[rauljordan2020]

As someone who speaks Chinese and is learning Japanese, I have been so surprised at just how incredibly complicated and obtuse Japanese is. Chinese (Cantonese) 7-9 tones, loads of characters, but after memorizing the first 2000-3000, you pick up on all the radicals, patterns, and meanings which help you fill in the gaps. Grammar is barebones: I only had to learn 5 to 10 different grammar rules for Chinese that I recall, and basically everything else is incredibly easy.

Whereas in Japanese, I am learning 2-3 grammar rules per LESSON. Having each character pronounced a single way in Chinese is also super easy, and communication is even more direct than English. With Japanese, the cultural context, the phrasing, the end particles, and subtle vocab changes the meaning significantly.

I think for me, it took 5 years to reach fluency in Chinese but I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese. It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?

[pm215]

I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar". For example, the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar lists ~に比べると as one of its grammar points, but this (meaning "compared to ~") isn't really new grammar, it's just a specific usage of particle に, a particular verb and と for if/when (in the same way "compared to X" isn't new English grammar but is a pattern of use of a particular verb).

My experience is that Japanese grammar isn't particularly complicated, it's just that it works backwards from Indo-European languages. Vocab is a pain because there's no common root of word origins to help the way there is between say English and French, but that's true for Chinese too I suppose. The writing system is kind of silly but it is what it is (and of course it doesn't matter at all for conversational fluency).

[thaumasiotes]

> I think some of the "Japanese has a ton of grammar points" is an effect of how the Japanese-as-a-second-language teaching resources label things, where a lot of what you could classify as "sentence patterns" are described and taught as "grammar".

Sentence patterns are grammar. They are a major presence in English grammar, where e.g. in almost all cases you can only determine the subject of a sentence by the fact that it precedes the verb. Other languages are more explicit.

Fundamentally we use "grammar" to refer to whatever governs the meaning that appears in a well-formed sentence that isn't just part of the individual meanings of (the uninflected forms of) the words in that sentence. But this is not an entirely satisfactory definition, and grammar can show up in surprising ways.

Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".

In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.

In Mandarin, these verbs are also the same verb. But Mandarin speakers draw the same distinction that English speakers do - if they mean "look", they will say 看, and if they mean "see", they will say 看到, inflecting the verb with a grammatical suffix indicating successful completion. Although they do not use separate verbs, they have no trouble tracking the English distinction.

In English, obviously, the same distinction is drawn. But the mechanism is lexical; we treat these as being entirely different words.

I suggest that a Japanese learner choosing "see" when they mean "look" or "watch" is making a grammatical error, the same way that they'd be making a grammatical error if they said 看 instead of 看到 while trying to speak Mandarin.

[pm215]

What I mean is that, to use an English example "in comparison to X, Y" and "in contrast to X, Y" are not grammatically different -- the words are all doing the same jobs in the same structure, it's just a different verb. But they're both useful idiomatic patterns to learn. It happens that the standard in Japanese as a second language teaching is to call (the Japanese equivalents to) these different idiomatic patterns different grammar points. Personally I don't care too much about the terminology as long as everybody is on the same page, and because this is the standard in the J2L communities it's generally fine; but it does mean that looking at the size of the volumes of a "Dictionary of Japanese Grammar" is a bit misleading about how grammatically complex the language is.

I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).

[thaumasiotes]

> I would suggest that choosing "see" when you mean "watch" is a vocabulary error, not a grammar error - you picked the wrong verb, but didn't use it in an ungrammatical way (eg wrong tense or mixing transitive and intransitive or getting subject and object the wrong way round).

Have you tried doing this? In general you can't swap these verbs without the resulting use being ungrammatical. The problem is that "watch" is durative (it takes time) and "see" is punctual (it takes no time).

