Japanese: The Hardest Language in the World

People often debate what is the hardest language in the world to learn. Assuming your native language is English or one of the other Indo-European languages like Spanish, German, Russian, or Farsi, then an Asian language like Chinese, Japanese, or Korean is an obvious choice. In other words, the language you start off with affects which languages are easier to learn next.

If you are a native Spanish speaker, you’ll have little difficulty learning the other Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, etc.). If German or English is your first language, then the other Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, etc.) go easily, and the Slavic and Scandinavian languages aren’t too much of a stretch.

If Japanese is your native language, then it is easy, and Korean isn’t too bad. But otherwise there’s good argument for saying that Japanese is the hardest language in the world, with Chinese being a close second.

Japanese is hardest becaus, first and foremost, the writing system is catastrophically confusing and convoluted. My classical Japanese history professor said that the worst thing ever to happen to Japan in its entire history was the introduction of Chinese characters. The Japanese took them, gave each several readings (pronunciations) and sometimes as many as two dozen, then created two syllabaries (like alphabets, but larger), and over the next 1,000 years came up with all sorts of bizarre, inconsistent rules about when to use characters versus the two syllabaries, and how to combine them to write the language. After the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese decided that their writing system wasn’t complicated enough, and so added the Roman alphabet for writing certain words, and for the convenience of foreigners.

Now Chinese does use more characters than Japanese does, about five to six thousand compared to the two to three thousand in daily use in Japan. So learning to read Chinese does require learning a lot more characters. However, since each character is pronounced in only one (or sometimes two) ways, what has to be learned for each character is much simpler.

There are no rules about when and how to combine characters in Chinese with anything else, since that doesn't happen. Japanese, by contrast, has complex rules about when and where the hiragana shows up with characters. These rules are sufficiently troublesome to challenge many native speakers. Then there are personal and place names, which are given readings almost at random, often completely unrelated to the standard pronunciation for the character.

None of this is an issue in Korean, which has what is arguably the most brilliant, efficient, and effective writing system ever developed in the world. Learning to read and write Korean does take effort, but only about as much as learning the Arabic script when learning Arabic, Farsi, or Urdu, or learning Devanagari for Hindi.

Grammar in Japanese is a bit messy, with verbs doing all manner of bizarre things, adjectives behaving exactly like verbs at times, and all of this having to be changed depending on who is saying what to whom under what circumstances (what is called “respect language” in Japanese).

tl;dr

実はそんなに難しくないんだよ
複雑なところがあるなんだけど
この世で各語にはそれは普通だろう？

didnt read lol

tl;dr
English is hardest due to grammatical structure.
Russian is second hardest for similar reasons.

I thought English was fairly simple compared to other languages.

I would agree that English is easy to learn to a basic level as is very evident, but to learn it fluently must be very hard as it is littered with hundreds of nonsenscial idioms, even in grammatical structures. It's also the fastest developing language, due to most computer and science related work being done in English.
As for Japanese the grammar is incredibly easy and logical. It's just the kanji that require a lot of time and effort.

Foreigner cannot into chinese character

LOLWUT?

Learning to read and write Japanese is certainly the hardest. With the kun'yomi and on'yomi and the several ways to pronounce a kanji character and its several definitions depending on its context.

Learning Japanese is easy as long as you don't waste time posting this.

I always thought French was the hardest language, due to its completely fucked-up grammar. I read very little about Japanese, but it seemed to be consistent, with simple grammar and the not-so-hard kanji system.

I'm Korean and im currently learning Japanese.
I think its pretty easy to learn Japanese if you know korean
the grammatical structure is very similiar(although there are some exceptions)
even some slangs are alike
it is somewhat challenging to memorize 3000 kanji though

Japanese is fucking easy.

>>14
Translate something I provide then faggot. And tell me EXACTLY how you pronounce it. Google Translate won't tell you.

Arabic is definitely one of the hardest.

You have to learn Modern Standard Arabic in order to read and write, but you also have to learn the local dialects in order to speak to people. So essentially, in order to obtain a good grasp in Arabic, you need to learn at least two languages.

Tl;dr

>>15
Oh come on. Pronunciation is arguably the easiest part in the whole Japanese language.

* Small amount of sounds
* Tones are so unimportant that they are not even written in the dictionaries (to the shame)
* Reading of a word is consistent and doesn't change. Compare with Russian: дом(dOm,a house), but дома(dAmá, houses), дома(dÒma, in the house).

Google Translate won't tell you.
edict and rikaichan would.

>>18
seconded that.
Japanese is too easy.

>>18
And if you're French, all sounds except the "r" (closer to our "l") exist in French, so even easier.

>>18
The fact is depending on the context a kanji can be pronounced like 5 different ways.

>>18
provide video proof then of you speaking fluent japanese

COCK INTO IT. PENIS PENIS PENIS. COCKING OUT MAXIMUM.

PENIS FOREVER!!! !!! !!!

Japanese grammar might seems easy on the paper, but reading and understanding it is another thing altogether. Epecially when it differs so much from Germanic and Romantic languages. I'd say European languages are much easier than Japanese to Europeans for obvious reasons. Likewise Japanese is easy for Koreans due to similarities etc.

