[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.