[IIsi50MHz]

"I'd like to see that film." | "I'd like to watch that film." (interchangeable)

"I see birds." / "I watch birds." (very different)

"I'm seeing birds." ~ "I'm watching birds." (semantic'ly identical, but the first one is unusual)

"I'll see you home." / "I'll watch you home." (second on is word choice error)

[pm215]

"I watched the hawk landing in the tree" ; "I saw the hawk landing in the tree" -- both fine grammatically.

[thaumasiotes]

Is this the level of analysis you apply to all your work?

Try "I was watching the hawk as it landed in the tree."

[Izkata]

> Consider the difference between the verbs "look" and "see".

> In Japanese, there is no difference. They are the same verb and they mean the same thing. Japanese learners do not understand why English speakers draw a distinction, and they struggle to use the correct word when speaking English.

Isn't that like 見る and 見える?

[chaorace]

My understanding is that in many (but not all) cases they're gramatically interchangeable, but imply different levels of directness. Something like the difference between "I see you" (direct) and "I can see you" (indirect), with a general preference for the latter in polite conversation. It's not a perfect comparison because in English both usages of see are transitive, but hopefully the general idea comes across.

Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of Japanese verbs:

- "Thank you" in the past tense ("ありがとうございました") conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered and that you do not intend to impose further.

- "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("ありがとうございます") conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not yet completely rendered.

This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial the difference between a completed "look" and an incomplete "see".

[chrisoverzero]

見える only means “look” in the “to seem” or “to appear” sense.

Often in English, we have multiple words for sensory experiences to indicate how much focus is put into the action. “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture. “Hearing” a song is less focused than “listening to” a song.

[emmelaich]

I wonder if that inspired the lyric in "Come Together"

Got to be good-lookin', 'cause he's so hard to see

According to Wikipedia, "The lyrics were inspired by his relationship with Ono,"

[Izkata]

> “Seeing” a picture is less focused than “looking at” a picture.

Isn't that backwards? Like in the phrase "they look but do not see", which was what I had in mind in my first comment. Isn't that something like "見るけど見えない" ?

[jprival]

To look is to train one’s eyes on, or to scan for, something. To see is to perceive it.

So one can look without seeing, and one can also see something without intentionally looking.

[eloisant]

The Japanese grammar is pretty simple in fact, but it's very confusing coming from a European language because of how different it is. OK, once you get to the high level politeness (keigo) it can get pretty complex but you don't have to learn that until you're fluent in casual and neutral polite forms (teinei).

I don't know Chinese but I've read that it's "subject-verb-object" like in English, so maybe that's why you found it easier than Japanese.

I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there. And it makes a big difference, if you use it daily they you can catch up whole sentences and understand the grammar logic later on.

[rauljordan2020]

There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

A few examples from endless notebook on Japanese grammar notes I have from lessons - Various て forms, which have their own complexity and nuance. Spent almost a year on this - Volitional forms - X-なければ, conditionals, should/shouldn't - the "te-shimau" form - くれる / あげる - Conjugations for past tense for the 3 different verb categories...which were so hard to remember - しか - ばかり - ように - X-ところだ - X-ほうが-Y - Command forms, conjugations, etc.

[wk_end]

(background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish; Chinese not at all)

Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.

I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.

In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.

Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.

[gerdesj]

I think you have it right and OP doesn't. For example: "Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure"

There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.

Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".

I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.

Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.

Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.

I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.

[thaumasiotes]

> Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.

This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.

So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.

[psychoslave]

This led me to read https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... which was rather interesting

[gerdesj]

Not sure why I put Latin in as SVO, given that the second Latin lesson I received (aged 10), went into some detail about word order. The first was amo amas amat ... moneo monas monat.

However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".

[pilaf]

> only two irregular verbs

This is what textbooks often say, but it's kind of a soft lie. Besides the typical する and 来る (which are strongly irregular), there's:

ある → ない (negative form)

行く → 行って instead of expected 行いて

くれる → くれ (imperative form) instead of expected くれろ

And a number of others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_irregular_verbs

[glandium]

I'll go pedantic, but ない is technically not an irregular negative form of ある. The negative form of ある is the regular あらぬ/あらない, but it has been substituted with ない, which is an entirely different word. You'll often hear あらへん in Kansai dialect, which is derived from ある.

Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.

[actionfromafar]

O this!

English is like a runtime typed language, and Japanese sounds like a statically typed language.

[jcranmer]

> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...the difference is night and day. There is barely any grammar to learn. I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

What you're saying is that Chinese is not inflectional. It's a pretty common trope that people equate grammar with verb inflection.

But Chinese does have grammar, it's just in the things that aren't as in-your-face as verb inflection is. Chinese has numerical classifiers, which don't have a clear corresponding feature in Indo-European languages (the closest I can think is the... I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows" which are more erudite wankfests than proper English grammar). There may be other features, but I don't know Chinese well enough to highlight them.

The things is that if you're learning an Indo-European language (and you already know on), you can largely import your native language's grammar and expect things to work. Take, e.g., the superlative construction: in English, it's "most" + adjective; in French, it's "le plus" + adjective. Word-for-word translation (including tense/aspect/mood as word-for-word, when you'd use past perfect in English is pretty damn the same time you'd use it in other languages) gets you pretty close to correct, you just have to fix up some word order issues, and some agreement issues, and you're done, so grammar instruction largely focuses on teaching those elements of grammar. It can actually be somewhat jarring when you hit upon a situation where the grammar isn't in close alignment: e.g., in English, we would say "it has been several days since I've seen you" whereas in French, it would be (doing tense-for-tense translation) "it is several days since I've seen you".

The focus in grammar instruction on the elements that are different from your native language rather than the ones that are the same can lead you into a false sense of what grammar is.

[Kronopath]

A better comparison for numerical classifiers would be uncountable nouns.

In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:

三杯水 three glasses of water

十头牛 ten heads of cattle

两支铅笔 two rods of pencil

一条路 a strip of road

六只猫 six animal-units of cat

五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people

[dllthomas]

> I forget the term, but those silly terms like "pride of lions" or "murder of crows"

Collective nouns.

[jcranmer]

Actually, from the Wikipedia article, it's specifically the "terms of venery"

[tptacek]

Speaking of erudite wankfests! :)

[eloisant]

Coming from French I don't consider there is any conjugation in Japanese. The verb is the same no matter what the subject is - I, you, he/she, we, plural you, they... So in French you can multiply by 6 the number of verb ending. In Japanese you never have to care about gender and plural.

Same with German, where you have declinaisons on the articles depending on their grammatical position in the sentence (den/der/dem/etc.)

So maybe Chinese is even simpler than Japanese, but I would still rank Japanese as a language having a "simple" grammar.

[lIl-IIIl]

There's conjugation but it's on different axes.

One unusual feature is that Japanese verbs conjugate on politeness/formality.

There's also te- forms, past forms, imperative, "I can verb" form, "I want verb" form, "I must verb" form, causative, etc, etc.

The low number of irregular verbs is a blessing though.

[airstrike]

Portuguese has something like 50 different verb endings, Wikipedia tells me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_conjugation

In reality few people use half of these, I would think

My favorite bit is that "to be" is two different verbs entirely in Portuguese, "ser" and "estar". Both Italian and Spanish also have this distinction, but in my (admittedly limited) experience with those languages, neither really makes the distinction as clear as it is in Portuguese

[arrowsmith]

I don't know about Italian but the ser/estar distinction works in pretty much exactly the same way in both Spanish and Portuguese. I can't think of any difference between how Spanish and Portuguese treat those two verbs.

[airstrike]

You're right, I stand corrected. I guess I've been hearing too much Italian lately

[trocado]

Actually most if not all of those verb endings are used colloquially (the most important exception would be the second person plural, which is only used in some regions of Portugal).