Japanese learners sure have it easy since they have so much material that relate with their language interests and vice versa. I had so much trouble with Spanish since I had no motivation to learn it past the basic grammar and expressions. That and I had no material that interested me like manga or anime to hone my reading/comprehension skills. This makes the language seem more easier for some people who most of their time immersed in the language.

tl;dr there's no "hardest language" in the world and no language is easy as it depends on your mother language, the effort you put in and the willingness to learn it thoroughly.

The most trouble i got into when speaking foreign was when the language in question contains sounds my mother tongue does not. I.e. in English the difference between bad, bat, bed, and bet is not pronounceable. Cause my language does not contain those sounds.

>>15
There is only one way to pronounce a syllable in JP. Therefore, there is only one way to pronounce a give word. Pronunciation is fucking easy.

>>25
whats your native language?

But this language is so fucking easy

>bad, bat, bed, and bet

don't forget "but" while you are at it. Though it's more distinct than others.

>>26
Well, actually there can be more than one way. じゃねん for example can be pronunced like DZAnen or DJAnen. Not that it will confuse anyone.

>>24
Eh French and, even worse, German grammar aren't even easy on the paper , and have provided psychiatric hospitals with a good part of their clients for centuries. But it's true that the Japanese/Chinese writing system is really a huge mess

chinese grammer is very simple.

>None of this is an issue in Korean, which has what is arguably the most brilliant, efficient, and effective writing system ever developed in the world.

Can of Worms.jpg

The thing I don't get is how these cunts can go on without ever using any spacing between their words and still make sense of shit. IfIhadtoreadeverysentencealldaylong,writtenlikethis,Iwouldgobatshitfuckinginsane.

I've never seen an explanation for this, why haven't they adopted the fucking spacebar?

>>33

Funny, I had no problem reading that sentence.

>>34

congratulations, but would you want to sit down and read an entire book with no spaces? I'd have a god damn migraine after the first dozen pages. Then try and do that in a language you aren't completely fluent in. ARGGGGGGGGGGH.

>>35

Perhaps the kanji make whitespace unnecessary.

quite simply, from a "usability" standpoint, whitespace makes things easier for the user, or in this case the reader. all this is, is another example of how things could have been made much easier, but were simply ignored. yay for clutter.

>>30
I'm not having much problem with German grammar. But then, I'm Norwegian. Not that much difference.

>>33
The Chinese and the Japanese seem to agree to not really need spaces. Ancient Chinese used short(ish) sentences separated by commas/dots/whatever, modern Chinese looks not much different that way. In Japanese, kanji only ever seem to start a word, not end it.
Looking at Han'gul, however, it seems the Koreans beg to differ...

It's funny, I find the Japanese writing system to be simple and highly intuitive, it is what I would consider to be the "easy" part of the language.

The hardest language is Polish. Polish has 7 genders and 7 cases, an English speaking-native will be fluent at the age of ~12, but a Polish speaking-native will be fluent at the age of ~16.

>>40
an English speaking-native will be fluent at the age of ~12
what?

MANGSTAB GAAAAN

Japanese grammar seems easy to me. I never tried to seriously learn it but it seems much more consistent than, say, French, whose grammar is completely pants-on-head retarded.

I'm learning Japanese, I think the grammar and the pronunciation are the easiest parts. And the writing system is the hardest part.
My first language is French.

>>44

How is it easy?  The particles alone are hard to keep straight, and who came up with using a different counting system to count things depending on what they are?  I'm sorry but that is also pants-on-head retarded.  It doesn't make things any more comrehensible, it just makes a peson memorise extra words.  Also why is it that the language records the rank of the person spoken to -- It's a waste of time. 

And for the Corea-strong fag, Korean Hangul is great for Korean, but I defy you to write German with it.  Cryillic is actually much much better because it's alphabetic and almost any sound can be rendered with either one symbol or a combination of two symbols.  If Korean Hangul can do that, I'll believe that it's not limited to writing Korean for Koreans.  Latin has the same advantage -- you can write almost any sound, whether it occured in Latin or Italian, no need to mess with the sounds of the word or anything else.

>>45
it's alphabetic
aren't all alphabets?

Some are abjads (like hebrew or arabic), some are sylabaries (like Japanese Hiragana), some are alphabetic (like Latin or Cryllic). 

But back to the point -- can you write the words of another language in Korean Hangul or Japanese Hiragana?  Because I can write just about anything in Cryllic or Latin letters with no difficulty. 

I'd actually have the same critisim of Abjads -- Try to write Japanese in Arabic script.  It's not going to work well.

>>47
Try writing a driver in Python.

>>45
>The particles alone are hard to keep straight
Particles are not really difficult, in fact I like them.
>I'm sorry but that is also pants-on-head retarded.  It doesn't make things any more comrehensible, it just makes a peson memorise extra words.
It's not that hard to memorise, you just have to put some time in it. Oh, and a natural language doesn't evolve just to be more comprehensive. It sucks but it's like that.
>Also why is it that the language records the rank of the person spoken to
I'm not sure to see what you're talking about. You're talking about honorifics? Or the politeness levels? In that case, that part is very easy, it comes all naturally.

But I won't try to convince you it is easy. If you find it hard I can't do nothing about it.
Also maybe do I find that grammar easy because my first language is French.

>>49
>Also maybe do I find that grammar easy because my first language is French.
Probably. French grammar is a huge pile of shit that even confuses most native speakers. Its least terrible part is probably conjugation, but even that one looks needlessly complicated when compared to Japanese.