Now that I got my last post out of the way, let's talk about how hard Japanese is. Hoo boy is it hard! But you said just make it fun, Joe! Talk about games and stuff! Go jump in a lake, last week me.
Even though learning a language is easier when it's fun, there are always challenges. I've been looking at the challenges of Japanese as part of what makes it interesting, like unlocking a puzzle. Here are a few of the things that make it challenging for a native English speaker (or at least for this native English speaker).
Three alphabets
English has 26 letters. Japanese has a set of 48 characters. And then another set of 48 characters. Oh and also a set of... something like 50,000 characters. But don't worry: according to Wikipedia "few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number." So if you want to read at a high school level you just have to learn the 2,136 "daily" characters.
As intimidating as this is, it was one of the things that appealed to me most about Japanese. It's so different from my experience! I'm fascinated by a writing system that's so visual and with so much meaning encoded into each character.
I didn't really know where to start. Duolingo started with hiragana, and I'm glad they did. It only took a week or two to learn the characters, and a few months later I can actually process them quite quickly.
Katakana characters represent the same phonetic sounds as hiragana, but usually used for foreign words. γ« (ka) γ‘ (me) γ© (ra) = γ«γ‘γ© = Camera 1 . I'm surprised how many English borrowed words are used in conversation, but it's been helpful to anchor what I'm hearing when I'm lost. The hardest part about katakana for me are two pairs of characters that are hard to distingush from each other: γ· vs γ, and γ³ vs γ½ - and have unrelated sounds: shi, tsu, n and so.
As for kanji, I've learned to read a few hundred characters but that's not really enough to read anything of substance yet.
Word origins
I've never tried to learn a language without a frame of reference for words. Even if you don't speak Italian you can probably guess that acqua means water and sole means sun, because English has words like aquarium and solar. The only Japanese word I've come across with a shared origin is skoshi, which means "a little bit" as in "move over a skosh." I don't know if I've ever said that to anyone. Maybe if I said it more often this would be easier.
I do think it will get easier when I develop a frame of reference within Japanese. I already know some words with shared roots, I imagine there will be a tipping point where I've seen enough characters that I can guess at new characters from context.
Particles
Particles are something that makes Japanese both simple and difficult. Simple because the particles tell you what part of speech something is, like noun declensions in Latin. If it's the subject: wa - γ―. Direct object: wo - γ. Location: ni, de, or e - γ« γ§ γΈ.
In some ways this can simplify sentences, for example you don't need different pronouns. In English, "I like her" and "she likes me" need different pronouns and verb endings depending on where "I" and "she" are in the sentence. Japanese uses the same words in either case: Boku wa kanojo ga suki desu vs. Kanojo wa boku ga suki desu. 2 It gets simplified even more when the context is known: in some cases you could just say suki ("like") and you would be understood.
The difficulty is in the subtle differences between the particles. Wa and ga are sometimes interchangeable but often not. Ni and de both indicate location, but ni is more like a destination while de indicates where an action takes place (or so I understand).
There's sort of an equivalent in English: think of words like "in, at, to, and on." There can be a subtle difference where there's no real rule but there's an understood right and wrong way to use it. Why do we ride in a taxi but on the bus? You can walk to school or talk to someone. Or walk at school and talk at someone. "Want to go at the movie with me? You can ride on my car!" You know when it sounds off, but try explaining it.
In these cases it's often more useful just to learn the patterns than try to categorize everything.
Homonyms, homophones, homographs
There are a couple of tricky things in Japanese: words that sound the same can have different meanings. Ame can mean rain or hard candy. Hashi can mean chopsticks or bridge. Kanji can mean the writing system or a feeling. Same sounds, different characters.
Or it can go the other way around: same kanji, different sounds! The character η© can be mono or butsu depending on the context. δΊΊ can be hito, jin, or nin. And there are a LOT of words like this. The characters originated from Chinese writing, which is the reason for at least some of the multiple pronunciations.
But when I get frustrated I remember English has the exact same thing. Bat (sports) and bat (animal) are spelled and pronounced the same. Same with wage (war) and wage (money). Rough dough: same letters, different sounds. Same sounds different letters: which witch? Whether weather! We've got a ton of them. Context is everything.
Numbers
Oh boy, numbers. 1-10 are easy to memorize when they're on their own (ichi, ni, san...). Things get complicated when numbers are in context. For one thing, everything has what's called a counter - a word that comes after the number and indicates the type of thing you're counting. Some of them are shape-based, but not always. If you have three pieces of paper (flat), you would use san mai. If you have three bottles (long, skinny) you would use san hon. If you're counting most animals it's san biki, but rabbits are san wa, which is also the counter for birds, obviously.
It's a little like if the counters we used for groups of animals were used for everything. A flock of birds. Two schools of fish. Three hons of bottles. Not really though.
There are tsu and ko, which are slightly more generic, but when you use tsu (among other words), the pronunciation changes dramatically: 1, 2, 3, ichi ni san becomes hitotsu futatsu mitsu.
Days, months, and years are similarly fickle: The word for year is usually nen, except when it's toshi. Rai nen = next year, kotoshi = this year. I haven't noticed any rules for when to use one or the other, you just have to memorize the use and patterns.
Subject-object-verb
I saved the hardest for last. All of the above are mostly just memorization. But Japanese is subject-object-verb, so coming from subject-verb-object English you have to mentally rearrange the sentence at the same time you're translating the individual words. I don't know if there are any shortcuts to this.
Some sentences are almost word-for-word reverse order. "Book the library to return I will." "Next year Canada go to I want to." The hang of it starting to get I am but every day a lot of focus it requires.
In fact, all of this comes down to recognizing patterns. Our brains are fantastically good at finding and remembering patterns, but sometimes building it up is frustratingly slow. I trust that at some point I'll reach a critical mass where I'm comfortable with the writing and I know enough words that learning will come much more quickly. For now I'm content to keep listening and let the sounds flow into my ears and the characters flow into my eyes. I can feel it slowly sticking, it just takes time.
1: From what I've seen, words are mostly borrowed from English, but interestingly Italian cities are borrowed with the Italian pronunciation: γ γ¦γ (Roma), γγ£γ¬γ³γγ§ (Firenze), γγγγ’ (Venezia), which is different for example from γγ©γ³γΉ (France) and γΉγγ€γ³ (Spain).
2: "Me (topic) her (object) like" and "Her (topic) me (object) like." Caveat: This is my basic understanding after less than six months learning the language. It may be that as sentences get more complex or formal, this isn't the case across the board.