[airstrike]

2nd person singular is also never really used correctly, and even 1st person plural is sometimes replaced by 3rd person singular e.g. "a gente vai" instead of "nós vamos"

[gtranger]

I’m extremely skeptical of your claims that you learned Chinese grammar in a week as a Chinese learner myself and I’m willing to bet you don’t realize how much you don’t know. The Chinese grammar wiki has 505 articles on grammar split across A1-C1 levels of the European Common Framework for language proficiency. This wiki is also non-exhaustive. This isn’t even including the fact that Classical Chinese, which is a basis for many 成语 used today, has a completely different grammar than modern Chinese.

[hnfong]

It might not be technically correct that they learned the full set of Chinese grammar in a week, but I can imagine one week is sufficient for a beginner to get the basics and start reading/speaking/writing the language and absorb the other nuances or nitty-gritty details through everyday usage.

I mean, I'm pretty much a Chinese/Cantonese native user, so I can't be sure about that since I never "learned" the language in a classroom setting, but my impression is that this short period of learning grammar for Chinese language leaners is quite typical.

[raincole]

You feel Chinese grammar simple only because you're a native speaker, or at least have learned Chinese at a very young age.

Grab a textbook for Chinese-as-second-language learners and you'll be surprised how many rules there are. You don't deem them as rules cause you've internalized them, as a native speaker should have.

[thaumasiotes]

> There's no tense, no verb ending, no conjugation, zero of any of that stuff in Chinese...

This is plainly untrue. Speaking for Mandarin:

1. It's necessary to track tense in negative-polarity sentences because past-tense verbs are negated differently from present-tense ones. Technically this is accomplished by using an auxiliary verb, though in many cases that verb doesn't actually appear in the sentence where you're using it.

2. There are three aspectual verb endings, 了 (perfect), 着 (continuous), and 过 (experiential).

3. Verbs are inflected for possibility and impossibility, so that 动 is "move" and 动不了 is "cannot move".

> I finished the Chinese grammar in less than a week lol

Right.

[johngossman]

I haven't found Japanese grammar to be particularly complex either...at least compared to English or French. It is different. The 80/20 Japanese Book was a great help, as was "English Grammar for Students of Japanese" (the title is confusing, but it really is for learning Japanese, not English).

You can get a sample of 80/20 here:

https://8020japanese.com/japanese-sentence-structure/

Pronunciation also isn't that hard (Kanto dialect, at least) compared to, say, French. The writing system is definitely the hardest part for me.

[brigandish]

> I got to fluency in Japanese in roughly 6 months to 1 year while living there

Your experience is not the norm, not according to research and not according to most people who've tried learning Japanese. Either you have a talent or you had a more effective method for learning, but it does undermine your judgement as something generalisable to others.

Let's hope it's the method and you share it.

[psychoslave]

While the short time is indeed impressive compared to median learning curve, how much studies can afford a panel of people going through similar conditions of volontary complete immersion over such an extended period?

[hoseja]

I love when watching things in Japanese you can tell they are talking in hyperpolite register because all the words are suddenly dozen-syllable tongue twisters.

[emodendroket]

I don't think Japanese is really any more grammatically complicated than any other language (the writing system is a different story but if you're comfortable with Chinese you already have an appropriate degree of Stockholm Syndrome on that front anyway). Different languages just move the complexity around to different places rather than getting rid of it. For instance, Japanese has only 3 irregular verbs in the entire language. Singular and plural need not be marked. Verb and adjective agreement aren't issues. And so on.

[bloppe]

I don't speak either, but would posit that the status of Chinese as an East Asian Lingua Franca caused it to trend toward simplicity, whereas Japanese insularity (physical, cultural, and political, especially during the Edo period) provided far less incentive to simplify.

I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.

[hnfong]

I don't think there's any trend of written Chinese toward simplicity. Broadly speaking it has evolved towards "complexity" over its history.

If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win."

Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer.

Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese.

The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.

[marton78]

What you're describing is written Chinese though. It's entirely possible, that prepositions / postpositions were used in spoken language.

[hnfong]

Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to speculate about the evolution of the spoken Chinese languages* over that time scale...

* note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.

[bloppe]

I wouldn't call it meaningless. Comparative linguistics can draw surprisingly strong conclusions about how languages sounded a long time ago, even ones that were never written down. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects apparently descended from a common ancestor. That's enough for some serious comparative historical analysis.

Anyway, expressiveness is not the same as complexity. It would seem Chinese was able to evolve a lot of expressiveness without adding too much unnecessary complexity, unlike more insular languages. The simplicity is also not exactly a firm rule, but a trend.

Thanks for the interesting examples. Would love to learn more Chinese.

[nialv7]

Does Chinese really not have that much grammar though? I think it may have fewer _formalized_ grammar, but there are a lot of rules that are difficult to pin down. And if you don't follow them, your Chinese will sound wrong to native speakers, even though _technically_ the grammar is fine.

For example, I only very recently learned (in Mandarin) characters' tones change when they form words. The number one (一) has 3 different tones in different contexts, what!?

[ksdnjweusdnkl21]

> I feel that even after 10 years I will barely reach conversational fluency in Japanese

Interesting. I feel exact opposite with Mandarin. My progress learning Japanese was incredibly fast, I could speak decently in 6 months and read after 1 year. But I always lose motivation learning Mandarin because it's so hard. Maybe it's because my mother tongue is closely aligned with Japanese in pronounciation and grammar such as conjugation.

[rauljordan2020]

What's hard about Mandarin aside from memorizing the characters and pronunciations?

[gtranger]

The fact that it is a well-documented language that has evolved over thousands of years with almost no external influence and is entrenched with thousands of years of cultural concepts that are distinctly unfamiliar to a majority of the western world. Many phrases used in Mandarin today date back millennia. Also something that many people don’t recognize is that a single character can embody many meanings depending on the context. It’s not as simple as memorizing the character because you have to know which meaning a character is representing within a particular context.

[jimbokun]

Tones.

[richarme]

Is your mother tongue Finnish? I always found Japanese to have somewhat similar sounds. And as a bonus hint, you're missing a "the" in your first sentence ;)

[Lance_ET_Compte]

From their username, I'm guessing Polish...

[StefanBatory]

w szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie...

[wk_end]

Yeah, linguistic difficulty is almost always relative - I can learn French or Dutch much more effortlessly than a native Japanese speaker. A native Korean (I'm guessing?) speaker would definitely have a leg up when learning Japanese that they wouldn't have with Mandarin, and that a native English speaker doesn't have with either.

[z2]

The way I think of this for some Asian languages is that Japanese and Korean are like English and Dutch, while Mandarin is like one of the Romance languages (e.g., Mandarin is to Cantonese as Spanish is to French). The three have an easier time learning any of the other two for different reasons of shared vocabulary or grammar depending on the direction.

[yongjik]

"Complicated" is in the eye of the beholder. It looks daunting to someone who didn't grow up using a heavily inflected language, but also consider the reverse direction.

"A reading room" means a room that is for reading. "A reading person" means a person who is reading. And "Reading the room" means, well, the act of reading the room. Or it could be used as an adverbial prose to modify the following phrase: "Reading the room, I stopped right there." Or it could be part of a progressive: "He was merely reading the room." Don't confuse it with "What he did was merely reading the room," which must be parsed differently.

All from a single form of a verb. You just have to figure out which one is intended from context.

...and the point is, it's just so natural to a native English speaker that they don't even stop and think about it!

[j7ake]

I disagree that complicated is subjective.

Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.

One way to ask this objectively is to ask, for every non-native speaker, which languages are easiest and which are hardest to learn?

You can set this as a questionnaire and ask people to rank.

