I currently have to use Subtitles, kinda annoying. And I despise dubs since the voice acting is so bad, I mean like the emotions in the voice, its so emotionless in English.
I am a English speaker with some fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin.
How difficult is Japanese? Am I gonna waste a lot of time?
Also what’s the best resource to learn?
I tried this during my weeb phase some 20 years ago.
I stumbled across a video lecture series om some torrent site, and despite being very old (from the 70s or 80s) it was actually pretty good for teaching everyday conversational japanese.
I never progressed beyond the very basics due to life happening, but it got me far enough that I could at least grasp the general topic at hand. I’m sure I would’ve gotten a decent understanding of the language if I had kept at it.
Japanese is a fairly simple language with easy grammar. From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart that knowing one probably won’t help you much with the other, although I may be mistaken.
From what little Mandarin I’ve learned, I’d say the two are far enough apart
There are probably some loanwords, and I’d guess being able to read Chinese might help reading kanji, but beyond that, yeah, the two languages are completely unrelated linguistically. Japanese is effectively a language isolate, not related to any other languages in the world. (There are technically some minority languages on Japan’s outlying islands with their own separate but related languages, so it’s not quite a language isolate, but close.) That includes being unrelated to Chinese and Korean languages. (Incidentally, Korean is like Japanese, almost-but-not-quite a language isolate.)
As someone who has tried studying all three languages, Korean and Japanese are actually quite similar. Many grammar patterns like particles and conjugations can be directly translated and many loanwords from Chinese sound very similar in both languages. So knowing either one certainly does make learning the other one easier.
TL;DW: keep listening to Japanese media for a couple of hours a day. Watch anime in Japanese with no subs, listen to Japanese podcasts or audiobooks in Japanese while you’re working or doing something else, etc. Try to find something you know a bit about because it will help keep you engaged and help with context.
There’s a chapter about tolerating ambiguity which means they in the beginning you won’t understand anything and it will be very frustrating but you need to accept it and keep feeding your brain Japanese inputs. You’ll learn the sentence structure and vocabulary as well as learning pronunciation, this is basically how babies learn. You’re brain is really good at pattern recognition so just give it enough inputs and eventually it will start to click
Start doing Anki cards which will supplement all the inputs. Don’t go overboard, just learn the alphabets and then some common vocab and keep listening to other media. After about a year, start reading and writing a lot. Read manga, read books, and start writing notes and stuff in Japanese.
That’s basically it. You can use study materials if you want but feeding your brain more inputs is key. In addition to being really effective it has the benefit of being way more fun than studying grammar and whatnot
I had a friend who was a computer science student and did an additional major in Japanese just so he could read manga in original language. It can be done but requires a lot of dedication.
If you are a native English speaker, then learning Germanic and Romance languages will be easy because they have much in common. With Japanese, there’s no real evolutionary commonality so you really have to just learn a whole new system that doesn’t match your expectations–and from scratch. Example:
1,352
English: one-thousand three-hundred fifty-two Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two
Just the conception of how numbers work is different. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to do this, it would be fantastic. Just know that you have to develop a lot of new intuitions.
Japanese: one thousands place, three hundreds place, five tens place, two
That sounds like: 一千 三百 五十 二 (In both Chinese and Japanese Kanji)
“thousand(s)” is one word, there is no separate “place” word lol, doesn’t seem that different from english tbh
I think the better way to highlight the difference with English is the 萬 (10,000) 億 (100,000,000) which becomes the new place value instead of “milllion” (1,000,000) and “billion” (1,000,000,000). 千萬 (thousand-[wan/man]; aka: thousand-[ten thousand]; aka: 10,000,000) become a new word that would be slightly more challenging for English-Only speakers.
I have friends who learned japanese quite easily. Granted, they where living in japan so that’s way easier being deep into easy practice and daily exposure.
But grammar is quite easy, as well as phonetics (that actually depends on your mother language, for us it is at least).
Of course don’t learn the traditional symbols, or don’t learn how to write it at all, since that would be useless to your goal. If that is even possible I don’t know.
Disclaimer: I didn’t study japanese
I have friends who learned japanese quite easily.
