Is it hard to learn Japanese

I wanna learn how but I'm afraid, mostly from the different characters.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

>>2
I doubt English is the OP's first language.

>>3
Well if he doesn't know the characters, then he probably doesn't know any language related to Japanese to begin with, so it's still probably accurate

People need to stop posting that shitty Wikipedia article. The proficiency mentioned in that list are not the same for all languages. Also, "not knowing characters" doesn't make it the same for a speaker of say Korean and a speaker of English, so it's NOT "probably accurate".

>>5
Yeah and what are the chances he knows Korean? 1%? The guy probably speaks English anyways.

>>6
We're not talking about chances of him knowing a language, but the differences in learning Japanese depending on what's your mother tongue.
Nice cop-out there.

>>1
Japanese is easy if you know Korean or German. The characters are easy as pie, it just takes time to master them.

>>7
We're on an English message board asking about learning a foreign language. Saying it isn't his mother language is down-right stupid. He also obviously speaks English so it's relevant no matter what.
>>8
How the hell does German help Japanese? It doesn't.
Characters are easy as pie? Sounds like someone who only knows maybe 500 at best. Here's a hint, when you get to like 1200-1500, learning the rest gets that much harder because those last kanji are seriously never used. Even if you learn 2000 kanji there's still tons of other ones you will see like 徘徊/桶/槌/etc.

Mastering the kanji alone is harder than learning a language like Spanish for a native of English.

>>9
German pronounciation is pretty much identical to Japanese, so as a native speaker of German you will generally have no problems speaking Japanese.

As for the characters, I thought learning them was very easy and relaxing. I mastered the Jouyou Kanji in about 3 years with ease. I guess that very much depends on personal talent, though.

Japanese grammar is interesting and I agree that it gets harder the further you progress but on the whole, no big deal either in my opinion.

I didn't feel mastering Japanese was particularly hard, not any more so than English.

German pronounciation is pretty much identical to Japanese
Good lord, why don't you go and troll /b/?

>>11
If you don't believe me, not my problem. If you think Japanese is hard, well maybe it is hard for you but that doesn't make it hard for everyone.

>>12
Most people aren't as gifted at languages as you seem to be, so I guess your views are just an indication of your bias.

>>10
German pronounciation [sic] is pretty much identical to Japanese
I'm German and... lol no. Perhaps you pronounce the two languages identically, I certainly don't. And neither do the Japanese, or any German who doesn't want to make a total ass of himself.

I do agree with you that Japanese isn't harder than any other natural language and that learning kanji isn't as terrible as it may sound, though.

>>14

I'm not German, although I've studied it in middle school. The sounds of German and Japanese are close; for example, you'd pronounce 'a' and 'e' and 'k' the same way in both languages.

However, the accents themselves are completely different. The Japanese accent resembles Italian and Finnish more.

>>15
true, they do share quite a few sounds. But it makes me cringe when I hear Germans pronounce し or the ら行 using the German Sch or R, respectively.

Hey, OP here. Just wanted to let everyone know that english is in fact my first language. Sorry for any confusion.

>>16
That reminds me, germans can't even do the J sound. I remember one time a german told me he was chuukyuu-sai for age and I was like wtf?

>>10
Sorry but honestly, jouyou kanji isn't enough in today's age. I also somewhat mastered kanji in like 3 years, but one of those years was spent in Japan and I've always been way ahead of my class in kanji. When people tell me they master kanji, it usually means they just mastered the basics or they did heisig and they can't even read simple kanji like 強いる (no, it's not tsuyoiru..) and they read shit like 後ほど as atohodo or ushirohodo rofl
To read at least a highschool level book or higher without a dictionary honestly probably isn't even realistically feasible without living in Japan.

>>18
Sure, it's easy as pie. It's just a matter of learning vocabulary. Nothing exciting about it. And while it's true that Jouyou kanji isn't enough to understand every single word of a text for native speakers, it's good enough to understand most of it. You are probably not used to it because you are American but people, who speak more than 1 language, develope the ability to guess from context, so it's really not a problem if you don't understand a compound or a word every once in a while. Also you pick up new kanji all the time just by reading Japanese magazines and such.