You will find that Japanese is among the hardest to learn amongst nearly all cultures.

[filoleg]

> Japanese is more difficult to learn than an English objectively.

I press “doubt” on the entire comment just due to this statement. There is no “objectively more difficult” for most of the major languages (but it exists), and especially not Japanese. It imo heavily depends on your first language.

Ask any friends of yours who speak Korean as their first language. They will likely find Japanese language to be extremely easy compared to almost any other language. Almost all of them, even those who had zero prior knowledge of Japanese language, will be able to understand bits and pieces all the time.

Russian was my first, but I can confirm that Japanese was signficantly easier than English for me in majority of the aspects, esp when it comes to basics needed to be somewhat functional in the language. Only two tenses (past and non-past), pronunciation makes perfect sense (if you know how to read a kanji character, you know how to pronounce it; cannot say anything even remotely similar about English at all), grammar overall doesn’t feel overly complicated, etc. However, from what I’ve observed, native English speakers seem to struggle with quite a few of those things, including pronunciation.

Hell, I would say Ukrainian would be just as difficult for a native English speaker to learn as Russian would be. For any native Russian speaker though? A person who speaks only Ukrainian can have a conversation with someone who speaks only Russian, and both of them will be able to understand at least half of what the other person is saying (despite speaking to each other in different languages, without having any prior knowledge of each other’s language).

All of this leads me to believe that there is no such thing as “objectively easier”, unless we know the person’s first/primary language.

[gtranger]

Anecdotally speaking, my spouse is from China and she thinks it was easier for her to learn Japanese than English despite learning English from a young age and not having any formal Japanese education until college by which point she was already fairly conversational in Japanese from having watched variety shows and anime. We met while I was studying Japanese at college so I have a pretty good idea of where her Japanese ability stands.

Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score. His Japanese education consists of a few classes in college, anime, and video games. He says although he thinks his English is more fluent due to him living in the States, Japanese was easier for him to learn.

Point being? I think it’s subjective.

[brigandish]

> Another anecdote, a Chinese friend of mine from college just passed the N1 with a perfect score.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test does not include a speaking portion, which is the part of Japanese that Chinese people usually struggle with most - being kanji masters, the rest looks a breeze, lucky them! That tempers the point somewhat (somewhat).

[yongjik]

What you're proposing is not an objective measure, it's a popularity contest.

And yes, in a lot of such surveys you'll find Chinese/Japanese/Korean sitting at the top of the list. Sometimes with Arabic.

Maybe Japanese is a really hard language objectively, but these surveys aren't actually showing that. What they are showing is that the majority of organizations that are doing these kind of surveys are populated by speakers of western European languages, who find Japanese "objectively" much harder than Spanish.

[quartesixte]

That list is the CIA/State Department evaluating the average time to fluency for English natives going through one of the foreign language training programs they run.

Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic sit on top of the list because they are the most isolated away from English.

Koreans find Japanese extremely easy to learn. Vice versa.

[dotnet00]

I'm not too far into learning to speak/read Japanese, but have gotten pretty good at understanding it when spoken from years of only really watching/listening to Japanese media (human pattern matching ability is crazy!). My feeling has been that similar to what others have said, that the popular learning resources seem to make the early grammar seem broader than it is by teaching each sentence 'type' as a separate rule.

Although I haven't put enough thought into the exact differences (and thus might be entirely wrong), I've felt the grammar is fairly intuitive (I presume due in part to my background of also speaking fluent Hindi).

[giuscri]

How did you get exposed to Japanese media? You lived there? Or just anime? You used English subtitles or Japanese ones?

[dotnet00]

Started with friends introducing me to anime in highschool (with english subtitles), which I got hooked on, then got into the music as well, and later into vtubers (so no subtitles when watching live). I haven't ever really been into other entertainment, so for a little over a decade I've been listening to japanese on a near daily basis.

