[Mediterraneo10]

I wish that people referring to Japanese as "the most difficult language to learn..." could add the important caveat "...among major global languages". There are thousands of languages spoken on Earth, and some of them involve complexities that would daunt speakers of English or other Standard Average European languages more than Japanese. As just two examples, I remain daunted by the morphology of Skolt Saami and Nganasan, and Japanese’s inflexion looks easy by comparison.

I am learning Japanese now, actually, and the hardest part is the writing system, but that is really just a matter of rote memorization. (I already learned Chinese years ago, mastering the kanji is just repeating the same process of flashcards, except with the need to learn two readings for most characters and not just one.) Rote memorization of glyphs is something open to anyone with adequate time, but matters of phonology/morphology/syntax might ultimately defeat a learner regardless of how much time they throw at the problem.

[wodenokoto]

You either really missed out on something when learning Chinese or you are in for a realization in Japanese. (Probably you just simplified your explanation)

The problem with Japanese kanji vs Chinese Hanzi is not just that Japanese has two (or more) common readings for every character, it’s that they don’t follow the phonetic element to nearly the same degree as Chinese.

In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.

In Japanese you will regularly come across names consisting only of known to you characters and you will still have no chance of knowing how to read them out loud.

But I totally agree with your main point: Japanese is not as difficult as it’s reputation will lead would be learners to believe but it does have some road blocks (mainly the writing system) that will stand in the learners way.

[Mediterraneo10]

> In Chinese you really do have a fighting Chinese of reading a word out loud that contains never by you seen before characters.

Not really. Sometimes you can guess the root without the tone, but you won’t get the tone itself, and so you can’t really claim to recognize the word. Tones are not optional in Chinese.

[presentation]

Yeah, I actually find a lot of the grammatical rules to be pretty straightforward and generally there aren’t many weird exceptions. Distinguishing sounds is pretty easy too, unlike Mandarin for example. The levels of formality are tricky at first but you quickly adapt to it, and they also follow well defined rules. A lot of the odd pronunciations of words like you mention are generally things you can just memorize blindly. Cultural aspects and sensitivity can be very tough, but I think that’s true for any foreign culture. Time intensive? Sure, but most difficult? I don’t think so, but I think that depends on what you mean by difficult and what your goal is. If your goal is to masquerade as a pseudo-native speaker and be fully literate, then yeah, I could see it. But if it’s just to be conversant, it’s not that bad.

[rtpg]

echoing this, getting to a "everyday discussions doable" level for the spoken language is a relatively quick affair. There are very few sounds in the language, and the hardest thing for native-english speakers is perhaps the double-vowel timing and like trying to decipher loan words/overwrite the "original pronunciation"

The writing system is hard, but learning it helps complement your vocabulary in the same way that learning greek and latin prefixes/suffixes expands your english vocabulary.

Not even to get into the fact that, as a high context language, you can get away with extremely simple sentences and rely on context way more than in other languages.

[SomeHacker44]

Having studied both Mandarin and Japanese, not to mention Latin, Spanish, French and English, plus looked into myriad other European languages...

Mandarin is an order of magnitude harder than Japanese. Japanese is easy to speak and hear. It has two phonetic alphabets, and fewer pictograms in its Kanji than Mandarin. It has a highly regular grammar. So much easier than Mandarin. Just my 2c.

[teleforce]

I agree with your opinion that the reputation of Japanese being hard is mainly due to its arcane writing system, and sorting Japanese writing is practically an unsolved problem [1].

Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day [2].

[1] http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2011/02/13/sorting-in-ja...

[2] https://www.meridianlinguistics.com/news/learn-to-read-korea...

[ellipsis_12]

> Compare this to Korean where you can learn the writing system in a single day

I really, REALLY wish people would stop saying this about Korean. Sure, there's a couple of dozen letters and you can learn their individual default pronunciations in a single day, I'm not doubting that.

But that literally doesn't get you even close to being able to correctly pronounce many common words, because, guess what, when these letters are together in a word they influence each other in different ways and their pronunciation changes or they may not even get pronounced at all.

There is a reason why all these "learn hangul in 1 hour" web pages/videos never mention the existence of four-letter syllables. ;)

Learning Japanese phonentic alphabet(s) on the other hand, really can be done in one day and they are consistent and phonetic and there's no weirdness in pronunciation, but of course then you have to deal with thousands of kanji too. So I guess from that perspective, Korean really is easier, but learning to correctly pronounce the sounds and words in Korean is in my opinion much harder than in Japanese.

[wodenokoto]

I don’t fully agree with the trope of learning the writing system in one day kinda false.

I mean you can learn to map it to alphabet in one day, but unless you can grasp the subtleties of the pronunciation of the similar sounding vowels and consonants have you really learned what the characters represent?

[imtringued]

Are you trying to create a strawman? How do you learn characters without their pronunciation? There is nothing else to learn other than that. If you know the "alphabet" equivalent then you can pronunciate words written in that alphabet. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There is one exception which is Japanese where many characters merely have a meaning associated to them which need to be combined to form words. Sure, you do have to blindly memorize that but often the kanji on its own doesn't have one pronunciation, it has many and therefore it doesn't make sense to memorize all of them. Instead you just have to associate the pronunciation of the entire word with a given combination of Japanese characters.

[desuq]

In my experience, I have found learning Korean more difficult than Chinese/Japanese. I've lived and studied in China to provide some background. My difficulty in Korean stems from the nuance of how the characters interact with each other in terms of pronunciation and grammar. Still interesting nonetheless, each person holds their own perspective on how challenging a language can be to learn.

[3np]

I absolutely found Mandarin more difficult than Japanese - mostly due to pronunciation and tones.

The consistency in phonems in mandarin probably makes it a bit less demanding than Japanese, but I find that difference marginal on the whole.

(Studied Japanese 1y+, Mandarin 6 months)