(Japanese) What is your biggest challenge?

[Richard.H]

Hey everyone!

I have a few questions for people studying Japanese - or people interested in studying Japanese. I know there is a dedicated part of the forum to Japanese language only, but I wanted to hear opinions of people who are just thinking of learning Japanese as well!

What is your biggest challenge when you started out? Or what's your biggest fear of starting out? How were you thinking of starting to learn the language? What were your studying materials lacking?

To summarize I guess, what were your first studying materials and what were your initial snags/problems you've run into?

Basically I'm trying to figure out what are the most typical problems beginners have to face. Any and all opinions are welcome!

All the best

Richard

[Spyllus]

My biggest fear and difficulty, is learning and remembering all of the Japanese characters, I have trouble even just remembering the basic ones at times.

[Chris_A]

While I haven`t started to learn Japanese yet, I`m definitely planning to. Reading and writing will be a challenge for sure, but I think pronunciation and generally, speaking the language, might be easier then learning other Asian languages. Japanese, to me, sounds pretty European.

[Wanda Kaishin]

 

To summarize I guess, what were your first studying materials and what were your initial snags/problems you've run into?

I could probably write books on this but I'll try to keep it short and not torture you. If you ask around and do a little research, as you've done with this post, you should find that most serious learners will strongly recommend that you start using the phonetic Japanese scripts, hiragana and katakana, or kana for both of those, from the very beginning. Although using romanized script, romaji, in the beginning might seem like a good shortcut, in the long run it can really cause some problems. So if you choose to use kana, I would say this is the biggest hurdle in the very beginning.

This is a comparison that I often see made between Chinese and Japanese: Chinese starts out hard and gets easier; Japanese starts out easy and gets harder. I find this to be pretty accurate.

For initial study materials, I'd recommend just sitting down and memorizing the script. You should use a resource that has audio. You do this in the very beginning because when you hear a sound you want to picture it's kana, not romaji. This might not seem important to you right now, but I assure you it is. So just some little resource that teaches you all the kana and has audio should do.

[Tyrell]

I think for me the biggest challenge was writing (and understanding) the letters. Being someone who grows up speaking and writing languages with Latin alphabets, it's incredibly hard to suddenly have to write 'symbols' like Japanese letters.  "こんにちは、私の名前は〜です".. it just looks incredibly complicated and completely unreadable, at least at first glance. And that demotivates you from learning the language. And it just gets worse from there, because it's barely the hardest thing about Japanese.

[linguaholic]

The biggest challenge in Japanese? Definitely the grammar. The grammar in Japanase is very very complicated, especially in comparison with the Chinese Grammar, which is very easy. Moreover I have been confused with the different readings of Characters. This kunyomi, onyomi thing you know. I never really figured out how this is supposed to work. The Japanese society is very hierarchical and this is also reflected by the Japanese language; so this makes the grammar even more difficult and it also shows in vocabulary and different language use according to specific situations ---> honorific language.

[Franco]

The best way to become fluent in a new language is to befriend someone or organize for someone who is fluent in it, preferably a native speaker. It becomes so much more easy and you don't feel that you are studying a new language because you always want to be able to understand what the other person is saying. 

[Dannyd857]

My biggest problem is finding motivation. I would love to be able to speak and red the language with ease, but it is such a daunting task compared to latin and germanic languages. Grammar and vocabulary are difficult enough without having to learn 2000 kanji instead of a traditional alphabet.

[jamesbonner]

lol I always wanted to learn Japanese, but the biggest chalange is the totally new letters, at least in the other languages that use the latin letters, we already know how to spell the letters and how to write them, not like Japanese ! every thing is just new for me ...

[BonClay]

I think the biggest challenge in learning Japanese is definitely memorizing the 2000 most used kanji. I think this is where a lot of people get discouraged since hiragana and katakana can be learned within a day or two. I'm sure most people just want to start speaking the language, but with Japanese it's important to have a good foundation in reading and writing first. It is a lot to remember, but try not to overwhelm yourself. Just study around 10-20 kanji a day, then practice afterwards.