Cassie and I have both obviously been studying Japanese since before we left the States, and it has not been a fast or an easy process. But the more we come to understand Japanese, the more I think the hardest part about Japanese isn’t anything about Japanese – it’s just how different it is from English.
Like, okay, yes, learning all the kanji is a pain. But that really just boils down to “the vocabulary is a little harder to memorize,” and vocabulary just isn’t the hard part of learning a language. The slow part, maybe, but not the hard part.
The hard part is the grammar, and Japanese grammar just makes so much sense. I’m not at the point where I feel comfortable summarizing it – I’d definitely summarize parts of it wrong – but the whole language is like LEGO. Everything fits together in whatever combination you want to put it in. That makes it sound like it should be difficult – and it is definitely daunting at times – but in practice, it means that the language makes sense in a way that English doesn’t.
Even when I encounter a construction that I can’t parse out myself, once I have it explained to me, the whole thing makes sense, and adds a new tool to my toolbelt. The grammar is easy to remember because I don’t have to remember complex systems of standards and exceptions, I just need to know where the studs are and where the holes are and then I can guess at about 95% of it.
Which means learning it very quickly becomes just… work. When I was studying German and Spanish, I spent the entire period of study learning new grammatical concepts – new conjugations, new rules. With Japanese, though, I’m already nearing a point where I know enough of the grammar to read, like, YA books, I just don’t have anything like the vocabulary for it. But of course, the only way to learn vocab is by slogging through it – flash cards are a very useful tool, but just grabbing a book and struggling through it is also an important step.
It’s kinda boring, like for real. But “It’s so simple that it’s boring to learn” is a pretty great problem to have. I certainly don’t envy Japanese speakers who are studying English!