I know it's a meme for people to claim to know japanese from watching anime, which is why I don't claim to be able to speak it, but over time I did pick up enough that I don't need subtitles anymore. I'm slowly working on reading with practice books, wanikani etc, will eventually figure out some way to practice speaking too.

[huytersd]

Memorizing 3000 characters seems impossible. I know I would never be able to do it.

[StefanBatory]

How about memorizing 20 characters over 150 days, though? Or 10 over 300? ;)

And there's a pattern to them too in the end.

[qingcharles]

The way I approached it: if every Japanese person can manage it, I can manage it too.

[kingkawn]

Guess they weren’t thinking of you when they made it

[nonrandomstring]

> Why does it have to be so complicated?

I know nothing about Japanese, or Chinese.

(Edit: actually that's not true, I learned this today [0])

Maybe a little about language in general from studying linguistics (for compilers), but I think the answer to your question is;

Because it is able to express things that we can't in English.

That is beautiful, necessary and precious. The fact that groups of people exist in the world who can have whole ideas and worldviews that we barely conceive or express at all, seems so valuable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119457

[stickfigure]

I don't buy this at all. Maybe "can't express as concisely".

[bluepizza]

Exactly. Japanese _mostly_ doesn't have plurals in the English sense (it actually does have a few plural words), but you do use counters to specify quantities, which is just another way to express plurality.

I understand some folks might find the Japanese exotic ways gripping, but I find the realities of the language much more interesting. I find the thought "there are many ways to express plurality" much more fascinating than "wow, these people can build very reliable cars without expressing if a car has a wheel or many wheels."

[geraldwhen]

車は車輪がよぅつあります。

Car has 4 wheels. You can say many, few, a number, etc so the lack of plurality is overstated I suspect. You can use context to derive the plurality when none is given.

[nonrandomstring]

Why not "unable to express at all"?

Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.

So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)

The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one word for.

Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?

[hnfong]

Russell's paradox speaks of logical contradictions. Language is full of logical contradictions, but it's fine to us (not to logicians though).

Similarly Gödel speaks of consistent proofs in logical systems. His incompleteness theorem talks about either a system has statements it cannot prove (but they can expressed!), or is inconsistent. Since natural language is probably not that consistent, the whole issue is moot.

It should be possible to show under some loose conditions that all natural languages are "Turing complete". Even the halting problem does not impose a problem -- we're really not interested in telling whether long-running computation halts in natural language. The expressivity is guaranteed by not insisting on strict consistency in language.

(PS: the situation changes where there is a mandate to only speak things that are "correct", for example, censorship. Now you get into the realm where something might be technically "correct" but the decision algorithm is imperfect and does not allow you to speak that truth)

> is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

I don't think so as long as the concept is constructed from physical objects or shared emotions/feelings.

There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?

But this is kinda off-topic.

[nonrandomstring]

> There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it's an old philosophical chestnut in epistemology.

Godel and Russell are relevant because we can always look for meaningful statements that can be well formed under wone system but not under another.

> But this is kinda off-topic.

I had theory about that. It's so _on topic_ to be discussing the nature of language itself in a time when the biggest festival in town is "Large Language Models". Nobody so violently attacks a comment unless it hits a nerve, And I don't want to believe that my fellow HN commenters are simple racists. I think some people worry about basing the computing work on something as precarious and pluralistic as language. And they'd be right to.

[stickfigure]

> This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of

I think you're focusing too much on language. If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate, they'll figure out how to express themselves. Hell, they don't even necessarily need language.

The problem with a human and an alien trying to communicate is not that they speak different languages. The problem is that may experience different things (xrays, slitheryness, whatever).

I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.

[drdeca]

The issue I see with the "can't express at all" view, is that, if it can't be expressed, then how do newborns learn to speak the language?

If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions in another language, and have the listener, by imagining those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?

Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some concepts get attached to some words through ways other than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like, maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the human mind which one might intuitively associated with some combination of the previous two?)