Easily? 🧐
Granted, they where living in japan
Oh. Lmao. Of course. 😆
Hey you know btw I’m Chinese and I learned English very easily. How? It’s actually very simple. I immigrated to a English-speaking country when I was a child (with family).
xD
Consuming media is a great way to supplement your language-learning, but be careful not to confuse the dialog used in anime with actual conversational Japanese. Just like how nobody actually talks like a Western cartoon character does, Japanese people don’t talk like anime characters. Anime dialog is largely dramatized.
Also for what it’s worth; depending on what you’re watching, the English dubs have gotten way better in recent years. There’s a lot of good talent in the dub scene these days, and Japanese directors are getting better at trusting the performance of western voice actors, instead of demanding that the actor sounds the way they think it should sound in English. In my experience, most dubs post-2010 are generally pretty good. Generally.
Every time someone says the dub is actually good this time and I try it out, it sounds like shit. Frieren was the last time I trusted the dubbers and they made her sound like a MILF. She’s supposed to sound like a young woman because that’s what she is by elf standards. There was a whole running gag about whether she’s a MILF which doesn’t make any sense in english because she is definitively a MILF there.
Dragonball super has pretty great dubs. So does cowboy bebop. NGE also is pretty good. FMA Brotherhood also does a great job. So is My Hero Academia.
Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.
So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.
Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).
I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)
Yur Inglick iz turrbul!
[kj]
Hey I actually did that in my uni years because I wanted to experience manga in the original way. I guess it depends on how fast you absorb stuff like vocab but if you’re already used to listening to Japanese convo, it could take a few months to master the grammar (that’s the easy part imho). Then the hard part would be the writing (which you could avoid entirely since you’re focused on anime but I don’t think it’s a good idea in the long run since there’s a lot of written stuff in anime as well) and vocab. If you study a little every day (say 1 hour), it would take 6 month to understand basic stuff (like teenage shonen) and then a few years for more advanced stuff. That’s just my two cents In my case, took me 2-3 years to actually read shonen manga but I still struggle with furigana-less manga
It depends on your age and determination. The younger you are the less effort it will take
I don’t know shit about Cantonese and the only mandarin I know is the most basic of phrases and stuff to refer to food (so essentially nothing) so I can’t speak to that
Japanese is hard, but so is any language. You get out what you put in. I wasted about a year with “studying” half assed for like 10-15 minutes a day with duolingo. It was good that I had a consistent routine but at the end of 1 year I had very little to show for my effort. Learn from my mistake.
After that I switched things up. I didn’t put in a ton more time but I changed approach. Pretty standard but boring stuff: Anki, Assimil, and some other more targeted apps later on (renshuu, Benkyō, and most recently kanji dojo have been helpful). Setting up language exchange calls via apps like hello talk and discord have been far more helpful as things have progressed. This is more of a significant time investment and requires me to teach English a bit but I am happy to do it for free Japanese instruction. Joining group chats on line, watching YouTubers and vtubers, anime and dramas, etc also is helpful but the hard part was determining when to make the jump to not use subtitles and finding content that was digestible at my level. I’m not the kind of weeb that watches precure and little kid shows but for a minute I did just to watch stuff without subs. It sucked.
After about 5 years I got decent enough to have solid conversations via phone and text. Then DeepL came out and made it all pointless haha
If you have any fluency in Chinese, Japanese will be a little easier. Language learning difficulty; https://blog.rosettastone.com/the-complete-list-of-language-difficulty-rankings/ https://www.ecinnovations.com/blog/top-10-most-difficult-languages-in-the-world/
Just depends on how much time and effort you put into learning, if you’re willing to study for 3 hours a day you’ll probably pick it up in a couple years, if you do 5 minutes on duolingo a day probably not going to progress very far
study for 3 hours a day you’ll probably pick it up in a couple years
Surely if you study for 3 hours a day, you wouldn’t need a couple years.
That’s a quite standard time line to properly learn a language. Also depends what you mean by “pick it up”: getting a soda at the supermarket? Probably a week. Reading their maximum works of literature? Much longer. Having a reasonably smooth conversation and being able to read some small books? 3 years and about right
Depending on the proficiency level you want, but if we include immersion here (which we should as studying per se won’t get you very far on its own) then you will need a couple of years. Unless you’re studying and immersing full-time, there’s no way to speak a language proficiently in less than that.
