Quote:
Originally Posted by sakaeyellow
The sound elements of Japanese (consonants, vowels, intonation and others) are clearly much simpler than their European counterparts, not to mention the past / non-past tense and gender-free grammar.
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It is absolutely and demonstrably false that Japanese is easier to learn for a native English speaker than nearly every European language. You make the claim that the sounds in Japanese are easier, but I think they're easier in Spanish than Japanese. Beyond that, you're ignoring the most difficult parts of spoken Japanese: particles and counters. They easily make up for the "easy" gender-free grammar. Also, the lack of tenses in Japanese makes it
more difficult for a native English-speaker to adapt, not easier! Spanish often has a 1-to-1 translation. Japanese rarely does.
Studies have been done. The Romance and Germanic languages are vastly easier for a native English speaker to learn than languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Russian, and Arabic.
Of course, Japanese is vastly easier for a native Korean speaker to learn than is English. I can understand why someone from Hong Kong would find Japanese easier than a Romance language (although it still leaves me incredulous, as you presumably grew up with English, too, which should make especially Dutch easy for you).
Edit: Here is a source for my claim. It comes straight from linguistic researchers and practical instructors with the USA's Department of State Foreign Service Institute, tasked with finding people to serve the government's interests in foreign countries. I think they'd know a thing or two about teaching languages, since that is what they do (among other things).
Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks
Notably, the claim is made by them that Japanese takes approximately
four times as long (including 1100 hours spent in-class while living in Japan) as Afrikaans, Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish. Tellingly, these are all Germanic and Romance languages!
As someone who has studied Spanish and Japanese, I can affirmatively say that Spanish is a joke compared to even spoken Japanese. A decade of studying Japanese hardcore, including a year in Tokyo, has left me skilled in Japanese. Two years of Spanish in junior high followed by a decade of not speaking it at all, and a few years of spending time with my wife's family a rare, few days out of the year has left me with an ear for about 70% of natively spoken Spanish.