes sounds weird to native english speakers.😁
Japanese is hard in general, but coming from English kanji is a wall at the beginning. Speaking, and listening, is also tough since the sounds are so similar to each other compared to English. The part that doesn’t get as much talk though, is how many pronunciation exceptions exist (一匹 、二匹、三匹). I hope eventually they’ll be more natural but they’re not intuitive to me yet.
All OPs responses are AI generated. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather read replies with mistakes than AI slop.
Oh, I have one more: the pitch accent.
In English, pitch tends to be a feature of prosody rather than semantics, so it took a very long time for me to retrain my ear to attend to it. Consequently, I pronounced ゴクー wrong for _years_ until my partner corrected me one day. I had been watching Dragon Ball and still missed it, defaulting to the English pronunciation I grew up with. (It didn’t help that half the characters address him as そんくん, anyway.)
Oh, but the best part: the pitch contour that’s “correct” for a given word or phrase varies with dialect. A lot of them are flipped going from 標準語 to 関西弁.
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