I attempted this. I enrolled on an evening course and followed it for a year, doing all the exercises and so on. After one year, I had a rudimentary understanding of the simplest symbols (no kanji) and could do a minimal baby talk. From there, there is a lot of vocabulary. I abandoned. It’s not an easy path, but maybe missing other languages in the same family helps. For me, Japanese was my first non-European language. Fascinating but haaaaard!
The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.
The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.
Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).
No one actually provided good immersion material Check iroironanihongo on Youtube.
Check specifically for the playlist named: [BEGINNER] いろいろなアニメ
has anyone else attempted this.
Yes. Every Western Weeb for starters.
Hey, us Eastern weebs do it too!
Duty noted, and please accept my apologies. Consider it a consequence of my ignorance.
It’s not an easy language to master even if you lived full-time in Japan. Everything about the language is needlessly complicated. The grammar, the writing system, the social conventions that influence word choices. Anime Japanese is its own kettle of fish. Overly colloquial or stylized samurai talk - neither of which you’ll get taught in most language courses.
Now, you could be a savant who picks it up in no time. More likely you’ll be in it for a couple of weeks and give up - or life. It’s not a bad hobby. Even beyond Duolingo you’ll find plenty of resources online and lots of it free.
Everything about the language is needlessly complicated.
I mean, there is no language that isn’t needlessly complicated. At least Japanese doesn’t have gendered nouns.
toki pona li pona.
Consider the needlessly complicated to be applied on top of a general baseline of needlessly complicated that applies to any language.
While they don’t have gendered nouns, they have something equally unnerving for the beginner learner. Their noun classes evolve mostly around the nature of shapes and sizes, which becomes an issue the moment you need to count anything. For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms. And don’t get me started on the calendar. English is relatively unsophisticated by comparison.
For which there are two systems, one of which stops at ten, and the other is highly irregular in its forms.
I think you mean Wago and Kango counting, in which case Kango isn’t irregular at all. There are sound changes, but they almost all follow a handful of basic rules. Wago is plenty irregular, but it also stops at ten and is only used for a handful of things. It’s messed up, sure, but not the end of the world.
And don’t get me started on the calendar.
The calendar? Their months are literally just firstmonth, secondmonth, thirdmonth, etc.
I mean, I thought Japanese was super straightforward compared to English. I’ve been speaking English for three goddamn decades and I:
- still occasionally flip my Rs and Ls when I’m going fast and being careless
- have to pause a beat before saying “Canada” to make sure I don’t use the rhythm structure/emphasis pattern for “banana”
- sometimes just get really lost when I make a complicated sentence and have to stop and try again
- can barely remember that English speakers take pills, and not drink them (you don’t chew them, for fucks sake! Just say drink!)
- fucking hate that OUGH has more readings than most kanji
- realized a couple years into learning English, that English has twenty-six radicals, stacked horizontally, and they make a word, and that word may not be pronounced how the radicals suggest, and it’s best just to memorize 116,000 kanji-words (and you English speakers bitch about kanji so endlessly, not understanding the sheer absolute fucking monster you came from)
can barely remember that English speakers take pills, and not drink them (you don’t chew them, for fucks sake! Just say drink!)
In my mind drink is exclusively for liquids, which is why drinking a solid sounds weird to me. Because there’s no chewing involved swallowing pills makes more sense than eating them, but I’ll admit I don’t know why “take” is the usual verb.
The last point resonates with me! 😭 all other European languages are actually write-as-you-speak. Why, English, why???
The Great Vowel Shift. English writing was sensible in the early 14th century around the time of Chaucer, but then shit got out of whack speaking-wise and the writing system was never adjusted to reconcile the difference. So you can blame the Black Death I guess.
It’s not only vowels, but consonants disappearing or just having a different flavor of sounds in each word. Like word, sword, swan…
Danish has entered the chat. They don’t pronounce anything the way it’s written either. And French consists of 80 percent silent letters or thereabouts. It’s not just English in Europe.
I don’t know Danish, but French is at least consistent in what is pronounced and what is not. So seeing a word will tell you how to pronounce it even if it’s the first time you encounter it.
Edit: I was proven wrong about French.
Incorrect
Can you give me an example?
