Is Japanese Hard to Learn? The Hard Parts and the Easy Ones

The US Foreign Service Institute puts Japanese in its hardest category of languages for English speakers. Its estimate for reaching professional working proficiency is about 88 weeks of full-time study, or roughly 2,200 class hours.

That figure gets quoted a lot, usually to frighten people. It's a reasonable measure of the total distance, but it tells you nothing about where the hours go. Japanese isn't evenly hard. Some parts are easier than the equivalent parts of French or German, and a couple are heavy enough to eat most of the time on their own. It helps to know which is which before you start.

What's easier than you'd expect

Pronunciation

Japanese has five vowels, あ い う え お (a, i, u, e, o), and each sounds the same in every word. Most of the consonants exist in English already. Syllables are simple, nearly always one consonant plus one vowel, which is why さくら is just sa-ku-ra. There are no tones of the kind Mandarin has.

Kana spelling is close to phonetic, too. Read what's written and you'll nearly always be right. The main exceptions are three particles: は is said "wa", へ is "e" and を is "o".

The catches are small but real. Vowel length matters: おばさん (obasan) is an aunt and おばあさん (obaasan) is a grandmother. Doubled consonants matter: 来て (きて, kite) means "come" and 切手 (きって, kitte) is a postage stamp. The Japanese r sits somewhere between an English r, l and d. And there's pitch accent, which separates 箸 (はし, hashi, chopsticks) from 橋 (はし, hashi, bridge) in standard Tokyo speech. Getting pitch wrong makes you sound foreign, but it rarely stops anyone understanding you.

No gender, no articles, hardly any plurals

Nouns have no grammatical gender, and there's no "a" or "the". Most nouns don't change for number either: 猫 (ねこ, neko) is "cat", "a cat" or "the cats", whichever the context needs. A few words for people take a plural ending, like 私たち (わたしたち, watashitachi, we), and that's about it. Verbs don't change with the subject. 行きます (いきます, ikimasu) is "I go", "she goes" and "they go". If you've ever memorized a table of French or German endings, none of that exists here.

Verbs are very regular

There are two tenses, past and non-past, and the non-past covers both present and future. Verbs fall into two regular groups. The list of irregular verbs that every textbook gives has two entries, する (to do) and 来る (くる, to come). Here they are next to one verb from each regular group, 食べる (to eat) and 飲む (to drink).

Even the irregular pair only misbehave in the stem, and their endings match everyone else's. There are a few smaller oddities. 行く (いく, to go) has the て form 行って where the pattern predicts 行いて, and a handful of honorific verbs bend the rules slightly. Next to English, with its sing, sang, sung and go, went, gone, the total is tiny. Our verb conjugation guide lays out the whole system.

A head start on vocabulary

A large number of everyday words are borrowed from English and written in katakana: テーブル (teeburu, table), ホテル (hoteru, hotel), アイスクリーム (aisukuriimu, ice cream). Once you can read katakana you can guess a lot of them. Not all, though. マンション (manshon) is an apartment building and コンセント (konsento) is a power outlet.

What's hard

Kanji

This is the big one. Japanese is written with three scripts at once. The two kana sets take a few weeks. Kanji takes years. The official list for everyday use has 2,136 characters, and most of them have at least two readings, with the word deciding which one applies. 生 is せい in 学生 (がくせい, student), なま in 生ビール (なまビール, draft beer) and う in 生まれる (うまれる, to be born).

The practical effect is that reading lags far behind speaking. You can hold a decent conversation long before you can read a newspaper, and for a long time every new word costs you three things to remember: the meaning, the sound and the spelling. Learners who already read Chinese skip a good part of this, which is one reason the question in the title has no single answer.

The difficulty is volume. No individual kanji is hard to learn. There are a lot of them, and they fade if you don't review. We go through the numbers in how many kanji you need.

Word order

The verb comes last. "I ate sushi in Tokyo yesterday" is 昨日東京ですしを食べました (きのう とうきょうで すしを たべました), in the order "yesterday Tokyo-in sushi ate". Whether a sentence is positive, negative, past or a question is settled at the very end, so you have to hold everything in your head until the speaker gets there.

Descriptions come before the thing they describe, however long they are. "The book I bought yesterday" is 昨日買った本 (きのう かった ほん), literally "yesterday bought book". Short ones like that are fine. A newspaper sentence with three of them nested inside each other takes practice to unpick.

Subjects are dropped whenever they're obvious, which is most of the time. That makes speaking easier and listening harder, because you have to keep track of who's being talked about.

Particles

Japanese marks the role of each word with a small particle placed after it: を for the object, に for a destination or a point in time, で for the place where something happens. Most map onto an English preposition well enough. A few don't. 公園に行く (こうえんに いく) is "go to the park" and 公園で遊ぶ (こうえんで あそぶ) is "play in the park", and choosing between に and で for places trips learners up for a long time. The difference between は and が has no English counterpart at all, and people are still refining their feel for it at an advanced level. Our introduction to particles covers the main ones.

Politeness levels

Every Japanese sentence shows where you stand in relation to the listener. "To eat" is 食べる (たべる) with friends and 食べます (たべます) with strangers and colleagues. It becomes 召し上がる (めしあがる) when you're speaking respectfully about someone else eating, and いただく when you're speaking humbly about yourself.

For the first year or two you need two of those levels, plain and polite, and switching between them is mechanical. The honorific and humble layer, called keigo, is harder. It matters in customer service and business, and native speakers find it tricky as well, which is why many Japanese companies train new graduates in it. As a learner you'll be forgiven nearly anything as long as you stick to です and ます.

The smaller things

• Counters. Counting needs a counter word that depends on the object: 枚 (まい) for flat things, 本 (ほん) for long thin things, 匹 (ひき) for small animals, and many more.
• Casual speech. Spoken Japanese contracts heavily. 食べている (たべている, is eating) becomes 食べてる, 分からない (わからない, I don't know) becomes 分かんない, particles vanish and sentences trail off. If you've only studied from a textbook, your first unscripted conversation can be a shock.
• Unfamiliar vocabulary. Outside the loanwords, almost nothing looks like English. There's no equivalent of spotting "nation" in the French nation.

What that adds up to

Japanese is quick to start speaking and slow to start reading. With a few months of steady study you can introduce yourself, order food, ask for directions and follow slow speech, because the sounds are easy and the grammar is regular. Reading real text takes much longer, and most of that extra time is kanji and vocabulary.

That should shape how you study. Grammar and listening respond to bursts of effort. Kanji doesn't. It responds to a small amount every day for a long time, with reviews spaced so that each character comes back before it fades. Start it early and keep it running alongside everything else.

Your goal changes the answer as well. Chatting with friends, reading manga that has furigana, passing a JLPT level and working in a Japanese office are four different amounts of work, and they call for very different amounts of kanji.

Common questions