But, outside of things like that, I would expect that meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable collection of people, can be explained in any of the most common natural languages.

(Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of meanings that are specific to one person.)

Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could be communicated from one person to another child-person, which can't be replicated with another language.

Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate ideas which they could learn words for, but which we would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing between different human languages.

We should still be able to describe the statistics of how they use certain words together though, and how this correlates to the world, or at least, the world as described through those concepts that we can comprehend. And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of what words they would use to describe the ways in which our description of how they use the words (including correlation with aspects of the world that we comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the words.

There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined except in terms of words that would be defined in terms of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some other collection of concepts as the base case instead?" and idk what the counterargument is), and which supposedly every natural human language has a word for each of these (though the word might not only mean one of these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other meanings as well).

The idea goes that every word in any natural human language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like 65).

If this is true, then no idea in any natural human language would be entirely untranslatable to any other human natural language.

But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar to the question you were raising)

[nonrandomstring]

I like the idea of semantic primes and was pondering it these last couple of days.

If there are irreducible "experiences" with corresponding symbols then it sorta makes sense to follow a mathematical analogy that other ideas can be 'factored' into them. But we don't know that for sure about neural computers or brains.

On the other hand the problem may be constructive rather than reductive. If ideas are like chemical compounds we may know that some exist but have no known path to create them. Using your analogy, that would be like trying to guess prime factors or some special sequence of operators to get from A to B.

I'm still left with the strong intuition that some groups build a repetoire of ideas ineffable in another tongue.

[ropejumper]

My favorite simple example of this is exclusive "we". It's not a thing in most languages, but it allows a level of passive aggressiveness that you can't achieve without it.

Saying "we're going without you" isn't nearly as impactful as "_we_ are going", using a hypothetical exclusive we.

As another example, Romanian has a relatively unique "presumptive" verb mood, which has a certain connotation that's hard to achieve without it. It can show curiosity and resignment at the same time (besides other things.)

The conciseness is the whole point. Using words to explicitly describe things can ruin the effect.

[eszed]

I'd push back on that, because you do get that passive-voice exclusive "we" in English, just as concisely - except it's expressed through stress pattern (as you indicate with your underlines), not vocabulary / grammar. I think that's exciting, because it gives English (as written) a lot of poetic ambiguity and (as spoken) a lot of performative - if you will - flexibility.

[ropejumper]

Fair point! I think it's just a different way of expression, and both are valuable in their own way.

[eloisant]

This is true for every language, you can never perfectly translate a text. Something is always lost.

[brabel]

I've studied translation and what was fascinating to me was all the terminology that a language uses that's totally linked to the culture in which it's used. For example, in Brazilian Portuguese, someone may say something like "show de bola" (literal translation: "ball show" using the borrow English word "show" for something like "great performance") even in seemingly completely unrelated context, like when you do well on your math homework :D. Because football parlance is ingrained so deep into the collective mind of the population that you can "transfer" what would normally describe a fantastic play by a football team to pretty much any other context you like.

I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?

That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.

[shiroiushi]

>I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right

It's true, there are a bunch of American idioms related to baseball. What's funny about this, however, is that baseball isn't very popular in America these days (American football and basketball are much more popular, and I think even hockey is now more popular), but baseball is actually quite popular in Japan.

[olddustytrail]

> know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right

I'm not American either but a fairly obvious example is to "knock it out of the park".

[arrowsmith]

In British English you can be "knocked for six", meaning you're stunned or shocked. It originates from cricket, where you score six points by knocking the ball out of the park.

[brabel]

I was thinking "in the ballpark" and "touch base" as well...

[rauljordan2020]

My point is that it doesn't need to be. Chinese is concise, simple, single pronunciation per character, very little grammar. It has no need for verb conjugations, tense markers, 3 different writing systems super-imposed into one like Japanese does, and can still express highly sophisticated thoughts and meaning that English cannot